Pickup (1951 film)

Pickup is a 1951 American low-budget film noir starring Hugo Haas, Beverly Michaels, Allan Nixon and Howland Chamberlain. Written and directed by Haas, a Czech actor and filmmaker, it was his first American film behind the camera. Haas, a refugee from German-occupied Europe, went on to make a series of gloomy noirs about doomed middle-aged men led astray by younger femmes fatales.

The film is based on a 1926 novel, Guard No. 47 by Josef Kopta, and has a plot similar to the 1946 film The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), though with a much different ending.

Plot
Czech-American Jan "Hunky" Horak is a middle-aged railroad dispatcher who mans isolated Tank Stop 47, several miles out of town, by himself. When he takes a Sunday off for the first time in a year, his fill-in is Steve, a young man. While at the carnival, he is targeted by a much younger, attractive blonde named Betty, who is just after his money. After their date, she returns to her room, but finds she and her friend Irma have been evicted, not having paid rent for months, and her landlady threatens to call the police unless she returns the silverware and linen she hocked. To solve her financial problems, she marries Hunky, a widower of two years.

Afterward, Hunky loses his hearing and is allowed to retire early. Steve is his replacement, but since the retirement paperwork will take four or five weeks to complete, Steve lives temporarily in a tool shed across the tracks from the company-provided house where Hunky and Betty reside. Steve knows what kind of woman Betty is (she dated somebody he knows), but still falls in love with her.

When Hunky is knocked down by a car, he regains his hearing. He keeps this development to himself, initially for Betty's benefit, as his company pension will enable the couple to move into town. However, Betty talks openly in his presence about how she only married him to get out of a jam, and that she will not stick around to take care of him.

Betty finds out that she cannot obtain a divorce. She then attempts to get Hunky to move his savings into a joint account. When that fails, Betty tries to persuade Steve to shove her husband off a cliff during a rail inspection, falsely claiming that Hunky has beaten her, but he cannot bring himself to commit murder. Disgusted, Betty packs up and leaves.

Cast

 * Hugo Haas as Jan Horak
 * Beverly Michaels as Betty
 * Allan Nixon as Steve
 * Howland Chamberlain as Professor (Horak's friend)
 * Jo-Carroll Dennison as Irma
 * Mark Lowell as Waiter
 * Marjorie Beckett as Secretary of the Doctor
 * Art Lewis as Driver
 * Jack Daley as Company Doctor
 * Bernard Gorcey as Joe

Production
The film has been described by Larry Langman as "a poor man's version" of the 1946 film The Postman Always Rings Twice, based on James M. Cain's 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Release
It opened in New York on August 30, 1951. It was released only to secondary and independent theaters.

Reception
Time magazine praised Haas as "Hollywood's most promising new moviemaker" since Stanley Kramer, calling the film "a fascinating game of cat & mouse, played for pathos as well as suspense", and noted how its sense of character, acceptance of human frailty, and seedy, impoverished setting made it far from the usual Hollywood film. More recently Filmfanatic.org called it "a tawdry, low-budget camp classic", criticising predictable elements but praising the dialog and some unexpected plot twists. Fernando F. Croce remarked on its "unusually blunt masochism" and sympathetic treatment of the femme fatale (who makes it out alive).