On a New York subway, a pickpocket (Richard Widmark) palms a wallet and, with it, a valuable piece of microfilm the wallet's owner (Jean Peters) is unwittingly transporting from one Communist agent to another. Thus begins a Cold War spy thriller that is also a gangster film noir, pitting petty thieves and cheap whores against agents provocateurs in a ramshackle New York waterfront setting. Combining Samuel Fuller's intense nationalism with his crime-reporter sensibilities (as evidenced in Underworld U.S.A.), Pickup goes beyond anti-Communism to become an investigation of personal loyalties and ethics on the gutter level. A mood of chilling pessimism verging on anarchism informs the whole film, but it is nowhere more evident than in the central love story, audaciously directed with the abusive Widmark hell-bent on getting back into Peters' purse. Humanity emanates from one unlikely source, the stool-pigeon Moe (Thelma Ritter), who sells neckties and information to the cops but who happens to be an angel in disguise. Actually shot in Los Angeles, the film is a masterpiece of Fuller mise-en-scène and the fluid camera style that anticipates rather than follows the action.