NYC'S EARLY 1970S NEON NOIR
Netflix's recent posting of films from 1974 send me searching establishing shots
Recently Netflix has been celebrating films from 1974 with lots of choice flicks. Literary adaptations (‘The Great Gatsby’), kung fu flicks (‘The Street Fighter’), and auteur classics (Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Conversation,’ Robert Altman’s ‘California Split.’) But the films shot in New York in 1972 and 1973 that were released in ‘74 really struck a nerve: ‘The Gambler,’ ‘Death Wish,’ and ‘The French Connection,’ since the city the three depicted was the one I moved through as an adolescent and teenager. I became obsessed, not with the violence and decay each film depicted, but the establishing shots of a city that’s mostly gone, but that lives rent free in my mind. The tawdry shops of Times Square, fancy apartments off Riverside Drive, the subways (most of which in movies were graffiti free), blue and white police cars, that era’s signage in local diners and grocery stores, the sedans and yellows taxis of the day, and the neon that illuminated a city that at night had stark shadows from spotty street lights. In some of these screen captures Charles Bronson, Gene Hackman and James Caan -- white Hollywood icons — can be glimpsed. However the steamy, chilly, gritty city of my youth is the star of these images. (I’ve actually included a shot from 1971’s ‘Shaft’ to this mix, but you can’t tell which it is because that film is part of the same narrative of New York in decline.) In two years ‘NEW YORK: DROP DEAD’ will be blasted across the front page of the Daily News.
Yet I don’t see this era as the end of anything. For me, growing up in Brooklyn and beginning to discover NYC’s possibilities via the subway, it was a place of grand adventure. For all the stats on crime and talk of white flight, these movies were full of places I wanted to go and places I’d already been. Familarity didn’t breed contempt, but a full on love affair. Seeing ‘The French Connection’ with my mother and ‘Death Wish’ with friends at a Times Square grind house, told me my world was part of a larger story and that I, along with everyone I knew, existed in a very special place. Why else would they make so many movies about us?
Los Angeles movie studios may have wanted to bury New York and ridicule us (as Johnny Carson did in his ‘Tonight Show’ monologs), yet the city still stood and the streets where Caan gambled his morals away, Bronson became a homicidal vigilante, and Hackman roared in a crazed pursuit of justice, teemed with human life. And I was part of that life, seeing bits of it reflected on screen, while living it fully after I’d eaten the last of my pop corn. New York has been pronounced dead several times in my life time (the mid-70s, after 9/11, during the COVID pandemic.) Yet I sit in the city now, basking in slices of its past, anticipating future nostalgia for this present.
I look at the pix and Godfather of Harlem comes to mind. Have you written on that NG? I'm in the middle of S3 when Malcolm is on Haj. I'm amazed that Islam and the Haj are treated so openly and positively on US TV.