This is a caper movie.\u00a0 Four men armed with machine guns hijack a New York City subway train and hold the passengers for a million-dollar ransom.\u00a0 Walter Matthau plays Lt. Garber of the NYC Transit Authority Police who negotiates with the kidnappers.\u00a0 Robert Shaw is \u201cMr. Blue,\u201d the criminal mastermind of the gang.\u00a0 With supporting cast members Jerry Stiller as Lt. Rico Patrone, a cop working for Garber, Martin Balsam as \u201cMr. Green,\u201d the man in the gang who knows how to run a subway train and Lee Wallace as the despised and cowardly Mayor of New York the movie is a taut drama with humor and suspense mixing perfectly to suspend disbelief.\u00a0 And with gobs of local color from a supporting cast that acts and talks remarkably like actual New Yorkers of the period (as I can personally attest) the movie bumps along from the initial capture of the train to the first dead body to the mad dash to get the ransom money to the stone-cold killers who enforce a deadline with the lives of the hostages at gunpoint.<\/p>\n
Matthau and Stiller provide the comic relief and Shaw provides the menace with bloodless calm.\u00a0 The hostages are a tapestry of the ethnicities and callings of that time and the other parts, cops, the mayor\u2019s cronies and the transit workers all add texture to the story.\u00a0 And the swearing!\u00a0 Except for Robert Shaw almost every character including the women curse a blue streak.\u00a0 Some of it is actually quite amusing but it should be mentioned in case there are any folks who would take offense.\u00a0 And the most important character of the whole drama is the New York City subway system of that era.\u00a0 The movie was made in and on the subway trains and tunnels and it is unmistakably authentic.\u00a0 It brings back the thousands of hours of my life I spent travelling around Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan and The Bronx on subway cars.<\/p>\n
Here we are almost fifty years since this movie was made and it stands up very well although only the old remember the New York City being represented.\u00a0 I must confess it did my heart good to see the people of that era being represented.\u00a0 The city back then probably had a higher crime rate than even now in these post George Floyd riots times.\u00a0 And racial tensions were high and neighborhoods treated outsiders with suspicion.\u00a0 But at least back then people still considered the police as part of the solution.\u00a0 Nowadays the police are so disrespected that they probably wouldn\u2019t even bother to save the hostages\u2019 lives.\u00a0 They\u2019d wait until the hostages were shot and then write up the reports and look for some surveillance footage for the six o\u2019clock news report.<\/p>\n
I highly recommend this movie with just a warning about the swearing for the genteel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is a caper movie.\u00a0 Four men armed with machine guns hijack a New York City subway train and hold the passengers for a million-dollar<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,237],"tags":[1676,1233,1338,3130],"class_list":["post-14910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-reviews","tag-martin-balsam","tag-new-york-city","tag-robert-shaw","tag-walter-matthau"],"yoast_head":"\n