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. (As TCM host Eddie Muller noted after a showing of the film, contrary to film noir convention, the femme fatale does not get punished.) …...more
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