Special Features:

• Exclusive video interview with the late Sam Fuller
• Cinema Cinemas: Fuller
• Illustrated biographical essay on Fuller
• Poster gallery
• Still galleries
• Trailers for eight Sam Fuller films

Pickup on South Street's basic plot is classic noir: A petty crook picks the wrong pocket, finds himself with some highly desirable microfilm, and is then tailed by both Feds and Communist puppeteers. Then the crook and the girl whose pocket he picked both find themselves mired in a spiraling web of greed, caught between the Right and the Reds, in a battle of self preservation. What raises the film above its plotting is Fuller's athletic camerawork -- always in motion, the movie zings with bouncy tracking and crane shots, very different than what you'd find in, say, a Fritz Lang film. And, despite the harshness of South Street, Fuller portrays the film's hardened players -- Richard Widmark's thief, Jean Peters' semi-slutty courier with a heart of gold, Thelma Ritter's informer -- with compassion and humanity (Ritter's streetwise character may remind some of her streetwise character in Rear Window, or her streetwise character in Pillow Talk, but still wonderful). Her death scene here is one of her, and Fuller's, finest hours. To top it off, the film is packed with the lingo of the underworld, Runyonesque dialogue to end all Runyonesque dialogue: "Aw, everybody loves everybody when they're kissin'..."

The Criterion transfer is pristine as all get out, far cleaner than the muddy print I saw on late night cable years ago. And the extras include a series of trailers for Fuller's films, a giddy reminder of how the man was, as Foster Hirsch wrote, "the kinkiest of all B auteurs." While Pickup on South Street may not be top flight noir, it still packs a punch -- and is essential viewing for the director's fans.
---Craig Phillips