I haven’t seen many films that have been able to nail the elusive character of the prototypical hard-boiled New Yorker, that mixture of gumption, aggravation and good humor, but The Taking of Pelham One Two Three gets close. Film Forum snuck it into its “NYC Noir” five-week festival but it’s not especially noirish. First, with such snappy and funny dialogue, it’s more of a comedy. It’s not even in black and white as I had assumed but simmering with the alternately grim and garish hues of mid-’70s Manhattan, the latter best exemplified by Walter Matthau’s lemon-yellow necktie and a button-down shirt patterned in a multicolored checkerboard pattern resembling the dance floor in Saturday Night Fever.
Matthau plays a exasperated yet savvy lieutenant in the MTA’s police division whose workday takes an unexpected turn when he learns a subway car’s been hijacked and the passengers are being held for a $1 million ransom. For a film focusing mostly on this non action-packed standoff (and surprisingly little on the hostages, which are stock characters), the storyline managed to keep my attention, not only by slowly revealing how the four hijackers are planning on escaping with $1 million from a subway tunnel, but by bringing to life the city-worker characters: the salty coworkers of Matthau’s, the cranky flu-ridden mayor (the Koch-like Lee Wallace), and various cops bound by procedure and red tape.
After post-movie drinks downtown, instead of taking the subway home, which would have been only appropriate after watching perhaps the greatest New York City subway movie ever made, I took a cab, which I almost never do. I don’t recall seeing one of these before but my cab had a TV screen built into the back seat to bombard me with commercials, though at a push of the touch-screen, brought up a map that refreshed every few seconds to show the position of the cab as a green dot. Not very useful to me but mesmerizing anyway.