Film #84: The Taking of Pelham One-Two-Three

I still remember sitting over at my friend Brian Matson's apartment, snacks in hand, as I ran across this movie's opening credits. I'd always remembered the title: The Taking of Pelham One-Two-Three. But somehow I missed this bloodcurdling juggernaut as a free-so-freeeee filmgoing child of the 1970s. But, here, in the 1990s, sitting in my friend's living room, I was struck by one thing first and foremost: the massively bombastic score by David Shire. This was a score that said, in all caps, "HERE'S A MOVIE FOR YA, BUDDY! TRY AND TOP THIS ONE, PAL O' MINE!! BETCHA CAN'T! DOUBLE BETCHA! TRIPLE BETCHA!!!"

Even Brian stuck his head around the corner and said "What the hell are you watching?" I said "I dunno, but it sounds good, don't it??!!" Needless to say, I stayed with it and I've been thanking my lucky stars ever since. If you wanna see an action film that the God's honest roadmap for every other action movie made in its wake, then look no further, Mac. Here we have Jaws fisherman Robert Shaw as ultra-calm Mr. Blue, Garry- Marshall- movie- mainstay Hector Elizondo as kill-krazy Mr. Grey, Home Improvement's barely-seen next-door neighbor Earl Hindman as the shy Mr. Brown, and A Thousand Clowns Oscar-winner Martin Balsam as Mr. Green. (So, do all these Mr. Color names remind you of anything?) Together, these guys hatch a plot to hijack a subway car for...get this...ONE MILLION dollars (hey, stop those Dr. Evil jokes...a million bucks was really a MILLION BUCKS back in 1974).

Mr. Blue contacts the subway authorities, headed by Walter Matthau (in a rare 1970s dramatic role, though he still gets a laugh here and there (like when he insults a group of picture-taking Japanese businessmen who actually know English pretty well). Just as jowly as ever, Matthau acts as a reluctant go-between for the city and the kidnappers, who've given the mayor (an Ed-Koch-like Lee Wallace) one little hour to get their asses moving on this thing. Lemme tell ya, ab-so-lute chaos ensues.

Even if you find '70s movies boring (shame on you if you do), you're gonna love this one. It's about to be remade with snoozearama veterans John Travolta and Denzel Washington in the leads, so see it soon, cause the new version is bound to blow big-time (even if it does co-star the fantastic James Gandofini from The Sopranos). If you do rent it, you'll get to see Ben's dad Jerry Stiller in a supporting role as Matthau's smart-aleck second-in-command. You'll see Matthew's dad James Broderick as a flummoxed subway driver who's let go pretty early. You'll see Woody Allen sidekick Tony Roberts as the mayor's no-shit advisor. You'll see a quick flash of Doris Roberts before she became the mother on Everybody Loves Raymond. You'll see a vast array of then-scuzzy-cool New York locales expertly captured by cinematographer Owen Roizman (who did a few other little New York films like The French Connection, Network, Tootsie, and The Exorcist).

And, most importantly, you'll actually find that--hey, my heart is in my freakin' throat--as the train chugs towards its fate. Yeah, ya don't care about any of the passengers (because they're so annoying--the movie's one fault, or its bravest choice, take your pick). But it don't matter 'cause you'll still never be able to guess what's gonna happen in this head-butt of a movie based on John Godey's best seller, and directed by Emmy-winner Joseph Sargeant. And that title theme--occasionally you'll be able to shake your fanny to it on the dance floor, courtesy of some VERY creative DJs out there. So what's not to like?

Film #82: The Wrong Man

Alfred Hitchcock's 1956 drama The Wrong Man remains an anomaly among the director's works. Eschewing his vividly colored, 50s-era studio slickness in favor of a street-level B&W, quasi-documentary form, Hitch held back nothing in telling the true story of Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda, in possibly his most harrowing performance, next to his role as The President in Sidney Lumet's Fail-Safe). Manny is a New York nightclub combo's bassist who, through freakish happenstance, is mistakenly fingered as the perpetrator of a insurance office's robbery. The cops give this innocent family man his every due, but time after time, the evidence points only to him. With Manny's assured attitude of "an innocent man has nothing to fear," this would all be fine--except his nervous wife (a never-better Vera Miles), the mother of his two children, is run positively through the ringer by this turn of events. This horror is more hers than his.

Based on a Life magazine article by Maxwell Anderson (who co-wrote the script with Angus MacPhail), The Wrong Man is a markedly bleak entry into the Hitchcock canon that was no doubt seized upon by the director largely because of his own personal fear of being jailed. When Hitch was a boy, he once so displeased his father that Hitchcock Sr. sent the lad to a London jail with a note that instructed the constable to lock young Alfred up in a jail cell for 10 minutes or so as punishment. This famous event definitely scarred Hitch; one can feel the crushing rise in blood pressure this boy must have felt by looking at Fonda's shadowed, worried face right as the cell door clangs shut. With all the mistaken identity themes in his movies, The Wrong Man stands as Hitchcock's most blatant foray into Kafkaesque terror: the good boy labeled bad.

You can just feel something is different about The Wrong Man, right from the dramatically-photographed intro by Hitch himself: "This is Alfred Hitchcock speaking. In the past, I have given you many kinds of suspense pictures. But this time, I would like you to see a different one. The difference lies in the fact that this is a true story, every word of it. And yet it contains elements that are stranger than all the fiction that has gone into many of the thrillers that I've made before." But you have a hard time putting your finger on exactly the fine quality of this difference. Well, here it is: To give this picture that OOMPH it needed to send the viewer as over-the-edge as Vera Miles goes, Hitchcock filmed the movie--for the only time in his career--entirely on location. Thus the viewer sees the real Stork Club, where Manny Balestrero worked. We see the real insurance office where the crime took place. We see Balestrero's actual apartment in Queens, the Manhattan police station where he was booked, even the prison cell he was holed up in. I think, in this way, it's one of Hitch's most personal movies.

Somehow, all of this on-screen truth seeped into every facet of the movie, and ended up making it one of Alfred Hitchcock's all-time best (though, strangely and at the same time somehow expectedly, it's often lost in hubbubbed discussions of more flashy 50s offerings like Vertigo, North by Northwest, and To Catch A Thief). The horrifying and exhausting The Wrong Man features the usual top-notch contributions from cinematographer Robert Burks, composer Bernard Herrmann, and editor George Tomasini, as well as appearances by Anthony Quayle, Harold J. Stone, Neahmiah Persoff and, in cameos, Harry Dean Stanton, Bonnie Franklin, and Tuesday Weld!!

TriBeCa Diaries #4: Run For Your Life

I stepped into Judd Ehrlich's Run For Your Life not knowing anything about the history of the New York City marathon. I stepped out an educated man. The event was started by a charismatic, Romanian-born businessman named Fred Lebow, whose enthusiasm for running began the marathon's infancy in 1969. At that time, people on the street weren't used to seeing runners jogging alongside cars in clothes that looked like underwear. In 1970, when the first marathon was launched, the participants--no women allowed, either--just sprinted a few times around Central Park. After female athletes were accepted in 1971, and after the marathon's route was amended to follow a path that swept through all five boroughs in 1976, the fevered publicity surrounding the event began to launch its popularity.


All the while, Lebow--whom one friend says "ran like a duck, but was slower than a duck"--acted as press agent, detail man, and provocateur. He used the marathon to feather his own nest with fame and a constant array of young women (but no money--he was famously broke a lot of the time). But he also used it to help an ailing, bankrupt New York City find its footing and its pride once again. Using his mastery of event planning and salesmanship, he garnered an array of big-time sponsors and, by 1977, a 5000-strong army of runners hoping to complete the course. Nowadays, the crowd numbers close to 20,000 (and there's nothing like seeing all those people crunch across the Verrazano Bridge in the opening helicopter shot).

Run For Your Life does what all fine docs do: it recounts a story we've never heard, but which has massive historical implications. It gives us a main character worthy of our attention. It has a complex structure that doesn't follow events as they happened in a timeline, but as they relate to one another. And it inventively illustrates its story with perceptive interviews (with marathon champs Bill Rogers and Grete Weitz among them), archive footage that's well-edited (by Alison Shermin), and stunning graphic work (by Nicholas Vranzian) that casts still images and CGI work into an appropriately low-fi 1970s look. I also have to mention its incredible source-music soundtrack of past hit songs and present-day songs that should be hits.

I've never been a runner--I'm too busy watching movies, so I've always found its appeal a bit mystifying--but now after seeing the inspiring Run For Your Life, I think I know what its point is. And certainly, for Fred Lebow and the adoring friends who surrounded him, it was about passion. That's a good enough explanation for me.

Film #15: The Gods of Times Square

In its pre-cleanup days, the Times Square area in New York City was a place of vague contradictions. There'd be creeps streaming out of the jerk-off palaces as the melancholy mop-up guy got ready for another swabbing of the booths. Down the street, at one of the broken-down but strangely opulent all-nite movie houses, Lady Terminator would be playing on a double bill with Killer Condom. Two crusted, white-bearded Night Train junkies could be heard further up, brawling over the last Pall-Mall. Fish-netted trannies patrolled the area, scanning men's eyes for the next "date." The latest issue of Knocked Up and Milky could be glimpsed through the cracked, pink neon-lit porn shop windows. And the best hot dog you ever had could be gotten for a song. It was gloriously filthy, America's Reeperbahn.

Then there would be the presence of those who thought they could save all the lost souls wandering dejected down the spit-spattered sidewalks. Nevertheless, religious zealots of all stripes still were unknowingly smeared with the same grime that coated 42nd Street. And it's these colorful, proselytizing characters that make up a large part of Richard Sandler's epic 1999 documentary The Gods of Times Square. For seven years, Sandler--who remains a practicing documentarian and acclaimed still photographer--roamed the area, pointing his camera towards his subjects and grilling them about their spiritual beliefs. In the process, he caught on camera a cultural sea change of tidal wave proportions.

He catches the Jews for Jesus hawking their dichotomous dogma. Militant blacks are emphatically out in force, screaming about how they are the real chosen ones, and how the white man was put here "to be the Devil on Earth." Hasidics hold fourth from a massive trailer that blasts klezmer music through the city air. A Christian semi-raps through his bullhorn, warning us that, come rapture, we're going to be "roasting on our roaster, while we're toasting on our toaster and we're coasting on our coaster" (remember, this was pre-2000, the Christian year of the supposed Armageddon). Jimmy, a personable, beatific rocker dude with a Madonna obsession (the singer, not Jesus' mom) confesses that the Son of God has already come back to Earth. An elusively poetic Muslim with a priest's collar and a bottle-bottom glasses dodges answers to the Eternal Questions. A homeless man, in one of my favorite segments, has wisdom to spare regarding the flow of energy and the fabric of life. A flamboyant, bow-tied older gentleman condemns the lack of spirit in the city. A long-standing hot dog joint has its final day in business, culminating in the owner's saddened, physically-challenged son's rendition of Springsteen's "Hungry Heart." And a hilariously, scarily, tongue-wagging, porn-addicted businessman mightily resists a disciple's efforts to rescue his hide from eternal damnation. The array of stubborn, gorgeous misfits here is dazzling, and long gone from Manhattan.

Daniel Brown's ethereal editing style transforms Sandler's arty portrayal of the Times Square milieu further into dreamlike territory, with musically-timed cuts of gigantic fashion ads, surreal electronic displays, and disturbing views of streetwise desperation. He makes an invaluable contribution to Sandler's heartrending mourning of an admittedly rough, earthy cultural touchstone destroyed by corporate (read: Disney) interests (one man, in a gaudy McDonald's t-shirt, applauds the change, but another--mayoral candidate Reverend Billy--invades the Disney store and brandishes a plush Mickey Mouse, labeling it a representation of the antichrist).

In the end, this is a personal journey documentary, as much as Ross McElwee's Sherman's March, for instance, or Michael Moore's Roger and Me. Its wholly original voice--part doc, part wild experimentation--places it easily in such company. Thankfully, there's no narration here, but we are guided by the personal, searching questions occasionally delivered by Sandler from behind the camera. The director/videographer remains a curious figure but that adds to the uniqueness of one of the most unforgettable documentaries of the 1990s (right up there with Crumb). Actually, it's in the pantheon of the 25 best documentaries ever made (here's my list: The 101 Greatest Documentaries). When I was programming the Dahlonega International Film Festival in 2002, I insisted on having The Gods of Times Square as a centerpiece attraction, and the director happily provided us with a film that was 12 minutes longer than the version with which I had originally fallen in love (the 2007 DVD release includes this footage separately on a second disc). Brave, unrelenting and honest, Richard Sandler's beautiful Gods of Times Square can withstand any level of hype: it's just that good. Miss it at the risk of your own soul's peril.