The Pawnbroker

Sidney Lumet, who directed The Pawnbroker, makes movies of lower-class people moving in atmospheres of filth and crime but still retaining their humanity. Such is the case of Nazemann, a pawnbroker in Spanish Harlem who operates as a fence for a Negro pimp.

Nazemann, as a result of a traumatic stay in a Nazi concentration camp, has been trying for twenty years to escape from his own emotions. But the necessity of interacting with other people in the city will not permit him his stoicism, and eventually he is forced to work through his traumatic past in the manner of a psychoanalysis and return to his human responsibilities.

Lumet's parallel between Harlem and the concentration camp creates the impact of the film. Nazemann is constantly seen behind the pawnbroker's cage dealing with his customers as through the prison fence. The cage also symbolizes his isolation, emphasized by Lumet's close-up shots of Nazemann locking himself in and out. Inside the cage he is the Nazi officer responding to human misery with utter callousness, the Jew playing persecutor. But when a destitute woman enters to sell her wedding ring, he cannot avoid his own memories, shown as flashbacks, of German soldiers tearing gold rings from the fingers of their victims.

The flashbacks consist first of glimpses shot almost subliminally on the screen, followed by a somewhat organized grouping of images. The audience thus enters Nazemann's mind as he struggles both to recall and repress his past until consciousness finally wins. A dog barking on a Harlem street, for example, calls forth terrifying, split-second sequences of German police dogs alternating with the blackness of the Negro ghetto until Nazemann begins to see the dog tearing at his best friend's heels and the man clutching the prison fence in fear.

Nazemann goes into a spin and walks all the night around the city. The camera zeroes in on him moving through the crowds in Times Square, alone despite the human torrent around him. He is out of touch with any society when he crosses street after street against the traffic lights.

Finally he pays a dawnbreak visit to the apartment of a middle-aged social worker who has befriended him and who lives in one of those indescribably ugly housing projects. Lumet has the two play out an extremely dramatic scene on her balcony, from which several of her building's hideous cousins are in full view. Her sympathy and his despair confer humanity on that sterile setting seen in the early morning light.

In creating his modern tragedy, Director Lumet has contrived to effect his catharsis. Why should Nazemann, who has been living in New York for twenty years, exposed to the same influences, suddenly wake up? Why should he be able to recall traumas from repression when anyone else would need an analyst? The death of a Puerto Rican boy who intercepts a bullet meant for Nazemann seems far too circumstantial. Also questionable is Lumet's use of stomach-turners, such as the sequence where Nazemann jabs a long pin through his hand.

But catharsis can only come from such a closely-knit sequence of highly charged events compressed into a narrow time span. If those events all work together to virtually place the viewer inside the main character's skin, the film attains tragic proportions; if they do not, it degenerates into sensationalism. In The Pawnbroker the backdrop of the city creates a matrix which binds up the different devices and makes them effective. The pawnbroker's cage or the ugly apartment houses standing for the community achieve a near-symbolism, so that the viewer stops thinking in terms of reality and enters the special world of Nazemann.

One might wonder though how a simple pawnbroker like Nazemann could have the intellectual capacity to analyze his experience in the manner that true tragedy demands. But we must remember that Nazemann has fallen in life and we arrive at his story in medias res. The pimp he works for calls him "professor," and it vaguely suggested in other places that he once held such a position. Lumet's failure to clarify this point or indeed to provide his audience with a strong picture of Nazemann before his fall constitutes a major flaw of the film.

The Pawnbroker achieves such excellence precisely because Nazemann does have that capacity. His search for meaning becomes our own, and the understanding which he finds can also be ours if we are willing to share, if only vicariously, the immensity of his suffering.