Sadly Over-hyped

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

She's opportunistic, bad tempered, trampy and possibly murderous. She's Beverly Michaels, whose tough girl image started off when she got into a fist fight with Van Heflin in the 1949 MGM melodrama "East Side, West Side", and as one of the tallest women in Hollywood in the 1950's after Hope Emerson, she's a force to be reckoned with. This story centers on Hugo Haas, a small town whistle stop train maintenance person who, as a widower of two years, longs to find someone to marry but makes the wrong choice when he meets Michaels in a greasy spoon and begins to spend time with her. After she's kicked out of her apartment for not only not paying rent but selling items which belonged to the landlady, Michaels makes a beeline for Haas, and while we don't get to see the events which lead up to a proposal, they are soon married, as evidenced by the presence of a wedding cake on a messy table in Haas's humble cabin right after the ceremony. She's grumbling from the start, and when a young acquaintance (Allan Nixon) of Haas's stops by, it's apparent that she's in the mood to cheat on her new hubby, and maybe even arrange for his accidental death, falling over a cliff near the whistle stop he takes care of.A mesmerizing and fun piece of pulp trash, "Pickup" makes no bones about the fact from the moment you see her that Michaels is no good. She's one of those entitled broads that thinks that she can use her womanly wiles to get a man, even if its one she personally abhors. At certain times, there are hints that deep down, she cares for him in a fatherly like way, but there's obviously no love there. When he suddenly loses his hearing after having some sort of recurring seizure, Michaels realizes that she's trapped in a loveless marriage with a sick old man, and decides to manipulate Nixon into doing her bidding to get rid of him. But a sudden return of his hearing causes Haas to learn the truth about his wife, and he brilliantly leads her and Nixon on in believing that he's still deaf, even in one scene where she insults him with laughter directly to his face, and he laughs back, even though he knows exactly what she's saying. There are some great photographic effects when Haas has his seizures and when he learns the truth about what is going on. As a viewer of their unfixable situation, the audience gets to see through Haas's point of view the torment he faces, and it's absolutely riveting,Even so, there's an element of unbelievability that Haas could be so naive as to not see through Michaels' machinations, especially with old pal Howard Chamberlain looking in and giving his own warnings, and simply the obnoxious way that Michaels acts when she can't get her own way. But the performances of Haas and Michaels are amazing, especially Haas who brilliantly acts simply by staring off into space and revealing through his eyes how let down he feels, especially realizing what a complete fool he is. Chamberlain, too, is outstanding, reminding me of an older John Qualen. This is a great example of how a simple man can be pulled in over his head, like Edward G. Robinson in "The Woman in the Window" and the cuckholded husbands of Barbara Stanwyck and Lana Turner in both "Double Indemnity" and "The Postman Always Rings Twice". Also standing out in a small role as Michaels' friend is Jo-Carroll Dennison. It's nice to read that "bad girl" Michaels had a happy and normal life after leaving the movies, unlike a similar 1950's vixen, Barbara Payton, whom I often mistook for Michaels, and vice versa. I won't make that mistake again.

Betty (Beverly Michaels) is a cheap dame down on her luck. When she finds herself broke and homeless, she decides very impulsively to marry a very ordinary looking older man, Hunky Horak (Hugo Haas). There certainly is no love involved in her part...she just knows this hard-working man has some money. Soon, this tramp is bored. After all, Hunky is a relatively dull guy and they're living in the middle of no where. To make things worse, Hunky loses his hearing and she is not about to take care of any guy with a disability. Unknown to her, he's in a traffic accident and regains his hearing. But instead of telling Betty, he keeps it to himself because he overhears her saying a lot of awful things about wanting to divorce him and how she never loved him in the first place! She also flirts again and again with Hunky's supposed friend...and all the time, Hunky just listens and absorbs it all and shows no sign that he understands her hellish comments. The audience just knows that sooner or later, Hunky is going to burst...but what will he do and when?!In many ways, this film plays like a reworking of "The Postman Always Rings Twice"...except that HE knows that's coming and he's at a huge advantage instead of the poor sucker in "The Postman". Fortunately, despite the very low budget of "Pickup" and the relatively unknown actors, it works well because of decent writing, direction and wonderful acting by Beverly Michaels. She's just awful...and in a great femme fatale way and does a dandy job in making this character thoroughly despicable. She is much more coarse and nasty than Lana Turner in the other film...delightfully so. As for the ending, it caught me off guard and the husband didn't do at all what I expected. Some might be disappointed but it was very entertaining and worth seeing.

The reviewer who said "Citizen Kane it ain't" got it right. This is lowbrow stuff to be sure, but for what it is, Haas demonstrates a surprisingly keen eye for both dialogue and characterization, two things supremely lacking in the cheaper and lesser BAIT produced a few years later. Best of all, this is a highly entertaining ride, with a solid and credible performance by Haas as the pigeon who all but begs for a plucking until he sees the light (or rather hears the dark) when he overhears the plotting and venomous bile directed at him by his conniving and venal wife, who believes him to be deaf.Trumping all however is the bravura dominatrixesque performance of Ms. Michaels as the throaty pointy-bra'ed femme fatale. Here's one of the few broads I've ever come across who might be able to actually compete with Ann Savage's mouthy and devouring DETOUR chippie for supremacy over a castrated male race. And leave the male species begging for more.Also in the movie's favor is a reasonably tight storyline which features some nice twists and reveals with great gusto the true depths of treachery to which Michaels gleefully stoops to get her $7300 out of Haas. Again, this isn't DOUBLE INDEMNITY and it certainly isn't Shakespeare but it's charmingly pulpy and has an agreeably creamy evil nougat centre.

Citizen Kane it ain't, but Pickup isn't nearly as bad as one might think. Actor-director Hugo Haas deserves better, and I hope I can help the poor man (long departed) out. Haas,--no, I won't go into his career and background--let's just say the man had the reputation for being an okay actor, but as a director he was considered a sort of Central European version of Ed Wood. Pickup is about an older man, played by Haas, whose life is made a wreck of and nearly ruined by a toothy, gum-checking but withal irresistible blonde, portrayed by the unforgettable Beverly Michaels. The girl is, to be as genteel as possible, a worthless tramp, and nasty and stupid in the bargain. She plays with her adoring and naive lover like a cat with a mouse, and has an affair with a much younger man on the side. Amazingly, no one is murdered in the course of this film, which is actually at times quite sweet. Look, every novelist cannot write The Brothers Karamazov and every composer cannot write the Eroica, so why put down poor Mr. Haas whose only sin as an artist that I can tell is that is that he isn't Orson Welles. The man had a heart and soul, and this comes through in many scenes. He understands cruelty, too, and the woman in this film is, for all the melodrama, a not innacurate portrait of a certain kind of low-down broad who, if one were to show her videotapes of her inflicting her standard dose of pain on whoever the poor dope fool enough to get involved with her at the moment is, would shrug, light a cigarette and say, "Well, he was asking for it, wasn't he?". I'm not too sure about the character Mr. Haas plays in this film, but there is a kernel of truth in the mean little tale he tells; tacky though it may be, there's life in it nonetheless, which is good enough for me.