The Pawnbroker: The Real Tragedy

Have you ever come across someone in your life who is just so full of bitterness that all they say or touch is miserable? And you wonder, what made someone like this? The Pawnbroker, (1964) tells a story of just such a person. Sol Nazerman played by a much talented, but most underrated, Rod Steiger, used to be a successful professor in Europe during WW II. Nazerman is a Jew in a world that didn’t want them. He has a beautiful wife, and two angelic children, and other relatives who live a quite life in Europe, until the Nazis came and literally tore the family apart. One of his children dies in transit to the concentration camp, his wife is raped in front of him and eventually killed. His other child is never heard from again.

Twenty years have passed and Sol is now a bitter pawnbroker in NYC, right in the thick of things. Poverty, pain, drugs, alcohol, prostitution, anguish, also live in the neighbor Sol works in. But to a bitter Sol, he sees nothing, he feels nothing.  Sol’s eager assistant, Jesus Ortiz (Jaime Sanchez) is looking for a way to get rich quick. Jesus is a Puerto Rican immigrant living with his mother in a rat and roach infested apartment in Harlem. He wants out. He had a few break-ins with the law, but wants the straight, but narrow road. He finds Sol hardened, and bitter, but feels Jews, as Sol is, know how to get rich and quick. After all, it comes easy for as he put it, “you people.” Jesus sees Sol not only as a teacher, but as a father, to only be pushed away by Sol whenever he tries to get close. Eventually Jesus gets tired of being pushed away, and it leads him to making horrible decisions. Both Sol and Jesus are trapped in there desires. Sol lives in the past preventing him from moving forward in life. Jesus wants to move ahead too fast which ultimately causes him to act impulsively.

Sol feels nothing for the poor souls who enter his shop with their prized and last possessions. Each soul that entered Sol’s shop were like dead men walking. Lifeless and hopeless. But Sol acts like he doesn’t care, he pretends to love money more than people, after all, this is what was expected of a Jew. As mean as he is with the poor creatures, he manages to garner our sympathy because in fact, it is he who is slave to a real genuinely greedy man, a low life gangster, Rodriguez (Brock Peters) whose violence and brutal ways paralleled those of the Nazis which still haunted Sol’s days and nights.

The director, Sidney Lumet was quite daring in this film. He manages to crush the day’s stereotypes of  Jews, Blacks and Latinos. For the first time in Hollywood history a movie depicted the underclasses in a realistic manner. Struggling Latinos and Blacks in Harlem just fighting each day to put food on the table. And in these neighborhoods it meant that these souls would sell their memories to Sol just to survive. To some, a radio, candle sticks, etc, may seem worthless, but to these people it was worth a fortune. But to Sol, their memories meant nothing compared to his. We relive Sol’s concentration camp past through a series of heartbreaking flashbacks.

I found the film to be moving, and realistic. The New York City scenes are the perfect backdrop to a story of a powerful city filled with powerless people, it brought back a lot memories for me. Looking at poverty and hopelessness 3 D can be heartbreaking, but enlightening. Steiger’s performance makes the movie. Steiger played the role of Sol so intensely you’ll forget he’s acting. He deserved the Oscar that year for sure, he lost to Lee Marvin, unjustly so. Lument was brave enough to make the world face a subject they much rather had forgotten. And made us realize that the real tragedy is what we make of our suffering.