When The Shooting Stops

by Ralph Rosenblum

  Before we come to the next flashback, the pawnbroker misses lunch with Miss Birchfield and tells her where to take her petty loneliness and sorrows. Jésus forces him to state something about his beliefs, and Nazerman exclaims angrily, “Money is the whole thing!” after which Jésus reconsiders stealing the five thousand dollars that Nazerman recently locked in his safe. This upsets Jésus’s girl friend, however, a prostitute named Mabel who happens to work for the same crime kingpin who uses Nazerman’s pawnshop as a front to launder money. Trying to divert J£sus from a life of crime, Mabel decides to raise some money herself, beginning by pawning her necklace and turning a trick with the pawnbroker.

  She arrives as Nazerman is closing up for the day and coaxes him back inside. He offers her twenty dollars for the “One hundred percent gold” necklace she presents to him (“Plate” he says), and they haggle a bit. She gets to the point: “You have it in your power to make me a beat-up old woman.” “What makes you say that?” Nazerman asks. “If my boss finds out I’ve been messing around in private, he don’t stand still for nothing like that. If it was to get out to him, he’d make me old before my time.”

  The phone rings. It’s Tessie calling to tell Sol that her father has died. “Papa is dead, what am I going to do?” she pleads, but is unable to get any support from him. “Have him buried. There’s nothing else to do. Nothing. Nothing.” She accuses him of being inhuman; he says he can’t leave the store, and when she complains, he reminds her that the store is where her rent comes from. Again she whimpers, “Papa is dead.” Nazerman snaps, “Well, that’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” and she hangs up.

  By this time Mabel is engrossed in the bewitching rituals of her profession. “I’m good, pawnbroker, good” she says. “I’ll do things you haven’t never even dreamed of before.” Nazerman is so overcome with tedium, he sits on a crate in back of the shop and puts his hand to his forehead, completely unmindful of her offer. “Just twenty dollars more and I’ll make you happy like you never known.” She gently drops the necklace beside him. “I’ll show you how pretty I am,” she says. She looks over her shoulder and hurriedly shifts the suits hanging on an overhead rack to block the view of any passerby. She’s brimming with sexual energy, pulling down her panties from under her dress as she speaks: “You say nothing about this, you hear?” She’s still fearful of what the boss, Rodriguez, would do if he caught her moonlighting. Nazerman still hasn’t raised his eyes. “Don’t tell Rodriguez nothing,” she says emphatically, “nothing.”

  “Rodriguez,” says Nazerman blankly, and then a flash: it’s Steiger in the camp with a German soldier. “Rodriguez, the big man, the boss, the biggest in Harlem,” she says defiantly. Nazerman looks up, his eyes wide, realizing something for the first time. She puts her hand behind her back to reach for her zipper. “Wait a minute,” he says. Flash to his wife, Ruth, in the camp. “You work for Rodriguez?” He had no idea Rodriguez dealt in prostitution.

  She, sassy, unzipping: “Oh, yeah, he gots lots of irons in the fire.” The pawnbroker, another glimpse of the camp. “He’s a powerful man, so it’s better if you don’t tell him a thing.” Again Nazerman’s astonished face, awakened to a new thought, and another flash of memory—it seems to be a prisoner and a German officer. “I got to get me some money? she says, and with that the front of her dress falls. She has a fabulous body, trim to the ribs and sharply curved, with full, flawless breasts. She stands proud, her fingers at her waist, waiting for his response. “Look” she says.

  A flurry: the old pawnbroker. The soldier and the prisoner. Ruth’s withered gaze. Mabel: “Look,” she insists. “That’s better” Ruth again, sitting on a cot. A close-up of her face. Sol in the pawnshop, his eyes wide, his lips curdling. Several successive glimpses of Mabel saying “Look!” her face full of plucky confidence, alternating with Nazer-man lost in another world. “Look!” Mabel says, this time with a tinge of disappointment, and her word is echoed by a German expression uttered in flashback. “Willst du wa sehen?” says the laughing officer to the young Steiger. A long shot of Ruth elsewhere in the camp, sitting impassively, naked from the waist, awaiting her fate.

  The cutting flurry ends on Nazerman’s face as he sits in the shop, overcome by the past. He is racked with emotion, his lower lip drawn in, as he shrinks into the corner of the screen. We now return to the camp. It’s a rainy, dreary day, and soldiers are herding a line of male prisoners alongside a barracks. Behind a fence, trucks are arriving, and gradually we realize that the trucks are unloading women, who are being taken into a nearby building. Steiger reaches the foreground in his gray woolens, the Star of David on his chest. His familiar shaved head, like a large wounded Teddy bear’s, fills the screen. He hugs himself to keep warm and lets the other prisoners pass as he watches jeepfuls of laughing German officers enter the same building as the women prisoners. An officer comes up behind him and says, “Willst du wa sehen?” (“Do you want to see?”). As Steiger stares at the building, the officer repeats himself more aggressively. Steiger, looking like a confused child, fails to respond. The officer, incensed by the lack of response, grabs him viciously by the chest, twists his arm behind his back, and, in a feverish rage, drags him through the mud to the nearby building, the big man scurrying to keep pace as best he can. The officer is cursing furiously as he pushes Steiger toward the camera and finally bursts the gentle giant’s head through a pane of glass, from which it emerges in wincing, pathetic close-up.

  The twisted old pawnbroker sitting in the shop, paralyzed in his darkness. Steiger the prisoner slowly raising his eyes, shattered glass in the edges of the wooden frame, to see what the officer was so intent on showing him. A naked woman is being scrubbed down beneath a shower spigot in a small cubicle. Another cut to Nazerman in the shop, his desolation mounting. In the camp, the camera pans along a row of cubicles. Another naked, defeated woman is lying face down on a bare mattress. Mabel’s soft voice-over: “Look!” Mabel, her magnificent chest, her faltering plea. Nazerman, trembling. “Don’t cost you nothing to look,” she says, her words superimposed on the continuous flashback of women in cubicles, lying on dingy cots. In one room an officer is stretched out beside a naked prisoner, chatting with confident charm and loosening his tie. “Look!” exhorts the sound track.

  And there’s the lovely Ruth, sitting up on the cot, as we saw her in an earlier flash, her breasts bare, just like the Harlem whore. Her face is drawn, her eyes lost. The pawnbroker, closer to crying than we’ve ever seen him. Ruth, as we move in for a close-up, and then Steiger’s big pitiful head in the window, watching helplessly as a Nazi officer enters Ruth’s cubicle and stands before her arms akimbo and legs outstretched, his black silhouette filling the frame and blotting her out.

  Nazerman rises, fidgeting blindly, reaching about the shop for something—anything. The naked Mabel, disbelieving and dismayed, finally realizing that he is beyond her powers. The pawnbroker’s pleading distorted countenance, every molecule in him—from his clenched fists to his rabid eyes—begging, begging for it not to be so. In the midst of his distraction, he finds Mabel’s raincoat and places it over her chest. She looks down, almost ready to weep. Still uninvolved with her, he places a roll of bills in her hand and turns away. The camera moves in on his desolate features, his face contorting horribly and finally emitting an agonized roar. A cut to the lavish home of Rodriguez, an enormous black man played by Brock Peters, and the scene is over.

  We’ve been watching Sol Nazerman for over an hour now. Events have been moving so fast, with such unexpected twists and such riveting revelations, we’ve barely had time to recollect. If we ever hoped for Nazerman’s reform, wished that the man who had suffered such injustice might turn out more appealing, more redeemed in the end, we have abandoned such expectations as trivial. His experiences were so damaging, we suspend our right to judgment. We are torn and unsettled, but too absorbed to think about it. The Steiger of the camp scenes is innocent, with a mournful animal dignity; he is able to arouse our caring.
Steiger the pawnbroker is still a revolting man. But we no longer dare to imagine him any different. We just watch, stunned, as he is, by his memories.

  Now in the final third of the picture, as he tries to alter something about his life, we hang on in disbelief, for he is stepping out beyond any threshold of pain we have imagined. We see him telling Rodriguez off, we see him trying to get help from MARILYN Birchfield, we see him abandoning his strict utilitarian code—and we see each effort to rise out of his pit leaving him sealed in at a deeper level. By the climactic end, we understand what it means to be a prisoner, serving a life sentence in one’s own skin.

  Brock Peters’ Rodriguez is a menacing giant who can terrify an audience with a single flare of his huge nostrils. As he plucks cubes from an ice bucket, he calls Nazerman “Professor,” and in sinister tones tells him what a rare pleasure his visit affords. But when Nazerman says he won’t launder Rodriguez’s money any more if it comes from prostitution, the white-robed Goliath tongue-lashes him, threatens him, manhandles him, and humiliates him, sending him out in worse shape than when he came in.

  We cut from Rodriguez’s apartment to a grouping of strange lights that look like shifting UFOs. Dazed and disheveled, Nazerman enters the frame from the left, crossing in front of the lights in full profile. As Quincy Jones’s haunting cello plays a distorted variation of the Jewish liturgical prayer, Kol Nidre, Steiger seems as close as one can be to the walking dead, a soul lost in limbo. As he trudges across the frame, filling the screen from his chest to his head, the camera focus shifts to the background, and the UFOs now take their natural shape as the oncoming headlights of cars on One Hundred Twenty-fifth Street. It was an important moment in the film, all the more so because a jump cut was used from the apartment to the street, and three intermediary “geographical” shots that Lumet originally intended to use were omitted at my urging.

  Sol Nazerman now begins the all-night walk that eventually takes him to the Lincoln Towers apartment where MARILYN Birchfield lives, and where he finally expresses the words that define him. In the predawn morning, they sit on her terrace and she invites him to talk.

  SOL (subdued, searching): There were memories, that I well, I thought, thought that I had pushed far away from me—and now they keep rushing in. And then there are words, words that I thought that I had kept myself from hearing. And, now, now, they flood my mind. . . . Yah, today is an anniversary.

  MARILYN: What happened?

  SOL: What happened?

  MARILYN: Yes.

  SOL: It’s been a long time since I’ve felt . . .

  MARILYN: Anything.

  SOL: . . . fear. Fear. Fear, that’s what I felt. And then I called you, and . . .

  MARILYN: I’m sorry you are so alone.

  SOL: No, no, you don’t understand.

  MARILYN: What happened?

  SOL (in close profile, Con Edison smokestacks in the distance): I didn’t die. Everything I loved was taken away from me and / did not die. There was nothing I could do. Strange, I could do nothing. No, there was nothing I could do.

  Inside again, she offers her hand. There is a long pause. He doesn’t take it. He walks to the door, and as it shuts behind him the blur of a speeding train fills the screen.

  This is now the beginning of the third major flashback, the one that audiences responded to most profoundly. The blur slows and reveals a train stopping in a noisy subway station. Nazerman gets on. Shaken, unshaven, unkempt, he looks deranged and on the run. He suspiciously studies another passenger, a Jewish man about his own age. The man eyes him back. Nazerman is so disturbed by this, he moves off down the car, looking back a couple of times as he goes. Finally he stands in the center of the car, and the camera scans the other passengers, simulating the sweep of his eyes. Each new set of eyes is staring right back at the camera, at Nazerman, curious about him in some way. Intercut with this panning-camera survey of the subway car are instantaneous memory shots. By now we automatically associate these flashes with Nazerman’s mental processes. And this time they seem to suggest dissolution.

  Nazerman is leaning against a pole in the center of the car. Again, he looks at the other passengers, and as the camera sweeps their faces, we again intercut flashback segments. The flashback material ultimately reveals a packed Nazi freight car bearing camp-bound Jewish families, but the initial flashes are so brief that the content is not immediately clear. And because the memory film is sweeping the Nazi freight car at a speed and angle that suggests a continuation of the subway pan, we are disturbed for a moment without knowing why—a factor that contributed to the unsettling power of this scene.

  The passengers are staring back inquisitively at Nazerman. The first flash is four frames, and each one is progressively longer— growing to eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty, twenty-four, and finally twenty-eight frames, always returning to the searching eyes of the New York subway riders. The last memory cut—one and one-sixth seconds—seems to linger for a long time, enough to make out the suffering faces of the herded, hungry, exhausted people being transported for extermination. When at last we cut back to Nazerman paranoically clinging to his pole, we feel as if we ourselves have been jolted out of a reverie.

  Nazerman turns and flees, anxious to escape this haunted car. We see him through the window of the adjoining car coming our way, staggering and frantic. As he opens the exit door of his car, the train noise increases. He reaches desperately for the second door, opens it, and looks up into the next car. Horror comes over his face—he’s right in the midst of the Nazi freight train again, only this time the camera is not panning and the cut is not a brief one; a full flashback is upon him. Sound editor Jack Fitzstephens charged the onset of horror with the combined shriek of a baby’s cry and a piercing European train whistle.

  The freight car was a three-sided wooden box so packed with extras it could only be photographed from above. Lumet mounted the box on two rocking devices and crew members kept the whole contraption in motion throughout the shooting. We see various shots of the people inside the train, beaten, bedraggled German-Jewish townspeople of the thirties, with their tattered old cloth coats and hats, so suffocatingly close they have to hold their heads up to breathe. Eyes are closed, mouths open; people hanging in place like ghosts. Some of them are the same extras that were in the subway car, although we cannot know this except subliminally. The young Sol Nazerman, exhausted, his head leaning on his chest, a child over his back. Across the car, over the train noise, Ruth screams “Sol!” as she notices the boy slipping off Steiger’s shoulder. He tries to regain his grip on the child, howling in anguish as the boy finally slips to the floor, irretrievable amidst the densely packed, quickly shifting feet.

  We cut to the subway train pulling into a station and Nazerman getting off. The sound track is still laden with haunting screams from the freight train, and he covers his ears to block them out. Intercut are contrasting shots of the boy from the slow-motion picnic and the boy dead on the floor of the train. (Lumet tried to give the impression that the child was trampled to death, but this didn’t work. Instead you assume that he died for some other, unstated reason.)

  The last flashback occurs just before the climax of the movie, and it completes the backward odyssey. Nazerman is in the pawnshop again after his sleepless night. He’s become somewhat unhinged, offering ridiculous sums for the pathetic items his customers bring in to pawn. Rodriguez and a henchman show up and give him a beating for refusing to sign some papers. The only thing that saves him from getting killed is Rodriguez’s awareness that killing is just what he wants. When the big boss pinches Steiger’s face in his powerful black hand, the pawnbroker seems like a pathetic child.

  Shortly afterward, a sweet, bespectacled black man enters the shop, talking gently about the value of the butterfly collection he wishes to pawn. Nazerman isn’t looking or listening, but suddenly he bolts up and puts a large-denomination bill on the table. A four-frame cut of the glass-encased butterflies, a quick close-up of Nazerman, and th
en a long (four-second) dissolve that brings us back to the opening scene of the movie, Steiger and his family at the picnic. The old-fashioned memory device seemed appropriate for this last reverie. We are too emotionally exhausted now to go the other route, and the dissolve suggests the coming end. The music, too, sets us up for the resolution of the story.

  Steiger’s children are running in slow motion through the field of high grasses, reaching for butterflies. Intercut with glimpses of the other members of the family is a new element, German soldiers arriving on two motorcycles with a sidecar. Pieces of the silent picnic scene flit by punctuated regularly by an ominous ding! on the sound track. A momentary flash to the drained and beaten pawnbroker before the young Sol puts the children behind his back in a frightened, protective gesture. A last close-up of the German soldiers looking down on their prey gives way to Jesus’s three hoody friends entering the pawnshop to steal the five thousand dollars that Nazer-man recently took in for laundering.