The quintessentially New York director Samuel Fuller made only one movie* about the contemporary city, his 1953 film noir “Pickup on South Street” (which I discuss in this clip). Though born in Worcester, Mass., in 1912, he moved here as a child and honed his street smarts by working as a newspaper copy boy, starting at the age of fourteen. (It’s a story that he tells well in his autobiography, “A Third Face,” which I reviewed in the magazine.) He soon became a crime reporter—at the age of seventeen—at the primordial tabloid newspaper, the New York Evening Graphic, which was founded by the world-class eccentric Bernarr Macfadden (about whom my colleague John Donohue recently posted at his terrific blog, Stay at Stove Dad). There, Fuller worked with Rhea Gore, John Huston’s mother (Huston later told Fuller, “You know, Sam, you spent more time with my mother than I did”) and alongside others who got their start there—Walter Winchell, Ed Sullivan, and the future producer Jerry Wald and screenwriter Norman Krasna. Fuller wrote,
Though not usually known as an actors’ director, here Fuller directed the great character actor Thelma Ritter in the role of Moe, an aging Bowery stoolie (and expert in the ways of “cannons”) who is saving for her funeral; she got an Oscar nomination for her caustic yet sentimental turn. As spun by Fuller, Moe is the heroine of the kind of tall tale that got tossed around at the “Pot of Glue,” the speakeasy (the back room of Perry’s Pharmacy) where young Fuller used to repair, in the company of newspaper veterans, after their days and nights of hard-boiled reporting. (Of course, the film he had made before “Pickup”—the terrifically atmospheric “Park Row,” named for the downtown street where, for decades, New York’s newspapers had their headquarters—is set in the rowdy world of journalism, but of the eighteen-eighties.)
*If memory serves, “Underworld U.S.A.” isn’t set in New York City, but in a smaller city.
