The Pawnbroker

The Pawnbroker centres on Sol Nazerman, a Jewish survivor of the Nazi camps who now runs a pawnshop in Spanish Harlem in New York City. Haunted by the loss of his family and by his own memories of persecution, he has cut himself off from feeling, treating the people around him with coldness and contempt. His only real contact is Jesus Ortiz, the young assistant who works in the shop, and the relationship between the two men becomes the film's central conflict as Nazerman's bitterness collides with the life of the neighbourhood.

Sidney Lumet directed the film, the third of the twenty-six features he made, following Fail Safe and preceding The Hill. The screenplay is by David Friedkin and Morton S. Fine, and the cast is led by Rod Steiger as Sol Nazerman, alongside Geraldine Fitzgerald, Brock Peters, Jaime Sánchez, Thelma Oliver and Marketa Kimbrell. It is an American production running 116 minutes.

The film holds a critics' rating of 8.2 out of 10 from twenty-four reviews, higher than its audience scores of 7.6 on IMDb from around twelve thousand votes and 7.1 on TMDB from a much smaller number of votes. That gap suggests critics responded to the film more strongly than general viewers did, though both audiences rate it positively.