Walter Matthau tries to get to the bottom of a bizarre subway heist in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE (Joseph Sargent, 1974)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Saturday, July 8, 4:45, Sunday, July 16, 6:20, Friday, July 21, 5:00 & 10:00
Series runs through July 27
212-727-8110
filmforum.orgg
On October 29, 1975, President Gerald R. Ford refused to grant a federal bailout of New York, resulting in one of the all-time-great headlines in the Daily News: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” Film Forum is looking back at that rather unique decade in Big Apple history in the fab series “Ford to City: Drop Dead — New York in the 70s.” Running through July 27, the festival features more than three dozen Gotham classics, beginning with Midnight Cowboy and Taking Off and continuing with such favorites as Mean Streets (shown with Film Forum master programmer Bruce Goldstein’s Les Rues de Mean Streets), Serpico, Saturday Night Fever, Network, Klute, and Marathon Man. With all the recent problems with the subway system, it’s definitely time to revisit Joseph Sargent’s underground thriller, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. Loosely adapted from the book by John Godey, the film wonderfully captures the cynicism of New York City in the 1970s. Four heavily armed and mustached men — Mr. Blue (Robert Shaw), Mr. Green (Martin Balsam), Mr. Gray (Hector Elizondo), and Mr. Brown (Earl Hindman), colorful pseudonyms that influenced Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs — hijack an uptown 4 train, demanding one million dollars in one hour from a nearly bankrupt city or else they will kill all eighteen passengers, one at a time, minute by minute. The hapless mayor (Lee Wallace) is in bed with the flu, so Deputy Mayor Warren LaSalle (Tony Roberts) takes charge on the political end while transit detective Lt. Zachary Garber (a great Walter Matthau) and Inspector Daniels (Julius Harris) of the NYPD team up to try to figure out just how in the world the criminals expect to get away with the seemingly impossible heist. Sargent (Sybil) offers a nostalgic look back at a bygone era, before technology radically changed the way trains are run and police work is handled.
The film also features a very funny, laconic Jerry Stiller as Lt. Rico Patrone and the beloved Kenneth McMillan as the borough commander. It was remade as a television movie in 1998, starring Edward James Olmos, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Lorraine Bracco, and as an embarrassingly bad big-budget bomb in 2009 by Tony Scott. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is screening on July 8 (introduced by Goldstein), 16, and 21; the Film Forum series also includes such inspired double features as Shaft and Super Fly, Across 110th Street and Cops and Robbers, Dressed to Kill and Death Wish, Three Days of the Condor and The Eyes of Laura Mars, and The Warriors and Escape from New York. In addition, director Jerry Schatzberg will introduce The Panic in Needle Park on July 7, William Friedkin will introduce The French Connection via Skype on July 8, and New York Times media editor Bill Brink — whose father, William, wrote the infamous Daily News headline — will introduce Dog Day Afternoon on July 9.
Every year the New York Asian Film Festival tends to have one absolutely crazy, out-there movie that challenges the boundaries of good taste. This year’s entry is Vietnamese writer-director Lê Bình Giang’s utterly bizarre debut, Kfc, a sixty-eight-minute journey into a dark world that makes some of Charles Bukowski’s most cutting-edge tales seem like Disney stories. Expanded from a 2012 short, the film is as vile and disgusting as it is well made and fascinating, consisting of a series of interrelated vignettes depicting extreme violence, rape, torture, murder, arson, cannibalism, necrophilia, and plenty of fried chicken and French fries. (I can’t imagine that Colonel Sanders would approve of the film, which includes several scenes set in what appears to be a real Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Hanoi.) The gruesome special effects (except for the worms, which are real) are by Tony Nguyễn, who plays the dude in the headphones, and they are balanced by the musical theme, Khanh Ly’s version of Trinh Cong Son’s romantic ballad “Quỳnh Hương.” Although there is not a ton of dialogue, what talking there is just happens to be very poorly translated in the subtitles, upping the overall psychotic quotient. And I have to admit that I’m downright worried about the future sanity of a few of the children who have major roles in the film, the original script of which got Lê kicked out of the University of Ho Chi Minh. There’s a reason that the NYAFF page on the movie begins by declaring, “WATCH AT YOUR OWN RISK!” Kfc is screening July 6 at 10:45 (what, they couldn’t wait until midnight?) at the Walter Reade Theater. The festival, which runs through July 16 at Lincoln Center and the SVA Theatre, consists of more than fifty films from China, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia, including a surprise twenty-fifth anniversary screening of a 1992 classic.
Taking its name from The Truman Show, Peter Weir’s 1998 satire in which Jim Carrey plays a character whose entire life is a reality television program, The Reagan Show posits the fortieth president of the United States as the first full-time made-for-TV leader and his two terms as the height of performance art. The film opens with a December 1988 ABC News interview in which David Brinkley asks outgoing president Ronald Reagan, “Did you learn anything as an actor that has been useful to you as president?” Reagan responds, “There have been times in this office when I wondered how you can do the job if you hadn’t been an actor.” Writer-director Pacho Velez (
