The Pawnbroker (1964)
After yesterday’s exercise in despair with Liv Ullmann, all I wanted was a bit of silly relaxation but I guess that’s not what fate had in store for me. But it doesn’t matter because The Pawnbroker starring today’s star, Rod Steiger, is a very good film.
It starts with a dreamlike, almost surreal, lovely scene of a family spending time together in nature. But the bliss is short lived as it soon becomes obvious we are seeing a Jewish family and the time is World War II. The father is taken to a concentration camp but he also witnesses the deaths of his loved ones.
Then we jump ahead a few years when the man is a pawnbroker (THE pawnbroker) in Harlem. He does not trust other people, he is lonely and rejects everyone who might want to reach him, like his assistant or his neighbor who genuinely want to connect with him.
The Pawnbroker is a portrait of a life ruined by trauma, a trauma a person did not work through properly. It’s heartbreaking and shows how, and I don’t care that it sound cheesy, the light is taken from somebody’s soul.
It’s interesting and fantastic, in my opinion, that the characters here are pretty much all minorities – Rod Steiger is a white man but he plays a Jew, a Holocaust survivor. The soundtrack is pretty effective ranging from groovy 60s jazz to some heavy dramatic themes, plus, I enjoyed the establishing shots of New York City.
The Sergeant (1968)
The second film with Rod Steiger I watched today is The Sergeant and much like with The Pawnbroker where he played The Pawnbroker, here he plays The Sergeant. In fact he plays a GAY sergeant and all the conflict stems from this fact (I mean in the plot – I believe that the internal conflict of Steiger’s character also has a lot to do with his war trauma). There is a soldier under his command and he finds it hard to repress his feelings towards the young man.
Apparently (I read that on Wikipedia) Pauline Kael thought Steiger did not make a convincing homosexual at all and Steiger himself agreed with her. I don’t know if I do because I found him compelling and definitely the best part of the film which, while showing psychological torment which is interesting, is pretty dull. There is a LOT of scenes that are supposed to tell us time and time and again that the young man is NOT gay and he has a GIRLFRIEND and they have STRAIGHT SEX. And I am unsure about the gay representation here: Steiger sexually assaults the young man and throughout the film I kept switching back and forth between believing that his mental breakdown is connected to the fact that he has to repress his identity and between thinking we were supposed to think that this is just how gay people are.
Pretty heavy topics once again although today was not as hard as yesterday. Tomorrow is Irene Dunne day so maybe I’ll get to chill a bit with a screwball comedy.
Swingin' at the Seance 