AllMovie

The Pawnbroker is a powerful, moody film notable for a great performance by Rod Steiger in the title role and taut direction by Sidney Lumet. Lumet knows his way around New York, and his use of French New Wave techniques gives the film a vibrancy and urgency that complement the story. As Sol Nazerman, Steiger controls the showboating tendencies that have submarined some of his other performances, allowing his character's tortured past to seep quietly rather than boil noisily into his present-day life. Steiger's Nazerman is a cool, distant man slowly drawn back to his past by the challenges of life in contemporary New York. This was one of the first Hollywood films to dramatize the psychological impact of the Nazi concentration camps, while daringly drawing parallels to contemporary conditions of New York City ghetto life. The black-and-white cinematography by Boris Kaufman effectively enhances the somber mood, while the music and eerie lighting offer appropriate emotional punctuation marks for an intense and intelligent study of one man's emotional alienation. Rod Steiger received the film's only Academy Award nomination, though he lost to Lee Marvin's comic turn in Cat Ballou.