Sidney Lumet: On Locations/Art Direction For The Pawnbroker

An interesting story about The Pawnbroker. This element worked on me subliminally when I saw the film. I love how conscious all of it is, behind the scenes.

Excerpt from Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies:

Sidney Lumet:

To talk about art direction in black-and-white movies is to talk about something extinct. But it was exciting while it lasted. Dick Sylbert’s work on The Pawnbroker was superb. This was a picture about creating our own prisons. Starting with the pawnshop itself, Dick created a series of cages: wire mesh bars, locks, alarms, anything that would reinforce a sense of entrapment.

The locations were picked with this in mind. The supposedly wide-open spaces of suburbia at the beginning of the picture were cut up by fences clearly delineating each house’s 125-foot frontage.

For the critical scene where Rod Steiger tells Geraldine Fitzgerald of his guilt at being alive, we found an apartment on the West Side of Manhattan that overlooked the New York Central railroad yards. Throughout the scene you can see and hear freight cars being shunted from track to track. That kind of visual and auditory corroboration of a scene’s context is invaluable.

If you remember, The Pawnbroker is about a Holocaust survivor. Tormented by guilt at having lived, and having gotten out. The freight cars out the window of that rickety apartment were a perfect and haunting touch. Even here in America, in NYC, the sound of those freight trains followed this character wherever he went.

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