MICROFILM, USUALLY THOUGHT OF AS A MEANS OF PRESERVING DOCUments that might otherwise be subject to disintegration, took on a different meaning in the 1950s. Then, it was a method that Soviet agents used for recording classified information. David Greenglass informed the FBI that his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, had two apartments, one in Greenwich Village, the other on the Lower East Side, where he microfilmed whatever he received from his sources.
But the best known case of microfilm used in service of espionage was what came to be known as the “Pumpkin Papers,” an umbrella coinage for a cache of secret documents and two developed—and three undeveloped—rolls of microfilm. Whittaker Chambers, a former Soviet spy who broke with the party in 1938, kept them in his possession as bargaining chips in case his life were threatened because of his defection. Chambers deposited the microfilm in a hollowed out pumpkin on his farm in Westminster, Maryland. But since the microfilm dealt with events that occurred in the mid 1930s, its value was negligible.
A strip of microfilm with instructions for assembling a portable atomic bomb figures in the plot of Columbia’s The 49th Man (1953), a dizzyingly convoluted and morally disturbing thriller in the semi-documentary style of Walk East on Beacon, narrated authoritatively by Gerald Mohr, as if the film were reenacting a real-life incident. The 49th Man opens on a young man driving at a dangerously high speed. The car crashes, exploding in flames. At the crash site, a case with suspicious metal parts is retrieved, sparking the curiosity of the Security Investigation Division. One of the agents (John Ireland) brings the satchel to Los Alamos, where his suspicions are confirmed: The parts are components of an atomic bomb. After other such cases are discovered, the spy hunt is on, and an agent is dispatched to Marseilles, cinema’s favorite port of shadows and a likely spot for uranium trafficking.
The 49th Man is a “things are not what they seem” movie—with a twist. The agent’s French interpreter and two naval officers, who seem to be in league with the enemy, are really players in a war games scenario scripted by the military, in which the agent is the lead. Even the head of the division (Richard Denning) is out of the loop, pointing to a military establishment that has become recklessly autonomous. If everything is just a game, everyone is expendable—including the hot rod kid and the agent, whose life is in danger after coming upon a terrorist cell in Marseilles that was not part of the endgame.
The villains are two disaffected World War II vets, one of whom had been labeled a subversive by the military. Before they can detonate the bomb in San Francisco, they are apprehended, and the bomb is dropped on an atomic testing site in Nevada, killing no one, but increasing radioactivity in the area. Implicitly, The 49th Man argues that the end justifies the means. If a war games maneuver unmasked a terrorist organization and kept San Francisco from being nuked, it was worth it, despite the loss of a couple of lives and the creation of more radioactive fallout in the Southwest. Better that than a city in ruins. This is not a film to be overly analyzed. The screenwriter, Harry Essex, working from an original story by Ivan Tors, did not wag a finger at the military, but gave the audience reason enough to do so.
The ruthlessness of Soviet agents and their obsession with microfilm were not lost on screenwriter-director Samuel Fuller, whose Pickup on South Street (1953) revolved around a double theft: A strip of microfilm stolen by an agent is then inadvertently filched by a pickpocket. Pickup, which raised pulp to high melodrama, had exactly what the anti-communist movie needed: old-fashioned urban realism, for the most part studio-created, and New York in a sweltering summer, with an air of oppressiveness that had less to do with the temperature than the net of entrapment thrown over Candy (Jean Peters), a onetime call girl and now an unwitting courier for Joey, her communist lackey-lover (Richard Kiley). In a densely packed subway car, Candy brushes up against Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark), an experienced pickpocket, who deftly opens her purse and removes her wallet, unaware that it contains the microfilm. McCoy is breezily amoral and proudly apolitical. He is unimpressed when told that by not relinquishing the microfilm (containing a patent application for a chemical formula, about which nothing further is mentioned), he is “as guilty as the traitors that gave Stalin the A-bomb.” It was a weak analogy. McCoy was not in the same league as Klaus Fuchs and Harry Gold. He probably would not even have known who they were. Unlike the communists in Walk East on Beacon, who professed allegiance to the Soviet Union, those in Pickup on South Street are straight out of the hoodlum empire, a mix of lowlifes and mobsters. These so-called agents are go-betweens, devoid of ideology. They are merely in the rackets, and if the latest racket is secret microfilm, they’re in for the long haul.
Fuller structured the plot along classic lines of recognition and reversal, with ignorance yielding to knowledge, knowledge to regeneration—and, in one case, to death. When Candy is summoned before Joey’s associates to explain the loss of the microfilm, she suddenly realizes that she is caught up in an espionage ring. Without saying a word, Peters, a much-underrated actress (and not Fuller’s first choice), adopted a vacuous expression that masked her fear.
Women are expendable in Pickup on South Street. Although they may not get grapefruit pushed in their faces or hot coffee thrown at them, they are still victims of misogyny. It is bad enough that Candy is manhandled by McCoy, who at one point knocks her unconscious after he finds her in his waterfront shack. McCoy’s behavior is ungentlemanly but understandable. Joey, on the other hand, brutalizes Candy, even shooting her in the back (but not fatally). Joey is the ring’s one-man goon squad. Richard Kiley—who that same year showed another facet of his art by playing the romantic lead in the Broadway musical Kismet (1953), in which he introduced “Stranger in Paradise”—had the face of an aesthete, dreamy and vulnerable, which made his sadism even scarier. In the most emotionally devastating scene in the film, he makes himself comfortable in Moe’s furnished room. Moe (Thelma Ritter, in an Oscar-nominated performance) is a police informant who sells neckties for a dollar and is on familiar terms with fences and pickpockets, including McCoy. Moe is literally preparing for the end. For her, it’s not a matter of being “tired of living and scared of dying,” as it is for Joe in Show Boat, but of being tired of living and resigned to dying—if she can be buried in a private cemetery, not in a potter’s field. When Joey demands McCoy’s address, she refuses, adding that she wants nothing to do with commies. Like Candy and McCoy, she is politically naïve: “What do I know about commies? Nothing. I know one thing: I just don’t like them.” Realizing that Joey means business, she faces him, unafraid: “So I don’t get to have the fancy funeral after all. . . . Look, Mister, you’ll be doing me a big favor if you blow my head off.” Joey obliges—off camera, with the sound of gunshot substituting for the visual nobody wanted to see. McCoy provides Moe with her funeral of choice, and then he realigns himself on the right side of the law and finds true love with Candy, who plans to keep him out of trouble.
In his autobiography, Fuller describes the film’s reception. Conservatives found Pickup on South Street pro-communist, perhaps because the three principals were not gung ho patriots in an era when it was “us” or “them.” J. Edgar Hoover loathed the movie. He considered McCoy anti-American, thereby missing the point that McCoy, like Candy and Moe, is oblivious to world affairs. For McCoy, a newspaper’s sole purpose is to distract subway riders while he picks their pockets. Candy knows basic morality. Giving the microfilm to Joey is wrong, and returning it to the authorities is right. And Moe does not even have a radio in her room, just a phonograph on which she plays “Mam’selle,” the only record she seems to own. They are three basically decent human beings on the periphery of New York’s netherworld, too busy trying to make a buck to fret about Korea, the Rosenbergs, or Alger Hiss. Yet when it is time to show their allegiance, they put their lives on the line—in Moe’s case permanently.
In France, where the Communist Party was thriving, Pickup on South Street was retitled Le Port de la Drogue (“Port of Drugs”), with a drugs shipment replacing the microfilm and a corresponding loss of context. Even so, Pickup on South Street won the Bronze Lion at the Venice Film Festival.