The Taking of Pelham 123
Directed by Tony Scott
“What the hell did they expect for their lousy 35 cents? To live forever?”
So says a disgruntled New York City bureaucrat annoyed at having to work too hard on a day when some hijackers have taken over a Lexington Avenue subway car and are threatening the passengers.
This line is one of several dozen glorious bits of New York dialogue emanating from an unexpectedly great screenplay. Its author was the late Peter Stone, a Broadway playwright who brought astonishing zing to a throwaway urban thriller with a television director named Joseph Sargent at the helm and a cast of New York actors serving under Walter Matthau, then the most unlikely and most wonderful star of his or any other time.
The movie is 1974’s The Taking of Pelham 123, and even though the word “unpretentious” could have been coined to describe it, the thing has legs. As many of the more prestigious movies of the decade have faded–Coming Home, anyone? Julia, perhaps? The Deer Hunter, people?–the reputation of The Taking of Pelham 123 has grown. It is, in its way, perfect. The movie emerges from a hot summer day in New York; Matthau is a New York transit cop named Garber showing a bunch of Japanese subway officials around the shabby command center, which looks low-tech even for 1974.
Meanwhile, four men who call each other Mr. Green, Mr. Blue, Mr. Grey, and Mr. Brown board a subway at Grand Central, take control of the first car, detach it from the rest of the train, and use the train radio to demand a ransom of (cue the Dr. Evil imitation) one million dollars.
The mayor, sick at home in Gracie Mansion with a wicked cold, swears like a sailor and whines like a child (“this city doesn’t have a million dollars!”). Incompetent cops crash their car when driving the ransom money to the tunnel. Garber stews. His colleagues at Subway Central bellyache (“we had a bomb scare in Brooklyn yesterday, but it turned out to be a cantaloupe”) and some passengers die. A sneeze, of all things, helps complete the plot.
The director had almost free run of the subway system, for which the producers paid a small fee of $25,000 to the Metropolitan Transit Authority. After its release, when officials realized they had cooperated with a movie depicting a ransom scheme for a few bucks, they mostly ended the practice of licensing the system to Hollywood, and now all subway movies are filmed in an abandoned station in Brooklyn.
As a result, never before or since have the New York subways been depicted so vividly. And since the movie was made at a moment of low ebb, with stations and subway cars alike all grimy, ugly, ill-kept, and riddled with graffiti, the movie functions as a look back at the world’s greatest city when it seemed as though it was sliding into the decline that Detroit has instead suffered.
Mostly, though, what makes The Taking of Pelham 123 so wonderful are the words Peter Stone put into his characters’ mouths. They are all New York City ethnics, white and black and Puerto Rican, and Stone takes complete advantage of the city’s informal, blustery, large-hearted style of kibitzing, wisecracking, and playful putting-down. Netflix it, or better yet, go out and buy it.
I’m telling you all this because The Taking of Pelham 123, which was more than a B movie but a little less than an A movie, has now been remade with Denzel Washington in the Walter Matthau role and John Travolta as the head criminal (a part originally played by Robert Shaw, the magnificent villain who was also the shark hunter in Jaws). It turns out to be surprisingly watchable; I say surprisingly because the director is Tony Scott, an overcooker of a melodramatist who never saw a straightforward storyline he wouldn’t gussy up with excessive camera moves and hyperactive bloodletting. But Washington is very, very good and Travolta is unpredictable and frightening, and there are good crashes and explosions, and James Gandolfini is in it too, so who could complain?
The new movie demonstrates that the essential plot–a subway train held hostage and the cat-and-mouse game between the authorities and the hostage-takers–is so strong that it has now carried the day for two enjoyable movies 35 years apart. The plot is the work of a hack writer named Morton Freedgood, who wrote a novel with the same title under the pen name John Godey.
Peter Stone could have come up with a great joke about that. But if Tony Scott and Brian Helgeland, the screenwriter of the sequel, have ever even heard of a joke, you wouldn’t know it from this movie, which is about as light-spirited as a documentary about Darfur orphans. The terrific tonal shifts in the original, from funny to heart-pounding in about a second, have no parallel in the undeniably propulsive and exciting new film, which is so intense that, by the end, its intensity gets a little monotonous. Not bad. Just not as good.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
