Word: pickup
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...Pickup (Hugo Haas; Columbia] introduces Hollywood's most promising new moviemaker since Producer Stanley (Champion) Kramer. The film, a simple drama with a high entertainment return on the $83,000 it cost to make, was produced, directed and co-scripted by Czech-born Hugo Haas, 49, who also plays the leading role...
...Pickup is a story of an amiable, naive widower (well played by Actor Haas) living out a lonely middle age at a dreary outpost along the railroad tracks. On a visit to a carnival to buy a dog, he meets a calculating blonde floozy (Beverly Michaels), who soon has him at the end of her leash. Unable to resist his $7,000 bank account, she marries him. Then, showing her contempt as broadly as she chews her gum, she waits around for a chance to get rid of her husband and get her hands on his bank account...
Director Haas makes imaginative use of his camera and sound track to bring his story to life. And with Pickup's unromantic, middle-aged hero (a role cut to the measure of France's late Raimu), its sense of character, its tolerance of human frailty and its unglamorous backgrounds, he has produced a picture that is a far cry from the usual Hollywood product...
...jump ahead of the Germans, he made his way to the U.S. Between a wartime job as an OWI broadcaster and stints on the stage in New York and Chicago, he learned enough English to get character roles in Hollywood. With German-born Scripter Arnold Phillips, he prepared the Pickup scenario from a Czech novel, then trudged around to independent producers trying to sell it. "They all said 'fine,' but they all wanted to rewrite it." So Haas put up his life savings ($20,000), borrowed money from friends and shot the picture himself in ten days last...
...ceasefire, however, will certainly hit one soft spot in the economy: retail trade. Merchants who have been depending on a stepped-up arms program to pinch supplies and clear out their overloaded shelves, now will probably be overloaded for months, or, as some say optimistically, "till the pickup in the fall." Retail sales, which have been unimpressive for some time, last week were 2% below 1950. Many prices were due to drop. Last week St. Louis' Brown Shoe Co., Inc., one of the biggest U.S. shoe manufacturers, cut prices 9%, and other shoemakers got in step...