Hollywood Codebreakers: ‘The Pawnbroker’ Examines Trauma Through Nudity
Sidney Lumet had a problem with his leading man. The director had already worked with Rod Steiger prior to The Pawnbroker, and thought he was all wrong for the part of Sol Nazerman, a haunted Holocaust survivor living in 1960s Harlem. “That was my one hesitation in taking [the movie],” Lumet told film historian Mark Harris. “I knew Rod. We had worked together in live television, and I liked his work. But I felt he was a rather tasteless actor — awfully talented, but completely tasteless in his choices.”
He likened Steiger to a news pundit.
“The New York Post used to have a columnist named Max Lerner, a really cantankerous fool,” Lumet continued. “A friend of mine, the scenic designer Boris Aronson, was once asked why he didn’t like Lerner. And he said, ‘For five cents, he gives you too much.’ I felt that way about Rod.”
But as production wore on, Lumet was pleasantly surprised. He became an enthusiastic fan of Steiger’s performance, just like the rest of the moviegoing public. The Pawnbroker received universal praise in 1965 for its honest depiction of Nazi concentration camps and the trauma that lingered with survivors well after the war. But it had a bumpy release due to its disturbing flashback sequences. The PCA initially denied the movie a seal over one such scene depicting two pairs of bare breasts, an obvious violation of the Code. On appeal, the Pawnbroker producers were able to reverse the ruling by leaning on their obvious pedigree. The censors swore it was a special, one-time-only exception, but as Harris puts it, the decision was “the first of a series of injuries to the Production Code that would prove fatal” in three short years.
The Pawnbroker was an indie production with few matinee names. Despite a decade of film work, Steiger was struggling to make an impression in the 1960s, while his costar Jaime Sanchez had appeared in just one movie. The production team was similarly scrappy. Roger Lewis, a former publicity man for United Artists, had bought the rights to Edward Lewis Wallant book’s The Pawnbroker, hoping to turn the grim survivor’s story into a studio film. When the studio support didn’t come, he and his partner Philip Langner called on Ely Landau, a producer best known for his “Play of the Week” television series. The team assembled a crew to shoot on location in New York City over nine weeks in 1963. Director Arthur Hiller was fired, and replaced with Lumet, before filming commenced.
Once it did, the production attracted a consistent crowd of spectators. The New York Times noted onlookers “frequently numbering in the hundreds,” near the set in Spanish Harlem, marveling at the “polite demeanor” of the residents. (This was, as the paper put it, a “normally boisterous” neighborhood.) “I think it’s because the civil rights talk is in the air,” Lumet said. “The people who live here know the spotlight is on them, and I think everybody is making a special effort to behave responsibly to justify it.” The Times wasn’t the only paper to link The Pawnbroker — with its black and Latino supporting cast, Quincy Jones score, and “realistic” take on Harlem — to the growing civil rights movement. Variety ran a piece that same month on Robert Puello, the movie’s second assistant cameraman. Puello was one of only five black cameramen in the New York chapter of IATSE, the largest union representing technicians and stagehands. While Variety framed his work on The Pawnbroker as a breakthrough in crew diversity, Puello himself harbored no illusions about his future. “We got in through a fluke and without it we surely wouldn’t have gotten this far,” he told the paper. “I believe that there is hope if more films are made about colored citizens. Maybe then they won’t be so afraid about it rubbing off.”
Puello’s pessimism was right in line with The Pawnbroker, a bleak film about a thoroughly broken man. Sol Nazerman lost everything during the war — his academic career, his idyllic German home, and his wife and young children. After surviving the concentration camps, he relocated to New York, where he now drifts wordlessly through life, avoiding relationships and any conversations that aren’t transactional. The only people he tolerates are his pawnshop assistant Jesus Ortiz (Sanchez), his sort-of girlfriend Tessie (Marketa Kimbrell), and his dead wife’s sister Bertha (Nancy R. Pollock) — and even to them, he’s still distant or outright cruel. “Sol, when you talk like that, you’re not human,” Tessie says when he blandly reacts to her father’s death. Though Sol won’t discuss his past, it follows him everywhere through flashbacks. Shots of Sol walking home from work are cut with quick snippets of camp prisoners running over a barbed wire fence. When a pregnant woman enters the shop to pawn a ring, Sol remembers a sea of hands, stretched and waiting for Nazi officers to remove their jewelry.
But the most controversial scene involves Jesus’s girlfriend (Thelma Oliver), a nameless black sex worker trying to save money for their future. Hoping to get an extra $20 out of Sol for her locket, she removes the top of her dress, exposing her breasts. “Look,” she says. But all Sol can see is his wife, also bare chested, sitting on a bed in the concentration camp. He remembers a Nazi officer smashing his head through a window, forcing him to watch as other Nazis groped her in the shower, laughing uproariously. He also remembers these men standing over her prone naked body and sitting next to her on a bed, implying his wife was raped multiple times at the camp. Sol shakes as the memories rush back, suddenly standing to cover Jesus’s girlfriend with a coat. After she leaves, he lets out a muffled scream.
It’s a powerful scene that no reasonable person could find titillating, but it was still considered a breach of Code. “Indecent or undue exposure” as well as “complete nudity” was forbidden under the “Costumes” clause, which insisted that “the effect of the nude or semi-nude body on the normal individual must be taken into consideration.” Landau was convinced The Pawnbroker could overcome this hurdle due to its artistic quality, but as Variety wrote at the time, “no nudity has got by the Code so far.” Geoffrey Shurlock warned the producer that nude scenes “call forth a great amount of protest from pressure groups,” hinting that the Legion of Decency would condemn it. Still Landau shouldered on. So when the movie screened for the PCA in late 1964, Shurlock rejected it, calling the nude sequence and a scene of Jesus and his girlfriend in bed “unacceptably sex suggestive and lustful.”
Landau appealed the decision to the MPAA board, which met in the spring of 1965 to consider the movie’s fate. “The board is considering an exception to the Code for this picture,” the group said in an official statement. “Final decision will be made at a later date.” After a meeting that stretched over four and a half hours, the MPAA reached a verdict. The Pawnbroker could have a seal, but the nudity clause of the Code wasn’t going anywhere. “The sole exemption granted ‘The Pawnbroker’ is to be viewed as a special and unique case, and in no way as one setting a precedent,” Ralph Hetzel, the acting president of the MPAA, told reporters. The board could appreciate the film’s particular merits, but, Hetzel emphasized, the screen was still “closed for the prurient and salacious.”
Despite all that pontificating, The Pawnbroker did set a precedent. The Legion of Decency condemned it, as Shurlock suspected, but the movie faced few penalties for its nudity. Both the Kansas and Milwaukee censor boards initially demanded cuts, then changed their minds. Critics showered the movie with glowing reviews, both in its general release and at the Berlin Film Festival, where The Pawnbroker was the U.S. submission. Steiger won Best Actor there, though he lost in the same category at the Oscars to Lee Marvin for Cat Ballou.
The Pawnbroker’s rosy reception proved it was possible to make a successful American movie with nudity, no matter what Ralph Hetzel said. His word meant little anyway. The man was a temporary replacement for longtime MPAA chief Eric Johnston, who had died in 1963. A more permanent successor would arrive in 1966, in the form of White House aide Jack Valenti. During his tenure, Valenti would usher in the long-awaited movie ratings system, killing the PCA once and for all.
But another film would help get it there. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? shattered old Code notions of decency with its foul, filthy dialogue. The PCA picked over every “bastard,” “son of a bitch,” and “angel tits,” but it was still unable to suppress playwright Edward Albee’s gleefully profane language. Just like The Pawnbroker, the film was able to clinch a “special exemption” that was looking a lot less special as the PCA continued to hand them out. We’ll discuss Liz Taylor and Richard Burton’s feuding characters next week on Hollywood Codebreakers.
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