Over the years I've blogged a lot about how 1970's and '80s NYC was Funky Town.
And Funky Town was a big, wild place!
Here are some more examples of that time, that seems so far away and yet is right around (literally) the corner:
Back in those days trade school commercials were all over NYC television, like these for the Albert Merrill School and Apex Tech (that lovely set of tools is yours to keep after you graduate).
Then there's movies. A lot of great movies were shot on the streets of NYC back then -- The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Annie Hall, and Saturday Night Fever, just to name a few. As you might imagine, shooting them on location could be a challenge. Recently I read about the making of the 1974 original movie The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3. You gotta love it -- it's an action movie that stars Walter Matthau and Jerry Stiller! It's a great NYC movie that mostly takes place on the subway movie but it was a tough movie to shoot in the fall of 1973 -- as this article points out.
Talking about NYC movies of the 1970s, recently I was on the East Side and walked by The Copinette restaurant that has a plaque outside, commenterating its appearance in the 1971 Oscar Best Picture winner The French Connection.
And of course, there's The Sexy.
Before AIDS closed them down, sex clubs were prominent around town. Here's previous Mr NYC interviewee and former adult film star Hyapatia Lee talking about her visits to Plato's Retreat and The Hellfire Club and the wild, sexy times she had in this town.
And talking about sexy clubs, one night in 1975 a young songwriter named Van McCoy went to the Apple's Apple nightclub and saw people dancing in an interesting way. He therefore decided to write a song called "The Hustle" and it became one of the most famous, beloved, and iconic disco songs of all time:
So there's just some more examples of Funky Town, a place long-gone but that will forever live in Mr NYC's heart.
On this night at the end of 1972, just months after The Godfather and Play It Again, Sam had been released, and The Tonight Show had moved to the West Coast, a very young, very nervous, very funny Diane Keaton spoke with Johnny Carson.
They talked about a lot of things, including living in NYC. What a golden moment!
Diane Keaton was more than just a great actress, she was a cultural icon and a cinematic legend, an actress who could deeply impact you with her dramatic work, and make you laugh out loud with her comedica performances.
Diane Keaton's acting showed that she could do anything -- and it didn't look like she was acting at all.
Her filmography is oustanding: all three Godfather movies; many Woody Allen classics like Sleeper, Love & Death, Annie Hall (her Oscar), Manhattan; other movies like Looking for Mr Goodbar, Shoot the Moon, Marvin's Room, Father of the Bride, Something's Gotta Give, and, more recently, bizarre and brilliant The Young Pope series.
Keaton was from and mostly lived in California but her 1970s classics -- The Godfather, Annie Hall and Manhattan -- remain something of the greatest movies and New York City movies ever made. One is the most classic NYC crime story ever told and the others are the two most classic NYC romantic comedies ever made. Her leading men were Al Pacino and Woody Allen -- how cool is that?
RIP Diane. We'll never see your like again. La di da.
More than once or twice I've blogged about the oddity that is Mayor Eric Adams -- you can read all about it here, no need to rehash it.
This new article elaborates more on this oddness, calling him the "chaos mayor."
But more than cataloguing the mayor's chaotic reign, it also shows how Adams, like other prominent politicians of this era, simply have no idea whatsoever of what it means to be a leader. They spend their time blaming others for their problems, they use overheated crises-ridden rhetoric, they constantly attack the press as being out to get them, and they openly engage in self-pity.
Poor me! Poor me! Everyone's mean to me, I'm a victim, all these conspiracies and dark forces are out to get me!
It's not like they have power or something.
In Adams' case, it comes down to his handling of the migrant problem. When they started coming into NYC, Adams showed that he was overwhelmed and unable to handle it. He said this problem was a "crises" that would "destroy New York City" and that we were about to "lose" the city. When the press asked him how he plans to handle this problem, he told others that they had to provide the answers about how to handle the problem. He demanded severe budget cuts in order to handle the problem -- even though the city is running surplus. Instead of projecting confidence in his skills and in his administration's ability to handle this problem, he basically said "I can't handle it! Oh my god, the city is going down, you tell me how to fix it!"
Real leaders rush into a crises, come up with a plan, handle it in a pragmatic and confident manner, restore order, and fix it. Like that old guy in Godfather II, leaders say "This is the business we've chosen!" and get on with the job, showing that they're in charge and getting things under control. They don't whine and complain, attack their critics and demand pity. They work -- and the positive results speak for themselves and their leadership abilities.
You see this same problem with Trump --- the constant consipiracies, the constant attacks on critics, the constant self-pity. The former British Prime Minster Liz Truss, who managed to the screw up the UK economy in six weeks so badly that her own party kicked her out of office, is now out complaining that the Bank of England and the "blob" that is the UK Civil Service is responsible for her fall -- and not her own decisions. She was Prime Minister when the Queen died in 2022 and apparently Ms. Truss's reaction to this was "Why me?" Can you friggin' believe that?
It wasn't always like this. Leaders led and did the job. Jimmy Carter didn't complain, deflect, or demand pity during the Iran Hostage Crises. Reagan didn't either during Iran Contra. My God, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton got impeached and still worked hard!
Eric Adams, like Trump and Truss and others, doesn't seem to get this. They think serving in high office is an excuse either to live the high life or execute ideological agendas -- not govern, not serve the public. And when things don't go their way, instead of sucking it up and getting to work, they WAAAAAHHHHH!
The thing is, the public is much smarter than these folks. Trump lost the presidency (and hopefully will again), Truss was kicked out, and Adams looks like he'll lose next year.
The people want leaders and problem solvers -- not showboating, self-pitying egomaniacs. You chose this business, get it done.
Al Ruddy produced The Godfather and many other films. He was born in Montreal but his family moved to NYC when he was seven and he graduated from high school in Brooklyn before briefly attending City College. Eventually he made it to Hollywood and changed our culture. RIP.
The year 1980 was a turning point in American history -- the election of conservative Ronald Reagan as President proved that the country was rejecting the progressive ethos of the 1960s and '70s, the white hot flame of disco music was burning out, and the culture was gradually turning away from the dark cinematic vision of the New Hollywood (think The Godfather, think Chinatown) to the more upbeat blockbuster era (think Rocky, think the Star Wars trilogy).
New York City was also recovering from the late 1970s traumas of near-bankruptcy, the blackout, and high crime. Ed Koch was mayor and, such were the times, that he turned being a belligerent, mean-spirited asshole into electoral gold.
This same year saw the release of two movies set in NYC that were very similar and very different -- but that showed that the city and the world were changing, as was the lives of their creators.
The First Deadly Sin is something that I can't believe I'm typing -- it's a gritty NYC crime drama starring Frank Sinatra. Yes, FRANK FRIGGIN' SINATRA! "Old blue eyes", in this movie, plays an aging NYPD detective named Delaney who is, yes, just about to retire to take care of his very sick wife (an always great Faye Dunaway, still riding her post-Network Oscar-winning wave before Mommie Dearest ended it all) but who becomes obsessed with finding a serial killer who has been menacing the Upper West Side -- and, it is later revealed, all of NYC. His investigation takes him into a dark realm of trying to understand systematic but senseless violence all the while tangled up in the bureaucracy of the NYPD and the heartbreaking illness of his wife. It's a tense, well-told story and it was a a rare, late-career movie performance by Sinatra -- long past his glory days as a movie musical star.
Sinatra is, of course, great in this movie, and you can see why he remains a legend 25 years after his death. In this movie, he quietly emotes such pathos, such sympathy, such complexity, that we root for him 100%. This was his last big movie and it's sad, in a way, that Sinatra didn't act more in the later years of his life because this movie proves what a perennial talent he was, what a great actor he was (he doesn't sing this movie so there you go), and how exciting he is to watch in every scene -- even in a dark, disturbing, non-glamorous movie and role like this where he is struggling with the horror of death all around him, in both his city and his marriage. It's about the totality and agony of loss. The movie was not a big hit at the time but it really holds up.
By the way, a totally unknown struggling actor at the time walks around in the background of this movie -- a man named Bruce Willis, also dealing with his own sense of loss right now.
Some might argue that this other movie from 1980 doesn't hold up -- and even the director of it seems to agree. Dressed to Kill by Brian De Palm is about a murderous transsexual menacing wayward women in NYC, and it was highly controversial then and even more so now. I get that criticism and sympathize with it. However, just as a piece of filmmaking, Dressed to Kill is brilliant, an amazing and bizarre thriller that basically takes the story of Psycho (if you know it) and twists the hell out of it. Angie Dickinson plays a rich, bored housewife who's afternoon of passion brings her an untimely death in an elevator, Nancy Allen plays a hooker who sees the murder and becomes the killer's next prey, and Michael Caine plays a psychiatrist trying to help both women -- or is he?
You need to see Dressed to Kill to fully understand it -- trying to describe it with words is hard because, like all De Palma movies, the essence of its storytelling is visual. He doesn't use lots of special effects -- it's his use of the camera that is its own special effect. The movie is highly unconventional, there are whole scenes without dialogue -- including a brilliant 10-minute sequence in an art gallery that makes no sense but that you follow anyway, and that has a a great payoff. Like all De Palma movies, it'll enthrall and repulse you but this may be my favorite of his movies and I'm not even a big thriller fan -- but you should see this!
Dressed to Kill was, shockingly, given both its subject matter and unusual storytelling, a big hit in 1980. It's hard to imagine audiences today going to a movie this dark, depraved, weird, and challenging but they did. It shows NYC as a sexy, glamorous, and dangerous place -- this is not a "gritty crime drama", oh no, it's a sexy, alluring one, and it really gets under your skin. Skin, that you should probably cover up with clothes although please don't, you know, get dressed to kill.
I'm currently watching the Paramount+ mini-series The Offer and it's ... highly mediocre.
It's a 10-hour retelling about the making of the 1972 classic The Godfather, told mostly from the perspective of the producer Al Ruddy. Ruddy is played decently by Miles Teller and he's made out to be a hero, the genius behind ones of the greatest movies ever made (but my favorite performance is by Matthew Goode who does a great job portraying fellow Riverside Drive native Robert Evans, the flamboyant head of Paramount in the early 1970s who was responsible for overseeing the production of Love Story in 1970, The Godfather in 1972, and Chinatown in 1974 -- three movies in four years made that him a legend forever). The Offer would have you believe that somehow Ruddy is the reason for The Godfather's greatness, never mind that Francis Ford Coppola is the one who actually made it, and that Ruddy never produced another movie in his career that was anywhere near as good.
Also, The Offer is actually longer than all three Godfather movies combined!
Anyway, there's a minor character in The Offer that caught my interest -- the late Congressman Mario Biaggi who was the grandfather of Alessandra Biaggi, the former State Senator who destroyed the IDC in 2018.
Back in the early 1970s Biaggi was at the height of his prestige and power, a big-shot politician, a gregarious personality, and easily the best constituent-services Congressman NYC had the time. He was beloved, always won his elections easily, and seemed destined to become mayor. He also had strong connections to the real-life mafia, a "finger in every pie" kind of guy.
And he hated The Godfather.
Biaggi thought that it demeaned Italians, made everyone think they were all gangsters, and he did everything he could to stop it, including getting the movie's permits pulled so that the production couldn't shoot around NYC. Obviously he failed, but The Offer makes clear what a headache he was to Ruddy and Coppola, and how he was brought to heel by Joe Columbo, once he cut a deal with Ruddy to get the word "mafia" removed from the screenplay.
This profile of Mario Biaggi ran in New York magazine in December 1972, the same year The Godfather was released and just before he ran for a mayor in 1973 -- a campaign he would ultimately lose to Abe Beame. Biaggi would continue in congress until 1988 when he resigned and was ultimately imprisoned for corruption. He died in 2015, still a beloved if somewhat controversial figure -- but he was the kind of old-school politician who was, at heart, a public servant, a man passionate about his community and city, a guy who did a lot of good -- even if he sometimes feathered his own nest and tried to derail a cinema classic.
Son of the Bronx, actor extraordinaire, James Caan aka Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, has passed away at age 82.
Ironically, even though he's best known for playing an Italian mobster, Jimmy Caan was actually Jewish. He was also great in movies like Rollerball, Thief, Misery, Elf and many others. A great talent and a real legend. RIP.
How's this for two days in NYC history fifty-years ago this week:
March 15, 1972: The Godfather, one of the very greatest movies ever made, opened in NYC. It went on to become the highest grossing movie ever made (displacing the Gone with the Wind's 33-year run until it was displaced by Jaws in 1975), winning the Oscar for Best Picture, and defining American cinema and the darkness of the American dream forever after. Yeah, kinda important.
March 16, 1972: the very next day the Godfather of Soul, James Brown himself, went to Riker's Island and performed two shows for the inmates there. You can read the full story of how and why this happened here. It was a glittering, uplifting moment in time in an otherwise sad and difficult place -- a reminder that great culture can and should exist anywhere and for anyone.
Read this blog long enough and you'll know that I'm a massive fan of Al Pacino, perhaps America cinema's greatest actor ever. He has given more brilliant performances on stage and screen than anyone can remember. In many ways, all actors live under his shadow, he has defined acting for his and all subsequent generations. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the movie that made Pacino a star, The Godfather, and the great thespian is still working, most recently in House of Gucci.
Godfather is the hallmark of early-era Pacino, Gucci being late-era Pacino. So that's why it's interesting to revisit two NYC-centric movies that Al Pacino made in 1997 -- Donnie Brasco and The Devil's Advocate -- that mark mid-era Pacino.
Both movies are good -- not great -- but both show the huge range of the Bronx born actor.
In Donnie Brasco, Pacino plays Lefty, an aging, low-level NYC mafiso. He is befriended by a jewel thief named Donnie Brasco who, we learn very quickly, is actually an undercover FBI agent named Joe (played by Johnny Depp). Lefty takes Donnie under his wing, teaching him the ways of the mob and giving him lots of advice ("One broad, that's enough"). They try to get a club going in Florida -- yeah, that doesn't work out -- and they become part of a larger power struggle within the mob. These are guys who actually watched The Godfather but it couldn't be farther from their lives. How this ends, you can imagine -- but the bond between Lefty and Donnie is beautiful and tragic to watch.
Unlike many of his performances from this era, Pacino is very understated in this movie. He's mostly quiet except for when he feels offended. Lefty is a sad figure -- after 30 years in the mob, he has little in ways of power or money to show for it. He's scrapping by, still trying to prove himself. What makes Donnie Brasco so unlike most mob movies or TV shows (like Goodfellas, The Sopranos, even The Godfather movies), is that it makes life in the mob seem truly dreary and pressure-filled. Lefty and many of his cohorts aren't rich, they aren't dripping in bling or living in big houses or driving fancy cars, and, as indicated, not a lot of broads. They also spend all their time following orders and doing grunt work. It's a hand-to-mouth existence, and Pacino's deeply sensitive performance makes your heart ache for a man who has wasted his life for nothing -- although, as we realize, he probably didn't have anything else going for him either. This movie, and Pacino's performance, gets under your skin with its sad comment on humanity -- and it's also a master at the top his craft.
Then there's The Devil's Advocate. Long story short, it's a movie about how New York City is Hell and Al Pacino (playing a lawyer) is the Devil. A young hot-shot criminal lawyer from Florida named Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves playing smart for once) is tempted to NYC by Pacino's superlawyer John Milton (Get it? Paradise Lost!) to represent Milton's megafirm clients who get into criminal trouble. Milton assigns Kevin to a murder case involving a billionaire real-estate magnet (there's even a scene that was shot in Donald Trump's apartment before we fully realized that he was actually the Devil), and it sends Kevin down into a personal and moral tailspin that involves his shallow but vulnerable wife (played by a wonderful Charlize Theron in one of her first big movies). It climaxes with fire and brimstone Devil Al Pacino yelling -- A LOT -- especially about why God's prick ("He's a tight ass! ... Worship that? NEVAH'!"), and has a very suprising ending.
No critic will ever call this Pacino's best performance but, along with Big Boy Caprice in Dick Tracy, it's one of his most fun. Pacino is all id, all wildness, all attitude in this movie precisely because his character (El Diablo himself) is nothing but that. Pacino's greatest skill as an actor comes from the great depth of human feeling that he imbues his characters with -- here, because his character is the very anti-thesis of humanity, he make you sympathize, make you like, makes you want to keep hanging with the greatest evil ever. If the Devil existed, and he really was Al Pacino, doubtless we'd all become Satinists.
So I highly recommend these two mid-era Pacinos movie that show the immense range of his talent -- and you'll also be highly entertained.
Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of the classic movie The Godfather which made its cast (Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall, James Caan, and others) into huge stars (and cemented Marlon Brando's cinematic comeback). It also made its director, Francis Ford Coppola, into a household name.
Prior to The Godfather -- which became the highest grossest movie of all time when it was released in 1972 -- Coppola had only directed a few movies (Finian's Rainbow, The Rain People), none of which were successful. But prior to his Mafia classic, Coppola made his first movie in 1966, and it's actually one of his best: You're a Big Boy Now.
Set in NYC during the psychedelic '60s, the movie is about a young man named Bernard (Peter Kastner) who lives under the thumb of his controlling parents (Rip Torn and Geraldine Page) and works at the New York Public Library. Bernard and other library flunkies move around the stacks looking for books and documents on roller skates and daydream about leading more exciting lives. Bernard decides to move out of his parents home on Long Island and into an apartment in Manhattan. Naive, virginal, innocent and sincere, Peter roams around Times Square and the city, finding temptation around every corner. He falls for a go-go dancer and actress named Barbara Darling (Elizabeth Hartman) who teases him constantly, all the while being pursued by a sweet girl named Amy (Karen Black), a former classmate of his. Many hijinks ensue including with a rooster that attacks attractive women (!) and that take young Bernard from the streets of the city into walk-up apartments, off-off-Broadway theaters, Central Park, and adult stores.
But, fear not, true love prevails.
You're a Big Boy Now is what I'd call a "romp": there are many wacky surreal scenes that would be annoying if it wasn't for the fact that we really like Bernard and are rooting for him. The characters are all very unique and well-drawn, and all of the acting is first-rate. Most of all, this is a very stylishly-directed film -- unlike Coppola's later slowing-moving, epic films, You're a Big Boy Now is fast-moving with lots of quick cuts, clearly influenced by the French New Wave and rock'n'roll spirit of the times (music by The Lovin' Spoonful plays throughout the movie).
The movie came out a year before The Graduate and shares, in plot and tone, much in common with You're a Big Boy Now. But whereas the 1967 California-based movie is a very mainstream, straight-forward telling of a young man's coming of age, this 1966 NYC-based flick is an odd, eccentric, art movie about the same subject.
So, to sum up: You're a Big Boy Now is a very good, very 1960's, very NYC movie about moving into adulthood, and, since it's the debut film of one cinema's greatest directors, it's a must-see.
P.S. This was the first movie made under the Mayor's Office of Film and Television. I remember, years ago, seeing an old clip of Mayor John Lindsay giving a press conference, announcing the creation of this office and this movie being shortly going into production. Standing right behind him was a young, fully-bearded Francis Ford Coppola which Lindsay pronounced "Cap-polla."
Two vaunted pieces of NYC culture are the 1972 movie The Godfather and the 1996 Broadway musical Rent. This year Rent celebrated its 25th anniversary and, next year, The Godfather will celebrate its 50th.
One is about the mafia in the 1940s and '50s; the other is about young people in the 1990s. While both works couldn't be more different, they remain beloved classics since they are brilliantly crafted stories about the city as a place of great opportunity and great danger. In short, both stories are about NYC as a place where the American dream thrives -- if it doesn't kill you first.
There is a new genre of info-tainment that's becoming more popular: books, documentaries, podcasts, and movies about the creation of classic works of entertainment. Sometimes, even not that classic.
And this year is no different. There is a new movie coming soon about Jonathan Larson, the creator of Rent, based on a meta-musical he wrote about the making of Rent called tick ... tick ... Boom. It's directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Also, there is a new book called Leave the Gun, Take the Cannolis about the making of The Godfather. You should read this fascinating excerpt about how Marlon Brando came to play -- and discover -- the character of Don Vito Corleone, one of the most iconic performances in cinema history.
Whenever you encounter a masterpiece, a perfectly realized work of art, it's easy to believe that it somehow grew out of the earth, emerged complete from the ground, like some kind of beautiful plant. But no. There was time when their creators would struggling, working hard, putting the pieces together, re-working and re-writing and re-doing it all, probably fighting feelings of failure and doubt, doing their level best to create something good -- and they had no idea at the time that they were creating something that would resonate across time. They just wanted to get it done and get it done as best they could. History would take it from there.
Yours truly has not yet seen the popular new show Only Murders in the Building that involves Steve Martin and Martin Short solving murders in an Upper West Side building with, of all people, Selena Gomez. But the show is a big hit and it's apparently created some interest in the popular neighborhood not seen since the days of You've Got Mail twenty-odd years ago.
What's happened to the Upper West Sideis indicative of what's happened to NYC in general over the last fifty-something years: from hellscape to playground, from wild to, well, kinda boring.
This years marks the 50th anniversary of Panic in Needle Park, the movie Al Pacino made just before The Godfather. The brutal story about heroin addicts hanging out in Verdi Square on West 72nd street made the Upper West Side look like a village of the damned. This was on the heels of 1968's Rosemary's Baby where the Devil literally took over the body of a young housewife living in the Dakota, just down the block. A few years later came Taxi Driver, with Robert De Niro's crazed Travis Bickle turning into a horrific vigilanty -- and living and hanging out mostly on the Upper West Side. Then, in 1989, Pacino returned to the neighborhood in Sea of Love where he pursued a serial killer, Even the city's "hoity toity" lived in the squalor -- in 1990's Metropolitan the young Tom Townsend lived in the 'hood in genteel poverty -- in great contrast to his Upper East Side debutante friends.
But forget the movies -- reality was just as scary and sexy. John Lennon was killed in front of the Dakota in 1980. The swinger's club Plato's Retreat was going full blast. I grew up in the area and remember the Upper West Side as a decaying but nonetheless fun neighborhood -- and it felt like a neighborhood, a community, a place unto its own.
This article from Town & Country nails the evolution of the Upper West Side, how it's gone from a place of wildness, a sexy and scary place, into a not terribly interesting suburb. Lots of chain stores, lots of high-end boutiques, lots of expensive restaurants, lots of new glass buildings. Now it's safe. It's "family friendy." It's dull. Don't get me wrong -- it's lovely, and a great place to live. But the Upper West Side of yore is, well, yored. All we have are the memories.
On the face of it, the 1970s movies Serpico and The Turning Point couldn't be more different: the former is a real-life story about dirty cops, the latter is a fictional story about ballet.
But watching them makes you realize they share a lot in common: besides both movies being made in the 1970s in NYC, they are gritty, brutal, totally realistic deep-dives into high-pressure, competitive, all-consuming worlds that their denizens both love and revile, that reach into the very cores of their being, enthralling and warping them, and completing devouring their lives.
Back in the 1970s Hollywood used to make movies like these, movies where not everyone and everything was beautiful, where the world was reflected back to us in all of its deformed glory, where we saw and heard people who were in pain, and where things didn't always end happily. These movies were overshadowed by many othe great classics from that time (The French Connection, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws, Rocky, Star Wars, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, you name 'em), but these two slice-of-life movies of believable realism cut just as deep emotionally as any of those other great '70s flicks.
Serpico stars Al Pacino as real-life cop Frank Serpico who "blew the whistle" on massive, entranched corruption within the NYPD, leading to the Knapp Commission and major reforms. Serpico (who's still alive!) was an odd fit with the NYPD, more of a hippy than a tough guy, someone who didn't believe violence and brute force necessarily meant good policing, and someone who didn't think corruption should ever be "business as usual". He took his life into his hands to expose the corruption and, afterwards, quit the NYPD and left the country. Directed by Sidney Lumet at the height of his career, the movie was made just a year after the main events in the film so it was an almost real-time retelling of how and why Serpico changed the NYPD -- and the whole city -- forever. Pacino was just then becoming a star -- the first Godfather movie had just come out and he was just about to start work on the second one -- but this film showed his incredible range, his ability to transform into complicated people, the depth of a soul that is both revealing and mysterious. The film is also a very realistic look at what NYC was like back in the early 1970s and, watching it now, you see how much the city has changed while also realizing that problems with policing are, well, perennial.
The Turning Point is much different but no less intense: as someone who had experience in the world of professional ballet, I can tell you that it's a tough, insular, and unforgiving world. People in ballet LOVE balletto an irrational level, it completely dominates their minds and bodies, they speak and think and do nothing else. They sacrifice their lives and physical, mental, and emotional well-being in pursuit of career in it. There is no divide between their personal and professional lives. This film asks but doesn't attempt to answer this question: at what price glory? Shirley McClaine stars as DeeDee, a woman who relinquished a ballet career to move with her former dancer husband Wayne (Tom Skerritt) to Oklahoma City and raise a family and live a quiet life. Events ensue bringing DeeDee and her daughter Emilia to NYC where Emilia shines with the company, and where DeeDee enounters her frenemy Emma (the always glorious Anne Bancroft) who started with the company at the same time as DeeDee, stayed, and become a big ballet star. There are affairs, fights, and great performances throughout the film that show, in raw and gorgeous ways, the constant fight between ambition and personal happiness, between career and family, about understanding your real values, and the sacrfifices and sadness that go with both. The film offers no easy answers and does what all great movies do -- it shows and doesn't tell (including showing lots of great ballet dancing). It's a film that moves you and makes you think about own life and values.
So if you want to see two old NYC movies that feel just as relevant today as they were more than 40 years ago, I can't suggest Serpico and The Turning Point enough.
Yours truly had yet to be born when the first two Godfather movies were released in 1972 and 1974. However, I clearly remember when, early in my teenage years, The Godfather Part III came out in December 1990.
The first two movies were huge critical and commercial successes, became cultural phenomena, and are widely regarded as some of the greatest movies ever made. Obviously the third movie had A LOT to live up to, with expectations nearly impossible to meet. The movie's production received lots of press attention and controversy -- actors were cast and then uncast, it cost a lot to make, etc. etc. I remember wondering why this particular movie was such a big deal but then my brother showed me the first two movies on videotape (remember videotape?) and then I was as excited as anyone to see this one.
Godfather III received a mixed reception from critics and audience upon its release -- some liked it a lot more than others -- but almost everyone agreed that it was nowhere near as good as its illustrious predecessors. I basically agree but, unlike some, I don't think this movie is as bad as some believe.
Normally when a classic film hits a big anniversary date, its gets some media attention and then that's that. But this year, this December, The Godfather Part III has been resurrected in a new form -- director Francis Ford Coppolla has recut the movie and is releasing it this month. It's basically a brand new movie and it even has a brand new title: The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone. The reception for this new version has been great and, much like thirty years ago, I can't wait to see it ... all over again.
And while The Godfather story is sprawling -- across decades, across countries -- it's fundamentally a New York City story. It's a story of immigrants, of strivers, of people wanting a better life, of people turning to crime so that their children can live the American dream. It's a story of how this city is a place of both great opportunity and great danger, of great possibilities and great pitfalls. It's a quiteseential NYC story, spiritally capturing this town as any story told before or since.
Forty years ago today one of the most infamous movie reviews in American history appeared in The New York Times. It was written by Vincent Canby, the most respected movie critic in America, and he was reviewing the new movie Heaven's Gate by director Michael Cimino. Cimino's previous film, The Deer Hunter, had won the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director the year before. Heaven's Gate had just had its premiere in NYC the night before, and this movie and review were much anticipated.
And movie history changed.
Canby wrote: "'Heaven's Gate' ... fails so completely that you might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his soul to the Devil to obtain the success of 'The Deer Hunter', and the Devil has just come around to collect ... an unqualified disaster."
Ouch.
United Artists, the studio that had financed and produced this movie, cancelled its scheduled wide-release in December. Cimino went back to the editing room, cutting down his nearly four-hour disaster into a two-and-a-half less-of-a-disaster. It was released in April, 1981 and earned about $1.5 million against a roughly $40 million-plus budget. It was the biggest failure in American history at the time -- and United Artists was sold to MGM and effectively ceased to exist.
One movie had brought down an entire studio. Like 9/11 or the Trump Presidency or COVID-19, something unthinkable had become quite real.
Cimino's career nose-dived after this -- he only made four small movies afterwards and then nothing at all before his death in 2016. His career was one of the quickest rises and falls of anyone in the history of movies. Over the years many people related to this movie -- either directly or indirectly -- have shared their memories of this unprecedented flop. It premiered in NYC on November 18th, 1980, and has become perhaps the most infamous movie premiere ever -- a party no one wanted to go to, a party everyone hated, a party that quickly turned into a kind of funeral. It was like being at the election night event for a losing candidate -- a candidate losing big.
Of course, in the forty years since, many other films have come and gone that failed bigger than Heaven's Gate. But this movie remains the most expensive failure in history -- it took down a studio, one started by, amongst others, Charlie Chaplin.
What's also sad is that Heaven's Gate had the potential to be a truly great movie -- another Godfather, another Chinatown, another Gone with the Wind. It was a revisionist anti-Western, a re-examination of America's founding myths of the West being this vast welcoming space where immigrants to roam free and realize their dreams. The film, based very loosely on Wyoming history, was about how, in the late 19th century, immigrants were murdered by wealthy cattle barons who resented and feared immigrants' enchroachments on their land (sound familiar?). These murders were, apparently, sanctioned by the Federal Government and President Benjamin Harrison. It was an American genocide, and all perfectly legal. Sadly the movie's notorious production and failure overwhelmed any interest in its plot or the history behind it -- and, instead, it was derided as American history's most expensive "minor footnote."
The movie also became a footnote in Hollywood history, a not-so-gentle reminder that no one controls or has the final say over history -- any kind of history.
If you want to more of Mr NYC's Michael Cimino/Heaven's Gate coverage, go here.
If you're looking for a gritty, pulpy piece of NYC action noir, you can't do better than Nighthawks from 1981. It falls into the same genre of NYC crime movie like The French Connection and The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 -- smart cops, haunted by demons, trying to stop vicious criminals intent on destroying the city.
It stars Sylvester Stallone and Billy Dee Williams -- at the height of their Rocky and Star Wars fame -- as two NYC cops hunting a terrorist who, after bombings and murder in London and Paris, escapes to NYC to continue his rampage. The plot is fairly standard -- the cops do lots of hard detective work, deal with annoying superiors and personal issues, catch a few lucky breaks, and it leads to lots of shooting, chasing, and action.
You don't watch a movie like this for the plot so much as for characters, the action, and ambiance -- and Nighthawks has plenty.
This is also a great NYC movie. It shows a cross-section of life in the city circa 1981. The action moves all over the city -- from the subways to the backstreets to the roofs of buildings, from apartments to brownstones, from the Bronx to Manhattan to Queens to Brooklyn, from high-end department stores to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Roosevelt Island tram (and Roosevelt Island itself), even literally into the East River.
Stalline is at his grizzled best, Williams is both intense and charasmatic, and the movie includes a great supporting cast with the late Joe Spinell (from The Godfather Part II), the late Persis Khambatta (Star Trek: The Motion Picture) and the gorgeous Lindsay Wagner right after the Bionic Woman. There's even a cameo by adult star Jamie Gillis! Most importantly, it stars Rutger Hauer in his American film debut as the scary villan.
This movie is as pulpy NYC as it gets, and a fascinating look back at another city at another time.
Recently I blogged about The Godfather Part II where the character Hyman Roth talks about his childhood pal Moe Green who invented the city of Las Vegas. In reality Hyman Roth was a gangster named Meyer Lanksy and his friend was Ben "Bugsy" Siegel, the mastermind behind the gambling mecca of America. Like Lansky, Siegel was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who grew up to be one of the most feared and powerful gangsters of his day -- or ever.
Bugsy was a killer and a visionary, a psychopath and a builder, a monster and a genius -- in many ways, the ultimate product of his hometown and country.
The 1991 movie Bugsy tells the story of the man's creation of Las Vegas. In the early 1940s, the powerful NYC mobster traveled to Los Angeles to take over the gambling rackets for his bosses in NYC, only to realize that next door in Nevada gambling was actually legal, and that an entire city and industry could be built around it. Bugsy's pursuit of this dream leads to his greatest professional triumph, something so much more than the life of crime and violence he had previously lived. But as his dream comes to fruition, his destruction comes with it. It's the story of triumph and tragedy, creation and death -- the American paradox that fuels our history.
Warren Beatty, nearing the end of his leading man days, plays the title character, and a young Annette Benning, in one of her break-out roles (both as an actress and Beatty's future wife) plays Virginia Hill, Bugsy's movie-actress mistress and partner in creation of the Flamingo, the first Las Vegas hotel. The supporting cast is the real treat of this movie -- Harvey Keitel plays Siegel's one-time adversary-turned partner Mickey Cohen, and the absolutely brilliant Ben Kingsley plays Meyer Lansky in a career-best performance (with all due respect to Gandhi, both the man and the movie, this may be his best work). It was directed by Barry Levinson, coming off his great success with Rain Man, and this movie is beautifully directed and produced. Made almost 30 years ago, this is the kind of dark, brutal, mature, literate, deeply dramatic movie that the big studios used to make and don't anymore. It was, in many ways, the last of its kind. While not a great movie like Chinatown or The Godfather flicks, it's worth seeing.
Bugsy is yet another in the unofficial Mr NYC canon of movies about New Yorkers far from home who either go on to greatest or ruin. This movie is really about both.
In the movie Chinatown, the evil Noah Cross says this twice about his former business partner Hollis Mulwray. Cross both loved and hated him. Mulwray built a dam that brought water to LA and made them rich. But when Mulwray refused to build another dam -- as part of a dark plot to steal water and land in the Valley, and to make LA even bigger -- Cross murdered him. Still, even after that, Cross pays tribute to his victim's great legacy.
Cross and Mulwray are entirely fictional, obviously, but Mulwray is based on the very real William Mulholland who built the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913, bringing massive amounts of fresh water to the young desert city. Within a decade its population has tripled -- oh yes, Mulholland made that city.
New York City is, of course, much older and not on a desert. And if you asked most people today who "made" NYC, they might point to Robert Moses or argue that no one person is responsible for "making" NYC in its 400-something year history.
But they would be wrong. One man did make NYC, at least the city of five boroughs we live in today: Andrew Haswell Green.
I blogged about him briefly a few years ago, specifically citing a Bowery Boys episode about the man. Yet I realize that I have not really given him his due: Green truly is the "Father of Greater New York." His vision, his efforts, his ideas, were resposible for: Central Park, The New York Public Library,The Metropolitan Museum, The Bronx Zoo, The American Museum of Natural History, Riverside Drive, Morningside Park, Fort Washington Park. And Green chaired the committee, and had the vision, to consolidate the five counties of Bronx, New York, Queens, Kings, and Richmond into one city -- Greater New York.
So yes -- he made this city! The NYC we live in today was Green's vision.
And the reason, I think, I never properly gave him his due it because our city, his city, hasn't done it either.
Remember in Godfather II when Hyman Roth says about his (also) dead former partner Moe Green that he was responsible for creating Las Vegas? And remember when Roth yells that there isn't even a signpost or plaque commorating this "great man"?
Well, in Mr NYC's opinion, the memorials to Green NYC are extremely insufficiant. There's a small park on the Upper East Side and a bench in Central Park. There's also an island up in the Niagara River named after him. But these minor memorials don't seem to, in any way, really give the man his due. He doesn't even have a street or a building named after him! Ed Koch has a friggin' major bridge named after him -- but not this guy? Green needs to have a massive memorial named after him, a huge tribute.
The fall of 1989 was an eventful time -- not unlike now. Communism in Eastern Europe and the Berlin Wall were collapsing. Apartheid was drawing to a close in South Africa. Here in NYC there was a legendary election raging between three men who had and would be Mayor -- Ed Koch, David Dinkins, and Rudy Giuliani. And our movie theaters saw the debut of two classic NYC crime thrillers: Sea of Love and Crimes and Misdemeanors. Watching them again after 30 years, they more than hold up -- they are examples of great storytelling, brilliant acting, peaks in the arcs of historic careers, and wonderful NYC movies. Despite being thrillers, and being very different movies, they have one big thing in common: they are studies in the trials and tribulations of becoming middle-aged.
Sea of Love: Al Pacino stars as a Manhattan cop named Frank Keller. He's a classic movie detective: getting older, divorced, drinking problem, wondering if he should "put in his papers" to retire at "his 20" (years on the force that is), and generally depressed about his life. Meanwhile he's investigating a series of murders -- men who had answered personal ads turning up dead, shot in the head. The latest victim had a 45 record playing when he was found -- "Sea of Love." Frank and his new partner Sherman (investigating a similar murder in Queens) start an undercover operation where they will place a personal ad in the paper, meet up with women at a restaurant, and then take the glasses from the dates to swab them for prints. They hope that this will link them with the killer. But then Frank meets a woman named Helen on one of these dates -- and they fall for each other, hard. Suddenly Frank finds a new unexpected love, a new joie de vivre, but there continue to be more murders and Helen starts to look more and more guilty -- until he finds out the truth and solves the case. (I remember the tagline for this movie: "He's found somone who's either the love of his life ... or the end of it!").
This movie was a big deal for Al Pacino -- his career had been in decline for most of the 1980s, after his triumphs of the 1970s and early '80s (think The Godfather to Scarface period). Sea of Love was his comeback, a big hit that started the next act of his career. Meanwhile John Goodman was breaking out from Roseanne and his performance as Sherman made him a big movie actor too. Ellen Barkin was a star then too, and few performances are as sexy and frightening as her's in this movie. What's fascinating about this movie is that, while it's certainly a sexy thriller, it's also a working class NYC movie, set largely on a still-then middle-class Upper West Side. It's both extremely familiar and also exotic -- it's about becoming middle age, trying to find a new happiness, figuring out life, working hard for a living while also trying to find excitement and thrills.
Crimes and Misdeameanors: Woody Allen has made nearly 50 movies, many of them great. This may very well be his masterpiece. Woody has directed numerous comedies and a few dramas but this was his first movie to combine both comedy and drama. In fact, the movie contains two stories -- one comic, one tragic -- and the endings of each make them come together in a way you wouldn't expect. The drama centers around a man named Judah (played by Martin Landeau who got an Oscar nomination for it), an extremely successful eye doctor who has recently overseen the opening of a new opthalmology wing at a hospital. But Judah has a dark secret: he has been conducting an affair for a few years with a former airline stewardess (a scary Angelica Huston) who is making increasingly desperate demands that Judah leave his wife or else she'll confront his entire family about his adultery and also reveal his financial chicaneries. Judah calls up his brother Jack -- a dissolute character with underworld connections -- who sets up a hit to kill the mistress. Will Judah get caught and the scheme unravel? You need to see the movie to find out! Meanwhile, the comic story concerns a man named Cliff (played by Woody), a struggling documentary filmmaker who also has a failing marriage (although no mistress) who is making a TV special on his very successful brother-in-law, a pompous Harvey Weinstein-like producer named Lester. One of the producers on the TV special is a woman named Hailey who both Cliff and Lester fall for -- will she choose either man or reject both of them? Again, you need to see the movie to find out! And how do the stories relate, one makes them link-up? Again, only Woody Allen would make the connecting character a rabbi who's going blind ...
Woody Allen is not only one of our greatest directors -- he's also probably the most brilliant screenwriters of all time (he's been nominated for more screenplay Oscars than anyone in history). The Crimes and Misdemeanors script is perfect -- specifically the way that these seemingly unrelated stories are interrcut and made to relate to each other, the tightness and swiftness of the plots, the enormous amount of character development and emotional complexity in a few lines of dialogue, it is simply the best kind of storytelling you can ever encounter. The major overarching theme of this movie is seeing -- looking at what's in front of you and also trying to see something that may or may not be there. This is a movie, in some ways, about people who are looking not only for love but also for mercy and justice and order in the world -- a kind of God -- and not finding it. I remember reading that this is the movie where Woody looked for God and "found Him not there." This movie won't make you find God (in fact, his absence will only be confirmed) but you will certainly see a truly great movie by one of NYC's best filmmakers.
