The Criterion Collections Has Revealed Its June 2021 Film Restoration Slate

The Criterion Collection announced its June slate of new film restorations that will be released as both DVD and Blu-ray product offerings during the course of the month.

Leading the selections is auteur filmmaker Samuel Fuller’s 1952 film noir salute to the city of New York, Pickup on South Street, starring Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, Thelma Ritter and Richard Kiley.  It will be getting a new 4K restoration on June 29. 

A hooker, a pickpocket and a police informer on the streets of New York City are the makings for writer/director Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street, which was one of the films he did for 20^th Century-Fox as part of the seven-film deal he struck with Darryl F. Zanuck after the stunning success of his indie Korean War production in 1951, The Steel Helmet.

With Richard Widmark locked in as hustler Skip McCoy, all that was needed was Candy, the mark that McCoy targets on the subway, only to discover that she was a low-life courier for communist spies and that among the things he snatched from her purse was microfilm containing top secrets.   

Shelley Winters was set to play Candy — she was a hot commodity at this time, especially after her Oscar nomination in director George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun — but she had taken up with Vittorio Gassman and had become pregnant with, what turned out to be, her only child and had to back out of the film.  

Jean Peters ended up in the role, but the big surprise came with the casting of Thelma Ritter as Moe, a police informer who is also willing to trade information with those from the other side of the tracks … for her performance she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar (her fourth of six nominations in that category; never winning).

Bonus features include a newly-prepared video session with author and film critic Imogen Sara Smith (“In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City”) — which is exclusive to the Blu-ray SKU — and two vintage items, a 1989 interview of Samuel Fuller by film critic Richard Schickel, and the 1982 French television program, Cinéma Cinémas: Fuller, featuring Samuel Fuller and a discussion of the production of Pickup on South Street.

Rounding out the June film restoration slate from the Criterion Collection are: Japanese filmmaker Masaki Kobayashi’s epic, The Human Condition (June 8); documentary filmmaker Martin Bell’s Oscar-nominated, Streetwise, which is teamed with the 30-year follow-up, Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell (June 15); June 22 brings the collection titled Signifyin’ Works of Marlon Riggs, which features four of his feature films — Ethnic Notions, Tongues Untied, Color Adjustment, Black Is … Black Ain’t  — and three short films, Affirmations, Anthem and Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien; Visions of Eight (also on June 22) and director Dee Rees’ Pariah (June 29).