A Jew in Harlem

The Pawnbroker. In his murky, cluttered shop in Spanish Harlem's upper depths, Sol Nazerman sits behind a wire partition coldly doling out pittances to the people he calls "scum and rejects." Hopefully, they come to hock personal or stolen goods. They look to the old Jew for understanding, or even a fair price, and see the eyes of a man whose last links to life were cruelly severed decades ago in a Nazi concentration camp. Now he speaks of those days as if he were carving an epitaph: "Everything I loved was taken from me, and I didn't die."

This doggedly purposeful drama qualifies handily as the grimmest movie of the year; yet the best of it burns into the mind. As the pawnbroker, Rod Steiger performs with tightly measured virtuosity. He is colorless, an inconspicuous blob hidden behind steel-rimmed glasses and a steel-wool mustache. To blot out a world full of past and present horrors, Sol listlessly endures an affair with his best friend's widow. He spurns the friendship of a sympathetic social worker (Geraldine Fitzgerald), slowly begins to soften toward his troubled young Puerto Rican assistant (Jaime Sanchez), then crushes the boy by telling him: "You are nothing to me." In the tragic aftermath of that rejection, Nazerman's dead soul is awakened at least a little.

Director Sidney Lumet brings the movie alive when his camera turns on Harlem's blighted streets, sopping up the juices of a slum that breeds thieves, spivs, prostitutes and all their prey. Then in flashbacks--some spliced subliminally into the narrative two or three frames at a time, others developed in excruciating detail--Lumet adroitly dramatizes the agony of memories. Sunning himself on a lawn in a bleak outpost of suburbia where he lives with relatives, Nazerman's mind melts back to an idyllic day in the old country with his wife and children. In a teeming subway, he suddenly sees the boxcar-prison where his son was trampled underfoot. In the pawnshop, when a Negro harlot strips to the waist, enticing him to pay double for a gold locket, the old man recalls how he was forced to watch his naked wife submitting to a Nazi.

Though The Pawnbroker is full of emotional shocks, it is seldom deeply moving. At times Lumet's style seems self-conscious and stagy, unable to distinguish brass from gold, with more clever camera work than the somber occasions warrant and too many theatrically glib vignettes. One jarring note is struck by a vicious black racketeer and brothel master (Brock Peters) who supports Nazerman's pawnshop as a front for his deals while basking in the luxury of an improbable white-on-white world adorned with white jackets, white walls, and a blond loverboy.

A more basic flaw of the film is evidenced in the climactic cry of anguish that sounds Sol Nazerman's re-entry into the human race but echoes mostly as a triumph for Actor Steiger. Saddled with dialogue better suited to a symbol, Steiger speaks it like a man, succeeding so well that the character incriminates himself. This misanthropic pawnbroker has suffered no more than millions of Jews; he is simply meaner in spirit, a wretched and pitiable case study wearing the tragic mask.

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