Anita Ekberg fleeing in heels while toting a courier bag makes for a striking image on this poster for the drug thriller DOPE! Oh, wait a sec. The title is actually Pickup Alley. There it is on the bottom, in lower case yellow letters, a mere whisper, nearly an afterthought compared to DOPE! Not only does Pickup Alley get short shrift graphically speaking—it’s also deficient in scope when the film’s plot is considered. We’re talking about international drug smugglers here. It’s even set in Paris. Hah—the poster fooled you again. Don’t expect to visit Paris, despite the art’s inclusion of the Eiffel Tower. It’s tall and everything, but you can’t see it from other countries.
Pickup Alley stars Ekberg, Victor Mature, and Trevor Howard, and opens in New York City, where FBI narcotics specialist Mature investigates the murder of his sister, who had infiltrated a drug ring but been found out by her targets. Clues take him to London, searching for kingpin Howard, who’s rarely been seen, and is said to change his appearance often. Ekberg plays one of Howard’s drug mules, but when a subordinate tries to just start kissing her, she fights back and ends up shooting him. When she asks Howard for help, he realizes he has her trapped for good. Later she’ll try to quit the racket and get socked across the jaw for it. Howard sends her to pick up a package in Lisbon and deliver it to Rome, and Mature is right on her trail. He won’t quit until he’s the, er, victor.
Pickup Alley is a high budget feature with location work in all the aforementioned cities, bolstered by top notch cinematography, visuals that occasionally nod toward film noir, impressive exteriors both beautiful and gritty, a cool Roman catacomb sequence, a high energy score that includes hectic hep-jazz in the New York chapters, and adequate acting all around. Despite the money visibly lavished upon this film, and forward thinking direction from John Gilling, contemporary reviews weren’t appreciative. The highbrow British paper Monthly Film Bulletin said the movie’s “elaborate, elliptical sub-Welles plot” failed to rescue it from the “common rut.” But time waits for no critic. We think Pickup Alley is (not DOPE!, though we wish it were warranted) worth a watch. It premiered in the UK today in 1957.
I just don’t get it. Why do people in these post-War, crushingly industrial, hope-challenged, dead-end towns think DOPE! is a worthwhile escape?
