Review of The Pawnbroker (1965) by Mark Z — 12 Apr 2008

This is not a Holocaust movie. This is a movie about the Holocaust survivor, the one who is physiologically very much alive, but has socially has died years ago.

Sol Nazerman is our hero, and he is played by Rod Steiger in what may be his best performance. Steiger's played a good ol' boy Southern police chief, an angry and lecherous Russian in the middle of the Bolshevik Revolution, an English prison psychiatrist, muscle for the mafia, and, in this one, a German-Jewish Holocaust survivor. Steiger is simply one of the most versatile and component movie actors there ever was.

Quincy Jones does the score to this movie. Some, not many, feel the score is inappropriate for a movie about such serious matters. But I like the soundtrack. It fit the time period, the jazzy 60s. It contrasted Sol's inner pain with the joy and frivolity of normal life. Life didn't stop because he did. And this is such a vexing thing to Sol, psychologically. If he can't have joy, those having it are not worth his time.

Edward Lewis Wallant wrote the source material - the novel "The Pawnbroker" and would have been a very celebrated and sought after author today, but he died young, in his 30s from a heart attack, not even living to see his book put to film.

This is one of the best examples of Posttraumatic stress disorder adapted to film, which many Holocaust survivors suffered from, a so-called "survivor's guilt".