The Pawnbroker

SPOILER ALERT! The plot will be discussed.

I was originally going to discuss The Silence of the Lambs this week (I’ll talk about it next time), but decided to write about The Pawnbroker after my movie class viewed and analyzed this 1964 motion picture recently. I had seen it before, but was especially moved by Sidney Lumet’s direction and Rod Steiger’s performance this time around. This film is the first American movie to deal with the subject of the Holocaust from the point of view of a survivor. It is a very powerful portrayal of the paralyzing grip on a Jewish victim of that time, and explores whether he can loosen its traumatic hold on him.

Lumet, contrary to Hollywood practice, was a screenwriter's advocate (Network, The Verdict, Long Day’s Journey into Night) and some might say that he didn’t have a personal cinematic signature. However, in this film he reflects the French New Wave use of jump cuts as he evokes the stream of consciousness flashbacks visualized by Nazi concentration camp survivor Sol Nazerman (Steiger), (such as when Sol rides the subway and he mentally returns to the concentration camp cattle car). The movie opens, contrary to expectations, with an initially edenic scene of a smiling Sol, his laughing children, and his happy wife. The are in an open field of flowers, moving in slow motion, as if the people there want this free, joyful time to last forever. This blissful scene is destroyed as we see the individuals look up, their smiles disappearing, as Nazi soldiers appear on the perimeter, ready to coral and eventually imprison the pastoral celebrants.

We then see that Sol is having a dream which turns into a nightmare, sort of what has happened in his real life. Now that we know where Sol is coming from, his present snoozing in a patio chair in the backyard of the suburban Long Island home is not an escape from his past torment. Lumet conveys his mental prison by showing the lawn circumscribed by claustrophobic fences, and his relatives closed in by partitions on the house’s deck. (Later, crooks want money in exchange for a stolen lawn mower, obviously not a tool useful in the inner city. Sol’s attempt at using his suburban existence as a sanctuary is undermined by the image of the supposedly benign mower, shot from the ground up, transformed into a menacingly approaching reminder of the continual presence of past dread for him, and us, as we share his viewpoint). Sol’s sister talks about taking a trip to Europe, commenting that the old country has an ancient smell to it. Sol says he remembers it as a “stench.” For him, the past is a chamber of horrors, where he lost his wife and children, and which he does not want to revisit. Despite his desire to bury those memories, his subconscious keeps unearthing them. He is still mentally in that camp. He works in a pawn shop which is full of cages and locks, reminding us of Sol’s state of mind. These visuals extend to the landscape around him, as the small apartments in tall, slab-like buildings look like cells in a prison.

Sol’s mental state reflects a diagnosis of what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. He has suffered life-threatening events in the past, which can be triggered and relived due to present occurrences that remind him of his trauma. There is a numbing of affect, so emotions are repressed in order to insulate the psyche from the pain of those previous torments. In order to accomplish this escape from the past, the victim may try to remove himself from society. Sol’s name even implies i-sol-ation. Yet, Sol’s pawn shop is in the crowded Harlem of the early 1960’s, where shoes piled up in a store window remind Sol (and, thus, us) of those items placed in heaps in the death camps. Victims were stripped of their possessions and eventually their lives as they entered the gas chambers. The shoes are almost symbolic of those lost souls (no pun intended). Perhaps Sol works in the ghetto of the inner city because he is not capable psychologically of moving forward in time out of the historic jail in which his mind resides (he doesn’t want his helper to tear off the previous day’s calendar page). He may also be unconsciously punishing himself by working in a place where others are confined by the repressive limitations of their situations because of his own survivor guilt (another symptom of PTSD). It is ironic that the soundtrack plays jazz, a liberating, free-form music, that contrasts with Sol’s mental incarceration.

Economically and, therefore, optimistically drained people enter Sol’s shop. The place, with it’s metal grate separating the customers from Sol, becomes almost like a confessional as some people tell their stories to a seemingly disinterested listener, as Sol plays the role of a reluctant priest. They have to cash in what amounts in the material world as meager objects of value because of deprived situations. One fellow brings in an oratory award, which to him is gold for a past achievement, but in capitalistic terms, is only worth a dollar. Others come with bronzed baby shoes and a framed butterfly collection, objects that transcend material worth, but which current economic stresses force the owners to put a price tag on their intangible value. One man seems to just want to use his visit to expound on ideas, use his intellect, but he hasn’t enough goods to purchase a cerebral exchange with Sol.

Sol is like a walking corpse whose spirit, if not his body, died during the Holocaust. His death-like existence even spills over into his sex life. He has relations with the widow of a friend of his who died at the camp. Although it may be that in some way Sol is attempting to give comfort to the wife of his friend, it almost seems as if he is doing it only out of some form of duty. The two are like two lost souls going through the motions. (Lumet heightens their sterile affection by contrasting their lovemaking with cuts to Ortiz and his girlfriend who are passionate toward each other). Sol’s girlfriend’s sick father, Mendel (played by Lumet’s dad, Baruch Lumet) is sequestered (again like a cage) in an adjoining room, and it looks as if he was already in his tomb when later the daughter calls Sol to tell him he has died. Sol, stopping himself from opening the gates to emotional pain, coldly slams the door on commiserating. He says to her he is not able to afford to close the shop, and callously suggests that it was useless to go and “cry” with her.

The movie has come under criticism for depicting African Americans and Latinos as criminals. But as was noted above, many of Harlem’s inhabitants, given their circumstances, found very few opportunities to escape America’s ethnic prison in which they were confined. One of Harlem’s residents is Jesus Ortiz (Jaime Sanchez). Unlike Sol, he is trying to surmount the weight of his past, which involved criminal actions. He wants to learn the pawnbroker business from Sol, who was a professor in a previous life, and Ortiz wants to be his student in the US. Ortiz is full of energy and hope, neither of which Sol exhibits. The young man witnesses only contempt and coldness on the part of his mentor (little images show Sol’s lack of warmth, such as when Sol withdraws from Ortiz when the latter tries to help Sol on with his sweater). He asks Sol “how come you people come to business so naturally?” Sol is contemptuous of the ethnic stereotype, and says sarcastically, “you want to know the secret of our success,” which he does not view as an accomplishment. He says it derives from “several thousand years” of having nothing, no land or a place to grow food. All his people had was “a great bearded legend,” referring irreverently to God, and “a little brain.” Sol says that it was the use of intellect that led to becoming merchants, but the drive to survive through business then led to a vicious cycle of earning and reinvesting that left no room for generosity or enjoyment, probably because of constantly being in fear of what happened before. In a way, Sol blames the oppressive part of his heritage causing a type of confinement through being pragmatic, which has caused bigoted references to a Jew as being, “a usurer, a man with secret resources, a pawnbroker, a sheenie, a makie, and a kike!”

So, when Ortiz asks Sol about what he believes in, he says it is not “God, or art, or science, or newspapers, or politics, or philosophy.” All of these non-material things have not provided comfort in his world of pain. He, instead, cynically puts his faith in what can be used to sustain his body. He says he believes in “money … Money is the whole thing.” But in addition to not wanting to deal with his history, Sol also wants to close his eyes to where his “money” is currently coming from. He launders currency for the local big time gangster, Rodriguez (Brock Peters). Sol does not like how Rodriguez calls him “professor,” because it reminds Sol how far he has fallen when he is addressed by a lawbreaker. His mental avoidance  of topics is mirrored by how Sol does not look at people face-to-face, but instead gazes down or away. When he is called to visit Rodriguez (whose apartment also has a prison-like decorative screen, also implying that even this big shot is not free from the ghetto’s restraints) to make sure he will comply with the gangster’s wishes in the future, Rodriguez does not allow Sol the denial of where the pawnbroker’s payoffs derive. He makes him face the fact that the income comes from illegal activities, including drugs and prostitution, the latter of which is particularly painful as we see Sol flashback to when his wife was used to gratify the sexual appetites of the Nazis. In a symbolic act, Rodriguez grabs Sol’s face and makes him face the gangster, and, in effect, Sol’s own haunted situation. He forces Sol to say “yes” not only to Rodriguez’s demands, but also to his own life. The emotionally suppressed Sol now cries, as his psychological defenses break down.

Since Sol now confronts the corrupt nature of his money, it no longer holds the one constant in his life on which to rely. Back at the shop he begins to give out too much compensation for the objects that people bring him. A woman by the name of Marilyn Birchfield (Geraldine Fitzgerald) visited the shop, looking for charitable donations. After getting a dismissive response from Sol, she again reaches out to him on a personal level. They meet near a park bench. She seems to want to share her loneliness with Sol, again in a sort of confessional encounter, and he reaffirms his desire to be left alone. However, in his current lost state, Sol goes to Marilyn’s apartment. She wants to help him, and there are symbolic gestures in their encounter. She opens a door to a balcony, an invitation to what seems to represent a chance at removing Sol’s psychological barriers through sharing pain with another. But, Sol is not capable of reaching out to her. They go back in the apartment, and Marilyn feels defeated, expressing her helplessness, as she stretches out her arm (looking something like a human version of the figures of God and Adam reaching for each other on the Sistine Chapel). She appears to be trying to make a last chance connection, hoping Sol will take her hand. He does not, and leaves.

Rodriguez comes to the pawn shop to confront Sol for not cooperating again. His henchman beats Sol up, and Sol asks Rodriguez to kill him. Rodriguez realizes that Sol has a death wish, that he wants to be released from his agony. Rodriguez won’t grant him his wish, wanting the man to deal with his torment, and predicting a worse fate when death will come to Sol at a time when he wants to live. Because Sol’s cynical views that life offers nothing to believe in, and has taught Ortiz that everything comes down to acquiring money, Ortiz returns to his criminal accomplice, Tangee (Raymond St. Jacques). Ortiz observed one of Rodriguez’s men deliver a large sum of money to Sol to keep in his safe. Ortiz informs Tangee of this fact, but doesn’t want any guns involved in the heist. Tangee and his men show up to rob the shop, and Sol, again trying to fulfill his desire to end his life, provokes them by closing the safe door. One of the men has a gun, and Ortiz, surprised at seeing the weapon, intervenes to protect Sol, and is killed instead.

Despite the fact that the story revolves around a Jewish Holocaust survivor, the film has several Christian references. Sol’s last name is Nazerman, which seems to be a reference to Jesus’ birthplace of Nazareth. Ortiz, ignorant of the Nazi practice of tattooing numbers on inmates arms, asks if the digits represent Sol belonging to a secret society, and he asks Sol what he had to do to be a member. Sol’s answer is, “You learn to walk on water.” Perhaps Sol is saying that it took a miracle to have survived the ordeal, but the statement again points to Jesus as the miracle worker. But Sol is not the Christ figure here. If anyone is, it is Ortiz, living up to his first name, Jesus, by sacrificing himself for another. At the end of the movie, after Ortiz crawls out of the shop, bleeding, Sol impales his hand on the nail used to hold the pawn slips. He then goes out onto the sidewalk, and bends down next to Ortiz, like a supplicant, as if to recognize the young man’s unselfish act. Sol’s self-inflicted wound is sort of a stigmata, connecting him to the sacrifice. It may be that Sol at the end looks at the blood of another, and empathizes with the suffering of others in general, as he mixes his own blood with that of Ortiz’s, showing the universality of suffering and sacrifice.

The next film is The Silence of the Lambs.