GamerTab That was an excellent one.

Brendon Jones It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Ariella Broughton It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Kaelan Mccaffrey Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

XhcnoirX Railroad worker and widower Hugo Haas is looking for a new companion after his dog died. But instead of a new dog, he finds golddigger Beverly Michaels. When she discovers he has thousands of dollars in a savings account, she digs her fangs deep into him and they get married. When Haas loses his hearing all of a sudden, and early retirement seems imminent, things are looking up for Michaels, who's unable to get to the money, and unhappy living in a remote house next to railroad tracks. She turns her female attention to fellow railroad worker Allan Nixon, to get him to push Haas off a cliff to his death, which seems to be the only way to get to the money. What they don't know however is that Haas has regained his hearing.Haas ('Bait', 'Hit And Run') does not have the best reputation as a director/actor, but he's really not that bad, he's just not that good either. Maybe I'm too nice tho, but there is something likable about Haas, as if he almost cannot contain his enthusiasm for his projects. And truth be told, he's quite good here as the naive and friendly widower. His wife at the time, Michaels ('Blonde Bait'), is not exactly the best actress, but she knows how to effectively use her abilities here. She brings the same lurid sexiness to the table as his future muse Cleo Moore, and it fits the character to a tee. Nixon is simply not that good, which might explain why his career never really went anywhere (tho apparently his off-screen behavior didn't exactly help either).Haas and experienced B-movie DoP Paul Ivano ('Black Angel', 'The Suspect') do some pretty decent work behind the camera, even tho visually the movie isn't all that striking. But it's a really competently made movie that doesn't have any dragging parts. In fact, the main negative for me was the sudden and overly sappy/happy ending, which felt out of place. Thankfully that was only a few minutes of an otherwise decent watch. Solid stuff overall tho. 7/10

kapelusznik18 ***SPOILERS*** 50 year old railroad train dispatcher Jan "Hunky" Horak, Hugo Hass, had just lost his beloved dog "Nippy" who was tragically killed in a hit & run accident outside his house. With the help of his hobo friend "The Professor", Howland Chamberlain, Jan goes into town looking to buy a puppy and runs into sexy and leggy Betty, Beverly Michaels, who's on the balls of her a** looking to get some money to pay her back rent before she's thrown, together with her room--mate Irma(Jo-Carroll Dannison), out on the street. Taking advantage of the old guys loneliness and depression over the death of his dog "Nippy" Betty gets Jan to not only give her a a roof over her head three meals a day and a place to sleep but marries her in, what seemed like a few minutes, record time.Complications soon develop when Jan gets an assistant at the train station the good looking and Marlon Brando like, with a leather jacket & white T-shirt, Steve Kowalski, Allan Nixon, who soon hits on to Betty and begins a romantic affair with her. Jan who at first doesn't notice what's going on between Steve & Betty suddenly and unexpectedly loses his hearing that has both Steve & Betty's affair, at least the speaking part of it, get even more outrageous. That by them both telling each other how they love each other and what a jerk Jan is in front of him without him knowing what their talking about! There's also the fact that Betty knowing that her husband Jan has a fat bank account,$7,300.00, and plans to get her hands on it by causing him to have a fatal accident on the railroad track.***SPOILERS*** What unexpectedly does later happen is that Jan , after falling and hitting his head on the street, does get his hearing back but keeps it secret from both Steve & Betty thus finding out what the two have planned for him. It's in fact Steve who chickens out in the planned "accident" Betty is setting her husband Jan up for. This after Jan reveals that he in fact can hear which leads to a wild attack by Steve on Betty who, no surprise to us watching the movie, planned to leave him with Jan's money after he got knocked off. Jan now in full control of his life & destiny kicks the scheming and unfaithful Betty out of his house with Steve now sorry that he had anything to do with her back to both normal and his job as an assistant train dispatcher. In the end Jan gets rewarded for all the trouble & suffering he went through. That's by the "The Professor" who was keen to all that was happening, that's why he's called the "The Professor", brings Jan a new and cuddly puppy to make up for all he went through with the people, Steve & Betty, he dealt with in the movie.

bmacv Was Fritz Lang a fan of Hugo Haas? Distinctive elements of both Lang's Clash by Night and Human Desire are foreshadowed in Haas' Pickup (there's also an element left over from Jean Renoir's Woman on the Beach). But Czech-born Haas, a starvation-budget auteur of the 1950s, lacked the depth and style of his European colleagues. That's not so terrible, except that he also lacked their nerve, and as an actor rooted in comedy, the nerve for noir.Towering Beverly Michaels finds herself on queer street and spots in lonely widower Haas a way off of it. He mans a milk-run railroad pit-stop but has $7300 in the bank; she knows because she snuck a look at his passbook and married him for it. Trackside life soon proves a drag for the high-maintenance blonde, however, and she nags him to fake a disability so they can take early retirement and move back to the comparatively bright lights of town; she also strikes up a romance with his relief man Allan Nixon.Fate intervenes when Haas is suddenly struck deaf, putting his pension within reach. But just as suddenly he gets a face full of fender on a trip into town and regains his hearing – unbeknownst to his wife and his assistant. He listens impassively as they boldly exchange endearments, and just as mutely when Michaels works the flirtatious talk around to murder....The strongest hand Haas has going for him in Pickup is Michaels, his off-screen wife at the time. Her grasp of the gold-digger's ways was as firm as that of any actress, and her physical stature was exceeded only by Hope Emerson's. But otherwise the film's cheapness shows; apart from scenes at a carnival which look like stock footage, the action is confined to Haas' shanty and a stretch of railroad track. And, having indulged himself in a masochistic fantasy, Haas seems too timid to follow it where it seems bound to go, taking abrupt refuge in a jarring change of tone just at the end. And that end, too, foreshadows the final shot of another Beverly Michaels film, Russell Rouse's Wicked Woman: Her bags packed, she hits the road.

telegonus Citizen Kane it ain't, but Pickup isn't nearly as bad as one might think. Actor-director Hugo Haas deserves better, and I hope I can help the poor man (long departed) out. Haas,--no, I won't go into his career and background--let's just say the man had the reputation for being an okay actor, but as a director he was considered a sort of Central European version of Ed Wood. Pickup is about an older man, played by Haas, whose life is made a wreck of and nearly ruined by a toothy, gum-checking but withal irresistible blonde, portrayed by the unforgettable Beverly Michaels. The girl is, to be as genteel as possible, a worthless tramp, and nasty and stupid in the bargain. She plays with her adoring and naive lover like a cat with a mouse, and has an affair with a much younger man on the side. Amazingly, no one is murdered in the course of this film, which is actually at times quite sweet. Look, every novelist cannot write The Brothers Karamazov and every composer cannot write the Eroica, so why put down poor Mr. Haas whose only sin as an artist that I can tell is that is that he isn't Orson Welles. The man had a heart and soul, and this comes through in many scenes. He understands cruelty, too, and the woman in this film is, for all the melodrama, a not innacurate portrait of a certain kind of low-down broad who, if one were to show her videotapes of her inflicting her standard dose of pain on whoever the poor dope fool enough to get involved with her at the moment is, would shrug, light a cigarette and say, "Well, he was asking for it, wasn't he?". I'm not too sure about the character Mr. Haas plays in this film, but there is a kernel of truth in the mean little tale he tells; tacky though it may be, there's life in it nonetheless, which is good enough for me.