What a freaking movie. So many twists and turns. Absolutely intense from start to finish.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Getting back into watching TV shows, (with the jet-black BBC Comedy series Fleabag being the most recent great discovery)I decided to take a look at the shows on Netflix UK.As I checked up on the TV section,I stumbled on a movie that I had received high praise in a review on IMDb's Film Noir board, which led to me getting ready to trade things in with the pawnbroker.The plot:Since seeing the rest of his family killed in a concentration camp, Sol Nazerman (the only member of the family to not be killed in the camp) has closed himself off to the rest of the world,with the brief glimpses to the numbers on his arm bringing memories back to Nazerman that he tries to keep repressed. Working in a pawn shop used by gangster Rodriguez as a front for money laundering, Nazerman spends each day meeting the "Rejects" and "Scum" of society.Joining the pawnbrokers, Jesus Ortiz looks up to Nazerman,but is hurt by the fist Nazerman breaks his attempt at friendship with. As local social worker Marilyn Birchfield attempts to get Nazerman to let his guard down a bit, Ortiz decides to break the pawnbroker.View on the film:Mostly filmed at real locations (including a pawnshop at 1642 Park Avenue) director Sidney Lumet (who took over after Arthur Hiller got sacked,and Stanley Kubrick/Karel Reisz and Franco Zeffirelli all turned the project down) and cinematographer Boris Kaufman give the title an extraordinary grubby Film Noir atmosphere,with jagged wide track shots treading on all the rot and decay lining Nazerman's cold existence. Backed by the hard Funk of Quincy Jones,Lumet,Kaufman and editor Ralph Rosenblum display a masterful sense of collaboration. Digging into Nazerman's repressed memories,Lumet and Rosenblum's pin-sharp editing gradually brings the fragmented horrors that Nazerman faced into light,as the barrier put at the front of the shop places Nazerman in his self-imposed prison.Showing that he could do a role that Lumet was hoping to give to James Mason or Groucho Marx (!),Rod Steiger gives an incredible performance as Nazerman. Withholding everything apart from pure Film Noir vile for those he sees as the scum of society, Steiger incredibly keeps a vice like grip on Nazerman's repressed memories,which are treated with great psychological care by Steiger,whose wall of nihilism is built by Nazerman making all his other emotions dead to the world. Joined by some Blaxploitation jiving from Brock Peters smooth Rodriguez and the powerfully wounded Jaime Sánchez's take on Jesus Ortiz, Geraldine Fitzgerald gives a dazzling performance as Marilyn Birchfield,by stepping away from what could be big, emotional scenes,to instead give Birchfield's meetings with Nazerman a quiet, heartfelt sincerity.Breaking the Production Code in bringing Edward Lewis Wallant's book to the screen,the screenplay by Morton S. Fine & David Friedkin superbly walks into the Film Noir wilderness of Nazerman's life with brittle dialogue that spills the coldness Nazerman views society in across the screen. Taking the rather unique decision to look at the Holocaust in a non-War movie,the writers study the lingering after effects of the atrocity on Nazerman,whose brief releasing of the withheld memories leads to Nazerman finally feeling the decades of emotions he has been keeping on the shelves of the pawnbrokers.

Rod Steiger is under the lens in this classic study of a man zombified by life events. Adjusting to losing family, country and way of life proves impossible even after 25 years. He grudgingly supports his brother's family to expiate the gnawing acid guilt of survival. The black and white stark cinematography, weather and drudgery of pawnbroking work combine to infuse a suffocating dead- end atmosphere. The bleak city neighborhood and down at luck faces of the crowded inhabitants are a continuation of the concentration camp. The walk- in wounded seeping into the shop with hard-life stories, are dealt summarily by the walking dead Scrooge shop-owner. Despite this they still try again - they have not been beaten by the system. Yet. We build up some hope that his over enthusiastic Latino assistant stands a chance of scratching the surface but we get suddenly disappointed when his modest dreams get cruelly rebuffed. A lonely woman reaches out but is repeatedly and very coldly spurned. His second wife suffers and hopes but is left clutching at empty air. The pimp (an excellent Brock Peters) reads him too well. He expertly carries on where the Nazi's left off. There is no let up for him. He is condemned to suffer all his life in a concentration camp. How much of it is self- imposed? He asks for a release in death, and even that is denied him. The death of his assistant takes time to jolt feelings of excruciating agony from him. He does open his mouth but no sounds come out. We are not sure what the emotion actually is however. The shocking realization that he had cruelly let down a person that had looked up to him - and that person has just given up his life for him. He suddenly and desperately wants to start feeling something, anything again. Even pain is better than nothingness. Another explanation is that he wants to kill himself, but only manages to hurt himself. It feels too little, too late. Open to interpretations like all the best endings. Definitely not a feel good film

The Pawnbroker stands as an example of Rod Steiger's best work on film. He plays Sol Nazerman, a holocaust survivor who now works in a pawnshop in Harlem where he pushes himself through his daily routine and seems completely devoid of all color and life and personality. As the movie opens we see a younger, happier man who was a professor in Germany with a beautiful wife who loved him and children who adored him. But it isn't long before the Nazi death machine comes steamrolling in and takes his family away. We see very little of Sol's experiences in the camps, only fleeting glances, flashes of memory and suggestions of what he has experienced.We meet him years later working in his Harlem pawnshop, offering a cold and impersonal manner as customers bring in their trinkets to pawn, "Two dollars" he says to nearly everyone without making eye contact. He has no interest in other human beings, no interest in those who are lonely and come by his shop to pawn their goods or just for a friendly chat. His stature is of a man drained of all humanity, drained of all personality. His hair is white, his skin is pale and his approach to his fellow man comes in the form of cold, impersonal detachment. He is a living ghost, drained of, all the things that make life worth living. When the movie is over, we understand very little about his experience except that we have only scratched the surface of the horror he has experienced.This is one of the best films ever made about the connective power of memory. There are moments when Sol will see something and a flash of a memory will occur. He sees a man being beaten by a fence and he remembers a fellow prisoner in the camp who was killed when trying to escape. A woman attempts to pawn her wedding ring and he remembers the women of the camp with their hands up as the camp commandant takes their rings. A prostitute comes by and strips down in order to offer him sex and he remembers horribly what became of his wife. As he walks home, we see an incredible series of images that are similar to the camps, the fences, stacks of shoes in a store front, all daily reminders of his past as he keeps his eyes to the ground.Sol's only remaining relative is his sister Bertha (Nancy Pollock). She is married to a man who detests her Jewish son but loves her American daughter. At the same time, he cares for Tessie, the widow of his best friend and her father Mendel who is on his deathbed. All of these people are supported by the money from the pawnshop. Distancing himself from the world is not as easy as he had hoped. The people who come in and out of his pawnshop are of little significance to Sol, but he deals with them, sometimes absently, sometimes with a buried frustration. He deals with old people who are lonely and looking for someone their own age to chat with. He deals with a junkie who comes in twitching and nervous as he tries to pawn a radio. He deals with charity cases who come by asking for donations. He cannot escape being a victim, as he deals with a street gang led by a slick huckster who brings items that are most likely stolen. Plus he is the victim of the local mobster (Brock Peters) who uses his place as a front. But out of this cold indifference, there are those who try to pierce his unfeeling skin.First is Jesus (Jaime Sánchez), a Latino street kid who promises his mother that he is finished with his life of petty crime and finds Sol through a newspaper ad. His demeanor likely represents the joy, rapture and optimism that Sol once exhibited. He is young, exuberant and sees a future as an entrepreneur. He becomes an eager student of Nazerman, wanting to learn from his elder but finding that the old man has no interest in him or his desire to learn. Asking the old man about his beliefs, he receives a cold and indifferent answer: "Money." The other soul who tries to reach him is the sweet Marilyn Birchfield (Geraldine Fitzgerald) who commits the sin of asking him to lunch. This turns out to be the humanitarian gesture that he cannot refuse, though he doesn't go with good graces. In the park, she talks to him and attempts to break through his cold indifference but he isn't interested in her care.What Sol represents, I think, are the years of pent up rage, brought on by the years spent in the concentration camp enduring the inability to deal emotionally with what happened. He chooses to dehumanize himself so that the pain won't consume him. He is wracked with guilt that he survived while millions perished, including those closest to him. He maintains his life, spending eight hours a day in his shop behind a cage, spaced away from the world that constantly intrudes upon him. There is an extraordinary moment when he receives a phone call that Mendel has died and he coldly informs Tessie, "Bury him, when someone dies you bury them." Contrast that with another death that occurs at the film's end, one that breaks Sol's cold demeanor. He blames himself, not just for this but for so much blood on his hands. This is where we arrive at Steiger's famous "Silent Scream" in which he wants to cry out but cannot. There's something dead in Sol that will never be revived. I am so glad the movie doesn't end with a conventional happy ending, it ends on a note that reminds us that his pain will go on but just for a moment because the emotional confinement has been broken.

A Sidney Lumet masterpiece. Perfectly rendered Quincy Jones musical score, and a gritty, haunting tale of loss and redemption. Outstanding performances from esteemed actors Brock Peters, Raymond St.Jaques, and Juano Hernendez. Perhaps, one of Rod Steigers most contained and perfectly wrought characterizations. The bleakness of his performance, and the tension that builds as life crumbles his fragile barricades, is almost unbearable in it's sustained intensity. Everything comes together in this film. Cinematography, music, seamless acting and a powerful storyline, that leaves Sol Nazermans epiphany like an arrow through the heart.