“Her name was Mary Richards, but the police reporters changed it to ‘Baby Face Mary' when she was convicted... Pick Up is a somewhat violent inquiry into Mary's history after she leaves prison, falls in love with a cab driver (George Raft) and on an unhappy day is confronted with that nemesis of motion picture heroines--the scarlet past...” (New York Times)
“When Miss Sidney was invited to attend a screening of Pick Up,” William K. Everson writes, “her first reaction was one of surprise: since it never seems to surface on t.v., she felt it had been lost or (hopefully) destroyed. She added that while she had to make it, she certainly didn't have to see it. From such an opening onslaught, obviously the film has nowhere else to go but UP, and I think you may be pleasantly surprised by it -- and that Miss Sidney would have been too. Admittedly it's interesting today at least partially from an academic stance, as an accidental foreruner of the quite similar You and Me that Sidney and Raft made for Fritz Lang some five years later. But even so, I can think of a number of Sidney vehicles that survive the years less sturdily... Pick Up starts off extremely well, with a powerful, low-key opening reel which has an astonishing affinity with Lang's later work. Thereafter it softens itself a little and goes in more sentimental directions than expected, though since this is very much of a pre-Code film, it's sentiment with guts. A highlight, and an unexpected one, is the dynamic appearance of Lillian Bond, always an interesting and intelligent player, but never as delightfully uninhibited as here, playing a small-town hell-raiser with a penchant for bizarre, wild parties. Sidney's performance is a very good one, the more so since she hadn't been so heavily typed in this kind of role at that time...”