Pickup (Hugo Haas Productions, Forum Productions, Columbia Pictures, 1951)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Instead of watching the “Noir Alley” selection last night (Saturday, January 6) – Hugo Haas’s 1951 melodrama Pickup – when it aired, I found a YouTube connection for it and watched it there. I also waited until my husband Charles got home so we could watch it together, though in the end he was even less impressed and more disappointed in it than I was. Hugo Haas (1901-1968) was born in what was then called Brünn in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now Brno in the Czech Republic. He was a Jew and fortunately was able to flee to the U.S. when the Nazis took over his native country in 1938 in the run-up to World War II – though even before the takeover he’d worked his way up in the Czech film industry from acting to writing and directing as well. The most interesting of his Czech credits by far would be Skeleton on Horseback (1937) because it was based on a play by Karel Capek, author of R.U.R. (“Rossum’s Universal Robots”), who not only wrote the first work about artificial humanoids but actually coined the term “robots” (after robotnik, the Czech word for “worker”) to describe them. As he’d done in his homeland, Hugo Haas worked himself up from character actor to writer, director and producer, but only in “B”-movies. The Film Noir Encyclopedia lists just one of his films, The Other Woman (1954), in which he played a film director who murders his wife and uses his filmmaking skills to cover it up. Ironically, Larry Cohn, Haas’s imdb.com biographer, laments that his work remains largely unknown today, and for a rather quirky reason: he successfully landed distribution arrangements with major studios like Columbia and 20th Century-Fox, and therefore his films didn’t slip into the public domain like Ed Wood’s and George Romero’s did. “While many directors' work released by indie distributors has become readily available via VHS and DVD reissues, the major studios are loath to revive their ‘B’-movies in any form,” Cohn wrote. “A young generation to whom international low-budget helmers ranging from Joseph W. Sarno and Edward D. Wood, Jr. to Jess Franco and Joe D'Amato have become household names, has never seen Haas’s output, waiting in the vaults for some future reassessment.”

Pickup is a pretty strange movie, not exactly film noir but on the cusp. Written by Hugo Haas and Arnold Lipp (as “Arnold Phillips”) based on a novel by Josef Kopta (whom Charles said might have been an old friend of Haas’s from his homeland who had an unpublished novel in Czech lying around and Haas bought the movie rights just to give him some money), Pickup casts Haas as Jan Horak, nicknamed “Hunky,” who runs a “tank stop” along the Southern Pacific rail line. (I’m not sure what a “tank stop” is; my guess was it’s a location along a railroad where the train stops to refill its boilers with water, but the one train we see in the movie runs on diesel fuel instead of steam.) Jan, a widower of two years, and his friend, “The Professor” (Howard Chamberlin), go to a traveling carnival – carnivals have been a source of no-good in movies ever since The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) – and there they meet a couple of hard-bitten women, Betty (Beverly Michaels) and Irma (Jo-Carroll Dennison). The two of them have a nice scene together in which they lament that they have no money and dream of the nice dinner they’d have if they met someone who could afford to buy it for them. Betty hits on Jan, thinking he has money – which he actually does, sort of; he’s saved up some of his railroad salary and has accumulated $7,300 in the sort of notebook banks used to give you to keep track of your savings – and she successfully gets him to take her back to his place and ultimately marries him. Only she gets predictably frustrated with life in the middle of nowhere and turns her attentions to Jan’s hotter, hunkier and considerably younger assistant, Steve (Allan Nixon). Jan is looking forward to the day six years hence when he can retire from the railroad and start collecting his pension, and between that and the money he’s already saved he expects to live out the rest of his life in the local town. Betty starts badgering him and urges him to fake some illness so he can get himself declared disabled and retire early. He’s been having odd seizures, and after one of these he loses his ability to hear. Thinking he’s become permanently deaf, he goes to the railroad office and applies for disability, then figures that will be what Betty wanted from him all along. He also takes Betty along on one of his “track inspection” walks (which when Jan says it, with Hugo Haas’s thick Czech accent, sounds like “truck inspection”) just before he becomes deaf, and we’re introduced to a totally unconvincing process shot of a large canyon alongside the tracks where there’s a drop of several hundred feet to the rocky ground below.

Haas and Phillips set this up as a Chekhovian pistol but do surprisingly little with it – in fact, one of the big problems with Pickup is there are a lot of plot strands the writers threw into the script and then never resolved (including Betty’s friend Irma, who just disappears after she’s accomplished her plot function of getting Betty and Jan together). Later, on another trip to town, Jan gets hit by a passing truck, and the shock of the blow restores his hearing. But since he’s already put in his disability claim, he decides to pretend he’s still deaf – and in the film’s most creative scene, he hears the phone in the station house ring, briefly goes to answer it, and then draws back because he realizes if he answers it, that will “out” him and everyone will know he can hear again. Not realizing he can hear them, Betty and Steve plot various ways of getting Jan’s money and leaving town with it – which gives this film a weirdly voyeuristic aspect as Jan hears them plotting his demise and sits there stoically as these two horrible people make plans to knock him off. Betty has already decided there’s no other way for her to get her hands on Jan’s money – the savings account is in his name and he rebuffs her attempts to have it turned into a joint account; she consults a lawyer who tells her she can’t divorce him if he’s disabled; and the lawyer also says the only way she can get his money is if he dies. Ultimately Betty and Steve plot to push Jan into the canyon we’ve previously seen during his track inspection, only at the last minute Jan and Steve are standing alone at the canyon’s edge, Jan starts musing about another murder that happened there, and Steve loses his nerve and doesn’t go through with it. It all ends with Steve quitting his station job, Jan moodier than he was before and resigned to his fate, and Betty just walking out along the tracks as the film closes. She doesn’t get arrested and she isn’t hit by a train and killed, either, as both Charles and I were expecting. Recently I’d watched a similar film noir, Lighthouse (1947), made at PRC by director Frank Wisbar, and while I’d written it off as “dull” it seems like a deathless masterpiece compared to Pickup. Beverly Michaels as the sub-genre of femme fatale who’s not outright evil but so beaten down by life and lousy circumstances she’s decided conventional morality is a luxury she can’t afford turns in a great performance that quite frankly deserved a better film. Had Haas and Phillips been more sensitive writers, they could have turned her into a figure of real pathos the way writer Martin Mooney and director Edgar G. Ulmer did with the female lead Ann Savage played in Detour – despicable but also understandable. Pickup is one of those frustrating movies that had the potential to be really great but turned out to be just mediocre – and it doesn’t exactly encourage me to seek out Hugo Haas’s other films!