Pickup

A widowed station attendant meets a gum-chewing blonde. A short time later they are married, but this hardly means happiness. Played by  Beverly Michaels in wonderfully frosty, nefarious fashion, the woman is only after her husband’s money and already has her eye on one of his younger colleagues. Fantasies and emotions, slyness and greed serve as lubricants for this small, raw B-film that is a melodrama and thriller in one. For Czech filmmaker Hugo Haas (1901–1968), who had been long established in his home country, PICKUP was his first directorial work in American exile; he also produced, wrote the script and took on the leading role. After he had to flee from the Nazis as a Jew and anti-fascist, he tried for years to drum up interest for the PICKUP script in Hollywood before eventually shooting it with his own money, with Columbia Pictures later coming on board as distributor. Afterwards, Haas repeatedly created new variations on the story of the older man (always played by him) taken in by a blonde seductress. Anyone who thinks first and foremost about masochism and fetishism and cult appeal and camp with respect to Haas’s work and refers to him as the “Skid Row Orson Welles” (Dennis Dermody) overlooks the fact that his films always also create a portrait of the life of emigrants on the fringes of society and possess a degree of self-reflection unusual for Hollywood.