Pickup

Cinema lies between Renoir's trains (La Bête Humaine) and Lang's (Human Desire), somewhere in there is the forgotten Hugo Haas with walrus dignity and Eastern European wryness, telling his little tale by a railroad just outside of Hollywood. The first words heard are from "My Brother's Keeper," Haas' widowed trackwalker waves them off, he's mourning his pooch. Off to town for a new pet, his assistant (Allan Nixon) gives him a strenuous wink ("Sharp as a sponge!"). At the fairgrounds the camera is placed low as the blonde giantess (Beverly Michaels) advertises herself on the carousel, she's openly contemptuous of her older suitor's home until she glances at his finance book. "You know, life's funny." "Where'd ya read that?" Haas works with scraps but his filmmaking is lucid—a dissolve from the girl's determined face to the wedding cake ornament discarded in the immigrant's living room sets up the intrigue, the locomotive whistle heard in the distance as her cigarette is lit by her future lover gives it a new direction. The Postman Always Rings Twice from the cuckold's vantage point, though the dizzy spell that gives way to deafness also takes note of Gance's Un Grand Amour de Beethoven. His hearing is restored just as capriciously but he keeps up the charade after learning of his wife's scheme. An unusually blunt masochism colors Poverty Row aesthetics: The vixen laughs at her husband ("Ya sucker!"), he laughs back ("It's a lot of fun, eh?") before letting his face go balefully slack. Despite all, the filmmaker fondly spares his heroine the femme fatale's demise, she just takes off and sticks out her tongue at Fate. With Howland Chamberlain and Jo-Carroll Dennison. In black and white.