Jan Horak is a middle-aged railroad dispatcher stationed at a forsaken spot in the desert, within driving distance of the nearest town. A widower, he has saved his money and goes to town to buy a dog, meets Betty, a flashy blonde who gains his confidence and marries him to acquire his $7,000 "fortune."
Hlídač č. 47, Zastávka 47
USANR
USA
“Oh, baby, I’m so happy I’ve found you.”
What happens if you take The Blue Angel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, a hot blonde, and lovely b&w cinematography and stir with a low budget for 78 minutes? You get Hugo Haas’s Pickup.
Lonely widower Jan Horak (Haas) falls for cheap floozy Betty (Beverly Michaels), and who could blame him? She marries him for his money, and he thinks they’re happy until he discovers how duplicitous she really is. What’s a fella to do? I think I smell something noir.
Pickup is the first of fourteen similar B-movies directed by Haas, who had made six earlier films in Czechoslovakia. Haas does a lot with a small cast and a few sets.…
After having fled the Nazis and spent more than a decade as an actor in Hollywood, Czech emigre Hugo Haas set up his own production company and made his American debut as a writer/director (he'd previously directed several films in his native country) with Pickup in 1951. Proudly a b picture in its cast and budget, Pickup is a nasty little noir made of suspense and inevitability, and it's awesome.
Beverly Michaels stars as Betty, a small time hustler on the make, so desperate for a place to live that she marries the much older Hunky, a good-hearted railroad worker played by Haas himself, because he's a)kind, and b)has a house. When Hunky suddenly goes deaf, things get complicated and,…
I like my noirs exactly the way George Costanza likes his chocolate eclairs, out of the trash..
"Never fails; Young, handsome, broke."
There is a certain sense of forlornness and desolation present in this film that usually accompanies only the small, forgotten parts of America. Such a deliberately detached view of the US could only come from a foreigner. And it did.
Alongside its remarkle ambiance, Pickup comes with a pulpy, twisting narrative that, luckily, diverges from its Postman Always Rings Twice premise by putting the (almost sole) focus on Jan Horak (Hugo Haas), the old, lonely sap who is to be defrauded by desperate, cold drifter Betty (Beverly Michaels) and her lover. Playing a (supposedly) deaf character suits the former silent actor Haas unsurprisingly well. There is even a scene, one where he awakens after a…
My first Noirvember 2023 film was a blast.
Hugo Haas, the film's director, plays Hunky, a widowed railroad employee who lives alone on the outskirts of town. He decides it's time to get out again and heads to the local carnival where Betty, (Beverly Michaels) a statuesque gal who has caught the eye of every man there, decides to con him in a small way. It doesn't really work but now the two have met and that drives the rest of the plot.
I love how Haas plays Hunky. I suppose he's a fool for falling for Betty, but Haas doesn't play him that way. Nor does he make him a lech. Hunky thinks Betty likes what he likes, wants…
Cinema tends to smooth the creases of adapted fiction, even the seedily scuffed. Less so Pickup.
With limited means and containable ideas, Writer/Producer/Director Hugo Haas gamely faces the gutter more-or-less head-on with a relish for the tawdrily tabloid (the raw snark of Beverly Michaels's Betty) albeit sentimentalised with a penchant for hobos and puppies.
Haas's offscreen story is much the more interesting: The American story of the immigrant underdog doing it his way, which is the even more American story of doing it the pulpy way. His self-financed melodramas following the success of this film tend to the image of the small dark town with a lot of dusty space, where knock-off genre furniture satisfyingly arranges in asymmetrical patterns. This postman rang a few times...
B-movie to the core, with an A-movie premise and performance, by Hugo Haas and Howland Chamberlain. Beverly Michaels, though quite the site, was all sorts of awful both in terms of her character and performance. Borderline cringe-worthy every time she opened her mouth. Hunky and the Professor do most of the lifting in this, and as a result, it’s definitely worth the watch.
At Home - PLEX
Hugo Haas is one of those directors that I often think about when NYC arthouse theaters are doing retrospectives of under or over appreciated directors. Haas was a Czech silent film actor turned sound director before fleeing Europe for Hollywood at the start of WWII. His Hollywood auteur career is strictly low-budget B-film poverty row features touching on similar themes of a bad girl (usually blonde) setting a trap for an aloof man.
In PICKUP Haas himself plays a Czech immigrant train station worker who on his way to purchase a puppy becomes the prey of Beverly Michaels who wants to show a girlfriend she can trick the lonely Haas into anything, she succeeds and the…
Linear B with no trappings: bad girl Beverly Michaels (Betty) settles for gentlemanly railroad roadmaster Hugo Haas (Hunky) but can’t get Allan Nixon (Steve) to get rid of him so walks out. The End.
Haas is to noir what Boetticher is to westerns. Maybe.
My first Haas film and I see a lot of potential here.
Eco do Pecado estreava há 70 anos nos EUA.
pequeno noir bacana, com uma das maiores bad bitches do gênero (o que não é pouca coisa), mas o final é muito corrido e avacalhado.
TVRip no MakingOff.
A solid movie about a guy who realizes that his young wife is up to film noir shenanigans. Hugo Haas is affable in the main role and Beverly Michaels is fun as a no-nonsense femme fatale (there's some wildly implausible stuff in the second half, but the actors mostly sell it); otherwise, the film is fairly unspectacular as far as these types of movies go, but it gets the job done.
Middle-aged widower, Jan 'Hunky' Horak (Hugo Haas) takes a rare day off from his railroad job, and drives into town to visit the funfair. Wandering around, he sets eyes on Betty (Beverly Michaels)... a beautiful young blonde with a penchant for riding carousel horses side-saddle. Gams a-dangling, Betty has gathered quite a group of admirers, which is fine by her. See Betty, and her gal pal Irma, don't much care for an honest day's work; they'd much rather dole out a little bit of sugar in exchange for a nice meal and some help with their always overdue rent. Betty sizes up Hunky (I should clarify that the nickname refers to the fact he's Hungarian, not an actual hunk), and…
