Parents' Guide to The Pawnbroker

Steiger was nominated for an Oscar for his central performance in this impactful drama about a Jewish man in New York, haunted by his experience of the Holocaust. The Pawnbroker is one of the first major films to portray the Holocaust from the point of view of a survivor, and director Sidney Lumet (himself nominated for five Academy Awards) does an impressive job of moving between the gloomy New York setting and flashes of disturbing memories. A shoe, a ring, a woman removing her clothes—no matter how hard Sol shuts his emotions out, everything around him has the power to bring him back to the horrors he witnessed during the war. The cinematography only adds to his sense of alienation and inner turmoil, taking a German Expressionist style with some of its black-and-white city streets and dimly lit corridors to make everything seem just slightly askew, unfamiliar, and unsafe. Particularly impactful is Sol's silent scream toward the end of the movie. Shown in close-up, the moment captures a man trapped inside himself with emotions that are too intense to let out, but strangling him alive from within. It's a shame the film falls into damaging stereotypes—about Jews, but particularly about Black and Latino people—but it remains one of Lumet's most emotive and probably most important works.