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Movies: “The Pawnbroker”

Apr. 20, 1965 - Opening today in the United States is “The Pawnbroker,” a drama film directed by Sidney Lumet, starring Rod Steiger, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Brock Peters, and Jaime Sánchez. The screenplay was an adaptation by Morton S. Fine and David Friedkin from the 1961 novel of the same name by the late Edward Lewis Wallant.

The film is the first produced entirely in the United States to deal with the Nazi death camps from the viewpoint of a survivor. The film and Steiger’s lead performance earned international acclaim last summer at the Berlin Film Festival.

“The Pawnbroker” tells the story of a man whose spiritual “death” in the concentration camps and the loss of his wife and two children there cause him to bury himself in the most dismal location he can find: a slum in upper Manhattan. Lumet told the New York Times in an interview during filming: “The irony of the film is that he finds more life here than anywhere. It’s outside Harlem, in housing projects, office buildings, even the Long Island suburbs, everywhere we show on the screen — that everything is conformist, sterile, dead.”

“The Pawnbroker” is among the first American films to feature a clearly homosexual character, and it is the first film featuring bare breasts to receive Production Code approval.

On a 6–3 vote, the Motion Picture Association of America granted the film an “exception” conditional on “reduction in the length of the scenes which the Production Code Administration found unapprovable.” 

The exception to the code was granted as a “special and unique case” and was described by the New York Times this year as “an unprecedented move that will not, however, set a precedent.” 



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