On the New York subway, a pickpocket steals a young woman's wallet, and with it a valuable piece of microfilm she is unknowingly carrying from one Communist agent to another. The police, watching her, are slow to catch him, and so begins a spy thriller that is really a gangster film noir, “a political film in the sense that it emanates from its author's intense nationalism.... however, it bears the imprint of Fuller's sensibility, that of the crime reporter” (Colin McArthur).
“You want mise-en-scène? Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street has more mise-en-scène than anything you've ever seen. The seamy New York waterfront provides a perfect simulacrum of Fuller's gutter universe, with its two-buck whores, gamblers, and pickpockets living in wooden shacks and barges on the edge of the island.... Richard Widmark makes a great pickpocket...and the divine Thelma Ritter, as a tough, saintly stool pigeon, shines....” (Michael Goodwin/Naomi Wise)