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About The Seller: I am a married dad of four. I quit my job a few years ago to sell on eBay full time. My other job is pastoring a Church in Florida. I’m not some large corporation, just a regular guy making his way for his family. I have a fun time exploring and finding things to sell on eBay. I scour estate sales, garages, attics and anywhere to find many unique and rare items. I jokingly say that I am a minister for “orphaned objects”, finding them new homes where they will be used and enjoyed.

Problems: Virtually everything I sell is previously owned, so I understand that sometimes problems may arise. Please do not open a case. Email me and I will work quickly to resolve it. Your satisfaction is important to me.

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Shipping: I usually will use FedEx, but may use USPS if it is less expensive and within the same time frame. Handling time is typically up to 3 days or less.  I typically ship on Tuesdays and Fridays, so items may arrive faster than stated. Please let me know if you need me to ship same or next day. I can usually accommodate when requested. Flat rate shipping does not apply to outside the Continental U.S., Puerto Rico, Alaska or Hawaii. P.O. Boxes may incur shipping surcharge. I only use eBay International Shipping for international shipping. Shipping is not refundable on returns. Local pick up always available at no charge. Let me know and I will invoice you without the shipping charge. Items valued over $750 will require signature upon delivery.

Movie Info:

The Pawnbroker is a 1964 American drama film directed by Sidney Lumet, starring Rod Steiger, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Brock Peters, Jaime Sánchez and Morgan Freeman in his feature film debut. The screenplay was an adaptation by Morton S. Fine and David Friedkin from the novel of the same name by Edward Lewis Wallant.

The film was the first produced entirely in the United States to deal with the Holocaust from the viewpoint of a survivor.[3] It earned international acclaim for Steiger, launching his career as an A-list actor.[4] It was among the first American films to feature a homosexual character and nudity during the Production Code, and was the first film featuring bare breasts to receive Production Code approval. Although it was publicly announced to be a special exception, the controversy proved to be first of similar major challenges to the Code that ultimately led to its abrogation.[5]

In 2008, The Pawnbroker was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[6][7]

Plot

In Nazi Germany, Sol Nazerman, a German-Jewish university professor, is sent to a concentration camp along with his family. He witnesses his two children die and his wife raped by Nazi officers before she is killed.

Twenty-five years later, Nazerman is haunted by his memories. He operates a pawnshop in an East Harlem slum while living in an anonymous Long Island housing tract with his sister-in-law, who is also a Holocaust survivor, and her husband. Numbed and alienated by his experiences, he has trained himself not to show emotion. He describes himself as beyond bitter, viewing the poor people around him as "scum" and "rejects." He acts uninterested and cynical towards his desperate customers and gives them much less than their pawned goods are worth.

Nazerman is idolized by Jesus Ortiz, an ambitious young Puerto Rican who lives with his mother and works for Nazerman as his shop assistant. Ortiz's girlfriend is a prostitute who works for Rodriguez, a racketeer who uses the pawnshop as a front. After hours, Nazerman teaches Ortiz about precious metal appraisal and money, the only thing he still values. Ortiz refers to Nazerman as his "teacher" but his attempts at friendship are rebuffed. Nazerman is also pursued by Marilyn Birchfield, a neighborhood social worker who wants to get to know him better, but he keeps her at arm's length.

Ortiz's girlfriend tries to pawn jewelry to help fund his plan to open a shop; she offers her body to Nazerman to make more money, but he rejects her. When she tells him she works for Rodriguez, he realizes that Rodriguez owes much of his wealth to the brothels he owns and runs. Nazerman recalls his wife's degradation in the concentration camp and tells Rodriguez he no longer wants to do business with him. He also tells Ortiz that he means nothing to him. Crushed by the comment, Ortiz arranges for the pawnshop to be robbed by a neighborhood gang led by Tangee. Meanwhile, Rodriguez and a henchman visit the pawnshop, beating and threatening to kill Nazerman when he refuses to cooperate in the money laundering. In his suicidal despair, he tells them to kill him. Rodriguez promises him that he will die sometime but not immediately, as Nazerman would prefer.

During the attempted robbery by Tangee's gang, Nazerman refuses to hand over his money. A member of the gang pulls a gun and, in trying to save Nazerman, Ortiz is shot. The gang flees and Ortiz drags himself out onto the street. Nazerman stumbles out of his shop and silently sobs while Ortiz dies. Ortiz's body is taken away by ambulance and Nazerman goes back inside. He impales his hand on a receipt spike before wandering away from the shop, presumably for the last time.

Cast

Rod Steiger – Sol Nazerman

Geraldine Fitzgerald – Marilyn Birchfield

Brock Peters – Rodriguez

Jaime Sánchez – Jesus Ortiz

Thelma Oliver – Ortiz's girl

Eusebia Cosme - Mrs. Ortiz (Jesus' mother)[8]

Marketa Kimbrell – Tessie

Baruch Lumet – Mendel

Juano Hernández – Mr. Smith

Linda Geiser – Ruth Nazerman

Nancy R. Pollock – Bertha

Raymond St. Jacques – Tangee

Charles Dierkop - Robinson

Morgan Freeman – Man on Street (uncredited)

Major themes

The Pawnbroker tells the story of a man whose spiritual "death" in the concentration camps causes him to bury himself in the most dismal location that he can find: a slum in upper Manhattan. Lumet told The New York Times in an interview during the filming that, "The irony of the film is that he finds more life here than anywhere. It's outside Harlem, in housing projects, office buildings, even the Long Island suburbs, everywhere we show on the screen—that everything is conformist, sterile, dead."[9]

The film used flashbacks to reveal Nazerman's backstory. According to a review on the Turner Classic Movies website, it has some similarities to two films of Alain Resnais: Night and Fog (1955) and Hiroshima mon Amour (1959). A recent commentator observed that the film "is uniquely American, with its harsh, unforgiving depiction of New York City, all of it brought to vivid life by Boris Kaufman's black and white cinematography and a dynamic cast highlighted by Rod Steiger's searing portrayal of the title role."[4]

New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote that Sol Nazerman "is very much a person of today—a survivor of Nazi persecution who has become detached and remote in the modern world—he casts, as it were, the somber shadow of the legendary, ageless Wandering Jew. That is the mythical Judean who taunted Jesus on the way to Calvary and was condemned to roam the world a lonely outcast until Jesus should come again."[10]

Production notes

Development

The film initially was considered for production in London, in order to take advantage of financial incentives then available for filmmakers.[5]

Directors Stanley Kubrick, Karel Reisz and Franco Zeffirelli turned down the project. Kubrick said he thought Steiger was not "all that exciting." Reisz, whose parents were murdered in the Holocaust, said that for "deep, personal" reasons he "could not objectively associate himself with any subject which has a background of concentration camps." Zeffirelli, then a stage director, was anxious to direct a film, but said that The Pawnbroker was "not the kind of subject [he] would wish to direct, certainly not as his first Anglo-American venture."[5]

Casting

Rod Steiger in The Pawnbroker

Steiger became involved in the project in 1962, a year after the Wallant novel was published, and was involved in an early reworking of the film's script.[5] He received $50,000 for his performance, far lower than his usual rate, because he trusted Lumet, with whom he had worked on television in the series You Are There.[4]

Lumet, who took over the film after Arthur Hiller was fired, initially had misgivings about Steiger being cast in the lead role. He felt that Steiger "was a rather tasteless actor—awfully talented, but completely tasteless in his choices." Lumet preferred James Mason for the role, and the comedian Groucho Marx was among the performers who had wanted to play Nazerman.[5] However, Steiger pleasantly surprised Lumet when he agreed with him during rehearsals on the repression of the character's feelings. Lumet felt that ultimately Steiger "worked out fine."[11]

In a 1999 television interview, Rod Steiger revealed an inspiration he took from an unlikely source of art. Over a quarter of a century after artist Pablo Picasso's 1937 Guernica, the painting inspired emotional artistic depth again when, in 1964, Steiger borrowed the silent anguish of the skyward cry of the suffering female subject, seen at the right of the canvas. The scene in the film was in the last minutes of The Pawnbroker.

Variety considered Brock Peters the first actor to portray a confirmed homosexual character in an American film.[12]

Filming

Thelma Oliver and Jaime Sánchez meet with hoodlums at a night club

The film was shot in New York City, mainly on location and with minimal sets, in the fall of 1963.[5] Much of the filming took place on Park Avenue in Harlem, where the pawnbroker shop was set at 1642 Park Avenue, near the intersection of Park Ave. and 116th Street. Scenes were also filmed in Connecticut, Jericho, New York, and Lincoln Center (with both interior and exterior shots of the Lincoln Towers apartments which were new at the time).[9]

Post-production and release

The film premiered in June 1964 at the Berlin International Film Festival, and was released in the United States in April 1965.[13]

Finding a major U.S. distributor for the film proved difficult because of its nudity and grim subject matter.[5] Producer Ely Landau had the same problem in England until it was booked into a London theater where it had an enormously successful run. As a result, Landau arranged a distribution deal with the Rank Organisation, and it opened in the U.S.[4]

Quincy Jones composed the soundtrack for the film, including "Soul Bossa Nova", which was used in a scene at a nightclub. That would later be used as the main theme to the Austin Powers film series.

The film was edited by Ralph Rosenblum, and is extensively discussed in his book When the Shooting Stops, the Cutting Begins: A Film Editor's Story.[14]

Production Code controversy

The film was controversial on initial release for depicting nude scenes in which actresses Linda Geiser and Thelma Oliver fully exposed their breasts. The scene with Oliver, who played a prostitute, was intercut with a flashback to the concentration camp, in which Nazerman is forced to watch his wife (Geiser) and other women raped by Nazi officers. The nudity resulted in a "C" (condemned) rating from the Catholic Legion of Decency.[4][5] The Legion felt "that a condemnation is necessary in order to put a very definite halt to the effort by producers to introduce nudity into American films."[5] The Legion of Decency's stance was opposed by some Catholic groups, and the National Council of Churches gave the film an award for best picture of the year.[11]

The scenes resulted in conflict with the Motion Picture Association of America, which administered the Motion Picture Production Code. The Association initially rejected the scenes showing bare breasts and a sex scene between Sanchez and Oliver, which it described as "unacceptably sex suggestive and lustful." Despite the rejection, Landau arranged for Allied Artists to release the film without the Production Code seal, and New York censors licensed The Pawnbroker without the cuts demanded by Code administrators. On a 6–3 vote, the Motion Picture Association of America granted the film an "exception" conditional on "reduction in the length of the scenes which the Production Code Administration found unapprovable." The exception to the code was granted as a "special and unique case," and was described by The New York Times at the time as "an unprecedented move that will not, however, set a precedent."[11] The requested reductions of nudity were minimal, and the outcome was viewed in the media as a victory for the film's producers.[5]

Critical reaction

The film, and Steiger's performance in particular, was greeted by widespread critical acclaim.[5] Life magazine praised Steiger's "endless versatility." Brendan Gill wrote in The New Yorker: "By a magic more mysterious. . . than his always clever makeup, he manages to convince me at once that he is whoever he pretends to be."[11]

New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called it a "remarkable picture" that was "a dark and haunting drama of a man who has reasonably eschewed a role of involvement and compassion in a brutal and bitter world and has found his life barren and rootless as a consequence. It is further a drama of discovery of the need of man to try to do something for his fellow human sufferers in the troubled world of today." He praised the performances in the film, including the supporting cast.[10]

One negative review came from Pauline Kael, who called it "trite", but said: "You can see the big pushes for powerful effects, yet it isn't negligible. It wrenches audiences, making them fear that they, too, could become like this man. And when events strip off his armor, he doesn't discover a new, warm humanity, he discovers sharper suffering—just what his armor had protected him from. Most of the intensity comes from Steiger's performance."[4]

Some Jewish groups urged a boycott of the film, in the view that its presentation of a Jewish pawnbroker encouraged anti-Semitism. Black groups felt it encouraged racial stereotypes of the inner city residents as pimps, prostitutes or drug addicts.[