- For a brief period in the 1970's it was possible, and even fashionable, to arrange an entire suspense film around a group of irate, hysterical, unattractive people. These characters, more often than not New Yorkers, were always captives of some sort, usually as a result of either a natural disaster or a hijacking. In those strange times, potato-faced leading men like Walter Matthau and George Kennedy reigned supreme. Women were included primarily to scream or to voice concerns about the safety of children and racial issues were commented upon often and in ways that feel uncomfortable today. Despite their general cheesiness and dated attitudes, I have to admit that I love this type of film. Dog Day Afternoon is one, Airport is another, and Joseph Sargent's The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is the one I watched this weekend.
- Incidentally, you would be hard-pressed to find a film with more expert deployment of profanity than this one. "What about Scorsese and Tarantino!" you object, but no--they both intentionally journey far beyond the pale in matters of cussing. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three understands that its characters would curse at rates greatly exceeding the national average and constructs dialogue appropriately. There's no rhetorical flair and relatively little in the way of original expressions. The mayor of New York (Lee Wallace) finally concedes that he has to meet hijackers' demands and emotes with a simple "Shit, piss, fuck!" A subway employee (Tom Pedi) loudly wonders, "How the hell can you run a goddamn railroad without swearing?" The film's best line occurs when a random passenger exclaims "There's nobody driving the fucking train!" How could any disaster be summed up more concisely than that?
- Speaking of hijackers and trains, the plot revolves around four men (Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam, Hector Elizondo, and Earl Hindman) who have taken over the Pelham 1:23 subway train and the noble police lieutenant Garber (Walter Matthau) trying to stop them. Naturally, you will wonder how any criminal could expect to escape from an underground train, but rest assured the movie and its villains already thought of that. The criminals themselves go by colorful code names like Mr. Blue (Shaw) and Mr. Green (Balsam), another element of the film that Tarantino would later emulate. Take longer than an hour to get them their money, they announce, and they'll start killing one hostage per minute. The volatile Mr. Grey (Elizondo) may not wait even that long, much to the annoyance of Mr. Blue. The train conductor (James Broderick) is helpless, the police (Jerry Stiller, Julius Harris) are dumbfounded, and the subway employees (Dick O'Neill) are steaming mad. What is a level-headed fellow like Garber to do except to discover what these crooks are up to before it's too late?
- While the immensely talented Matthau and Shaw are clearly there to anchor the cast, the fact is that The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is fundamentally an ensemble affair. It's a film populated almost exclusively with character actors whose presence infuses a surprising believability into a fundamentally implausible story about a train hijacking. It isn't just the profanity that adds earthiness to the proceedings, either. In this film, people sneeze, work stinks, the subways are crowded, and everybody is loud and awful. In fact, the film's world resembles the real one in every respect except that trains aren't generally taken over by eccentric British thieves willing to electrocute themselves to avoid capture. The direction, like the rest of the film, is none-too-flashy but pleasantly gritty. The location filming is wonderful. Doubtless the film's own characters would describe the overall result as fucking terrific.
- Doris Roberts and Tony Roberts (unrelated) also have minor roles.
