Skip's Shack
Skip lives in a little shack perched over the river. On the side is written Live Bait and Boats for Rent as the shack’s original purpose was a place from which people could rent boats to go fishing. The symbolism may seem a little obvious, but is actually quite elegant in a way. Skip is going to wind up being the bait the Feds use to catch the Reds. That much is obvious. Using the thoroughly unpredictable Skip is like renting that boat however; the Feds are taking a gamble on this fishing expedition that absolutely never came with a guarantee of returning to shore with anything but an empty bucket where the worms used to be.
The Hook
Skip and Candy have a very complicated relationship. In Skip’s shack he knocks her out cold and then revives her by pouring beer onto her where she lays. He rudely tosses her purse to her. And all the while they are clearly falling in love. Much of this sequence is shot with a large hook connecting two pieces of rope in the foreground. Except for the fact that Candy has already been shown to possess a masochistic personality and Skip has a definite predilection toward sadism, there is absolutely no reason for these two to fall in love. But in defiance against all conventions of normal human behavior, they are hooked on each other. And eventually they become hooked to each other, unable to extricate themselves from each other even if they did want to.
Moe's Ties
Moe is a stoolie for money, but she works even harder trying to sell her ties on the street. Moe is the character that connects everyone together. It is only through her that the Feds learn who the pickpocket was and without that knowledge everything falls apart for them. Thus, Moe is the tie that binds the city’s low-life figures to the highest echelon of the United States government and through them all the way to the Soviet Union. Her ties are symbolic of the vital role she plays in the narrative and that role is further cemented by the fact that the viewer actually learns more about Moe than they ever learn about Candy or Skip.
The Microfilm
In the vernacular of Alfred Hitchcock, the microfilm in Pickup on South Street is the MacGuffin: that thing that is very important to the characters in the film, but only a plot mechanism for the audience. Except that in this case, the microfilm takes on huge significance within the realm of symbolism. The microfilm becomes a corrosive symbol of the corruptibility of capitalism because it threatens to become something that can be sold off to the highest bidder. The Feds are supposedly after the communists because they pose a threat to the capitalist system essential to democracy, but in a pure capitalist system, the forces of supply and demand would mandate that the wise and just thing for Skip to do would be to hold out for the highest bid. That he rejects this very tenet of pure capitalism reveals the flaw in the system: he must put the interest of the collective ahead of individual gain.
Candy Purse
The entire future of democratic society may rest upon the contents of Candy’s purse. The purse is by all possible means of interpretation the very last place one would have expected to find the key to saving democracy from the dreaded Reds. A purse is the ultimate symbol of female domesticity and females in the 1950’s world of the Red Menace, the Hollywood Blacklist, Sputnik, film noir and the Iron Curtain were simply not relevant. The women had gone back home to where they belonged after getting a brief taste of the business world during World War II. The 1950’s represented the re-domestication of the American female and so it is the ultimate irony that the democracy and capitalism are saved by the contents of Candy’s purse. Of course, it is only saved because a man plucked the key to saving the world out of it, thus reaffirming the dominance of the post-war American patriarchy.
