Surely no city in the world has served as setting for more movies than has New York, this entry-way, this battleground between human forces, this city of dreams and nightmares. Besides, movies began here on the afternoon of May 11, 1896, when William Heise set up in Herald Square a new invention of his employer Thomas Alva Edison that exposed not one photograph plate but one after another, sixteen times per second, capturing the most common of street-scenes and fascinating audiences with these “actualities” of life in our city.
Except for having enough room, downtown Manhattan has an excess of nearly everything, not the least are great movies. The earliest film on The Villager Directory list is a silent film released in 1931; the most recent is a 2008 Academy Award-winning documentary. Two films were written by the film’s director and star, and two directors have two films each on the list. One film is a musical, three tell of the immigrant experience, three star downtown’s most noted actor Robert DeNiro, and four are about gangsters though only two occur in Little Italy. There’s a film about a poet, a rock star, an aerialist extraordinaire, firefighters, high-rollers, down-and-outers, dreamers, voyeurs, lovers, even a ghost, and so as young Harvey Keitel as Charlie said in Mean Streets after his buddy ripped off two kids from the suburbs, “Let’s go to the movies.”

City Lights

In the original movie poster for City Lights from 1931, the Little Tramp is silhouetted against the towering backdrop of an art nouveau Manhattan skyline. It’s the 1920s as we hear a clarinet’s opening notes, then later a good Gershwin “Rhapsody in Blue” imitation; the cars are fancy, the clothes stylish. “A Comedy Romance in Pantomime” is how this little treasure promotes itself although ‘talkies’ had been fascinating audiences for several years by then. Written, directed, and starring Charlie Chaplin, with Virginia Cherrill as the blind Flower Girl, this film is simply told, each scene filled with humor and tenderness. Chaplin first portrayed the Little Tramp in the 1921 film The Kid; in 1935 he played this endearing, noble character for the last time in his film Modern Problems. Despite the Little Tramp’s constant good cheer and politeness to all, there is always deep pathos in him as well, which is why the story of the blind flower girl is so touching; she too has sorrow in her affliction despite her lovely, smiling face.
There are two storylines in City Lights which appears set in a version of perhaps Gramercy Park: the Tramp’s relationship with a millionaire who, when drunk, loves the Little Tramp but can’t remember him when sober, and the blind flower girl who thinks the Little Tramp is wealthy. Moved by her situation and beauty, the Little Tramp both aids her at her modest home and is determined to make money for an operation that promises sight. If you haven’t seen this movie I will not spoil the ending, and though referred to by many movie lovers as the most heart-wrenching scene in American cinema, what is most remarkable is the slapstick, so utterly simple and brilliant, Chaplin brings to every scene. This type of comedy cannot be explained, and the film, only 87 minutes long, embodies the spirit of the city: not the arrogance and insensitivity of the rich and powerful, not the mighty structures rising above us, but the kindness and generosity of those of us living here.

The Bowery

Directed by Raoul Walsh (who also directed High Sierra and White Heat) and released in 1933, The Bowery is an energetic, twisting, improbable, and wonderfully entertaining view of New York’s most notorious avenue during one of the city’s most exciting decades: the late years of the 19th century. The cast includes Wallace Beery, a saloon owner named Chuck Connors, and his rival Steve Brodie starring George Raft. In 1933, the same year that King Kong was released, Fay Wray plays Lucy Calhoun who, like Stephen Crane’s Maggie, is desperate and adrift in the city. Other characters have outrageous names like Slick, Lumpy Hogan, Googy, and a young Jackie Cooper playing a street punk named Swipes McGurk. Though everyone in the film is exaggerated, at times buffoonish, and the costumes are caricatures of the Gay Nineties style, this film recalls Three Penny Opera as it follows the lives, conflicts, loves, and dreams of con artists, thugs, and those struggling to survive along the Bowery. Based on a novel by Michael Simmons and B. Rogow Solomon, the script by James Gleason contains the prejudices of the day towards anyone who isn’t white. For instance, the rock Cooper throws through a Chinatown window starts a fire, consuming the block and killing many people. When Beery upbraids Cooper for his action the kid replies, “They was just chinks,” then Beery smiles and musses the boy’s hair.
As in Scorsese’s Gangs of New York and with only a few more inaccuracies, this film attempts some type of historical context with enactments of Carrie Nation with her band of temperance women who hatchet, then burn Connor’s saloon, the heavyweight champ John L. Sullivan throws one punch, and Beery’s character enlists at the start of the Spanish-American War. Our brief, bloated struggle with Spain began in 1898, but shortly before Beery enlists, George Raft’s character Steve Brodie performs a ‘stunt’ that actually happened in New York only in 1886. And this is my favorite part of the film, for there truly was a New Yorker named Steve Brodie who staged and became famous for a leap from the Brooklyn Bridge on July 23, 1886. In truth Brodie staged the event though his own Bowery saloon had a painting over the bar as “proof” of his leap. In the film Raft intended tossing a dummy off the bridge but the dummy couldn’t be found, so he leaps for real, at least for real in this fun, preposterous view of old New York.

Dead End

In 1935, a group of young actors from New York appeared as a petty gang of street urchins in Broadway’s production of Dead End. Written by Sidney Kingsley about slum life and its relationship to crime, the play was later bought by Samuel Goldwyn who planned turning the play into a movie. Unable to find Hollywood actors who could play the young New York gang as well as the original cast, Goldwyn brought the actors to Hollywood to star in the 1937 film Dead End, script by Lillian Hellman and with Humphrey Bogart as the mobster Baby Face Martin. The young actors from New York became known as the Dead End Kids, led by Tommy (Billy Halop), with Dippy (Huntz Hall), Angel (Bobby Jordan), Spit (Leo Grocery), T.B. (Gabriel Dell), and Milty (Bernard Punsly).
Known later as the East Side Boys, then the Bowery Boys, the group made the films Crime School and Angels with Dirty Faces in the next few years with Warner Brothers after Goldwyn sold their contract owing to the rowdy and often dangerous antics of the young actors. Two years later, Warner Brothers dropped the young men for similar reasons. But those first three films immortalized the young actors and established the stereotypic New York street punk who ‘don’t wanna woyk’ and ‘knows dis guy on touty-toyd street.’ Perhaps their most enduring film was Angels with Dirty Faces, released in 1938 and directed by Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) and starring James Cagney as Rocky Sullivan who, just released from prison, returns to his old neighborhood. Himself born on the Lower East Side, Cagney is both playful and tough with the Dead End Kids who see the mobster as their idol. But Rocky is convicted of murder, and before being sent to the electric chair he’s asked by his boyhood friend, the neighborhood priest played by Pat O’Brien, to “turn yellow” so the boys will no longer idolize him. Though Cagney scornfully refuses, his scene where he’s led screaming and kicking into death is Cagney at his best, receiving his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
“Tell us Fadda, did Rocky really die yellow?” the gang asks, and though knowing otherwise O’Brien told the boys he had, and so hopefully changing their wayward path.

Rear Window

Look next time at Hitchcock’s masterpiece thriller Rear Window from a New York point of view. Scriptwriter John Michael Hayes took the short story “It Had to be Murder” by William Irish and set it in Greenwich Village, or at least a 1954 Hollywood stage-set version of the Village. With all the shades open to apartments facing not across a street but a yard, the film is like watching a dozen films at once while the main story unfolds: a possible murder witnessed by a professional photographer (Jimmy Stewart) forced by a broken leg to sit in a wheelchair six weeks. At first he merely gazes out the window to avoid the trouble between him and his girlfriend (Grace Kelly) but soon, like so many of us, he’s hooked at looking into other windows, into other lives. It’s a New York tradition, ritual, fantasy, need, vice, wonder.
“That’s a secret, private world you’re looking into out there,” scowls friend detective Wendall Corey.
One couple sleeps on the fire escape, the pathetic Miss Lonelyhearts (names given by Stewart) dresses herself pretty, putters with make-up, sets the table and pours wine for two, then cries alone. A dog is lowered by basket to use the yard (my top-floor neighbor used to send hers to the roof). There’s Miss Torso, the dancer prancing, posing, practicing in her underwear (abundant, ample though still alluring 1950s underwear), and the suspected murderer himself (Raymond Burr) who thankfully also keeps the shades open. Even when the shades are closed they’re still not shut as we can see right through the slates.
The views into the windows are often typical New York visions: a party of young people, girls in party dresses, guys in shirt and tie. Jazz plays, and at another window a man composes classical music on the piano. Sometimes during the day we hear a woman practicing an opera, at times the music from the street resembles an Italian feast. Occasionally we hear car horns; there is glass broken once but no sirens, no trucks, and—ah, the old days—no buses with airbrakes.
The backs of the buildings look nothing like the Village but actually seem a composite of many styles all mixed into one back yard. A small opening between the buildings provides a slice of the street which too looks nothing like New York. Even the only taxi is more brown than yellow. The suspect’s address is 125 West 9th Street, which doesn’t exist. But no matter; this is a voyeuristic movie-lover’s movie, with movies within movies, and we get even deeper into the people’s lives when Stewart puts down the binoculars for his telephoto lens. Yet despite that impossible conglomeration of apartments or that no one in New York ever, even at night, closes the shades, what’s most remarkable is that gorgeous Grace Kelly could ever fall for dear, ordinary Jimmy Stewart.

Mean Streets

Roger Ebert declared Martin Scorsese’s 1973 Mean Streets “One of the source points of modern movies.” Written by Scorsese and Mardik Martin while driving the streets of Little Italy in the early 1970s, parking the car and taking notes and writing scenes about what was occurring before them when something besides Mulberry Street was still Italian, this gritty, stylized film follows Charlie, played by Harvey Keitel, a young man trying to rise in the neighborhood while forming his relationship to the city and the edges of the underworld. His best friend is a local punk named Johnny Boy starring Robert DeNiro who won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actor. This was Scorsese’s first feature film, and many of his most memorable moments in later, more polished and well-financed films appear in Mean Streets for the first time. Remember the camera following the back of robed and hooded DeNiro as he moved through the stadium, down the aisle to the ring and the camera pulled back in Raging Bull? Or in Goodfellas when Henry and Karen wound their way through the Copacabana’s kitchen? In Mean Streets we follow Charlie through Tony’s club (an early version of the club in Goodfellas), Scorsese himself has a cameo (as he would in some of his later films), and always that great choice of music: here, Aretha Franklin’s “It’s in His Kiss,” and “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes , the Marvelette’s “Please Mister Postman,” and DeNiro walking into the club in slow motion to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”
From the feasts in Little Italy throughout the summer to a scene with Keitel and DeNiro in the cemetery of the old St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Prince Street, Mean Streets imaginatively yet realistically captures a time and place in New York while telling a powerful story of friendship, dreams, and tragedy.

The Godfather 2

Released in 1974 following the huge success of The Godfather two years before, directed by Francis Ford Coppola and written by Coppola and Mario Puzo, The Godfather 2 is both a sequel and prequel, telling the story of Michael Corleone’s growing power while going backwards in time following young Vito Corleone’s arrival in New York and his rise on the Lower East Side. The scenes on the ship carrying young Vito to America–the passengers from steerage gaze in silent, reverential awe as they sail past the Statue of Liberty while The Godfather theme swells—and through the inspection halls of Ellis Island are magnificent, but best are those scenes shot on the Lower East Side and set in the first decades of the 20th Century.
Young Vito is played elegantly by Robert DeNiro whose work on this film won him an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor (the film also won for Best Picture and was the first film ever to have a ‘Part 2’ in the title). We’re with Vito in a small, crowded theater seeing a sentimental play, with him on the teeming, crammed street, in the grocery store where he works, in his apartment with windows in the walls between the rooms. We see his meeting and friendship with Clemenza (played by Bruno Kirby), and the scenes on the roof-tops, the Italian feast, and DeNiro sitting with his wife and young children (baby Michael in his arms) on a stoop while someone beside him plays and sings The Godfather theme are some of the most beautiful footage ever shot of old New York. Most of the time, these scenes are spoken in Sicilian except, chronologically, the first time Vito utters the famous, “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
Although much of The Godfather 2 occurs in Sicily, Nevada, even Cuba, a good portion of this three-hour epic is shot on the Lower East Side with detail, historical accuracy, and genuine beauty, and though we shake our heads in mutual dismay at the goofy Folker films DeNiro did, his performance here combining tenderness and calm with deadly power is one of the most memorable in American cinema.

Hester Street

Shot in black and white, which provides a documentary feel, and spoken almost entirely in Yiddish with sub-titles, Hester Street (1975) is a small, beautiful movie about a young Jewish immigrant woman’s struggles, compromises, gains, loses, and eventual adjustment to New York and America at the end the 19th century. Written and directed by Joan Micklin Silva (who also directed Crossing Delancey about modern-day Jewish match-making and features the Essex Street pickle stand), the film is based on Abraham Cahan’s novel Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto published in 1896, the same year in which the film is set. Though Cahan’s novel focuses primarily on the arrival in New York and the assimilation and Americanization of Yekl who, in his fervor to leave the past behind, changes his name to Jake, Hester Street is really more concerned with Gitl, his wife, who is much more traditional and resisting change despite her husband’s nagging insistence she give up her shawls, her head covering, and Yiddish. Gitl is tenderly yet powerfully played by Carol Kane; having appeared in Carnal Knowledge, as well as Dog Day Afternoon and Annie Hall, she is probably best known for her successful years on Broadway as Madame Morrible in Wicked.
This is a low-budget film; its scenes on Ellis Island, though realistic and detailed, have not the size and scope Coppola could accomplish in similar scenes in The Godfather 2. But what Hester Street lacks in expense it makes up for in compassion, depth, subtlety, and detail. The scenes of the streets on the Lower East Side, its shops, apartments, clothes, manners, and the penetrating study of the film’s characters make this a small epic, however contradictory that may be. Although Gitl is eventually abandoned by her husband, she is brave, strong, at times heroic as she realizes her own potential, and the adjustments she makes in the New World are inspiring, especially to women who will see her story as much of one woman’s true liberation from convention and stereotype as it is about freedom from the prejudice and ghettos of Poland.

Next Stop, Greenwich Village

Written and directed by Paul Mazursky and released in 1976, Next Stop, Greenwich Village is romantic, funny, tender, heartbreaking, and inspiring all at once. Based very closely on the writer’s own life story, the film stars Lenny Baker as Larry Lipinsky, a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who leaves the old neighborhood, to his mother’s dismay, and rents an apartment in Greenwich Village in order to become an actor while supporting himself by working in a health food store. This is the Village of the early 1950s, and while not the Village’s great days of the 1920s, the decades after World War Two were some the of the Village’s best. New York had recently inherited from Paris the artistic capital of the world, and what Montmartre was to Paris, the Village was to New York. Mazursky does an admirable job in recreating these rich, essential years of the Village as the central character becomes involved with a group of Villagers, all young and struggling and on the edge like himself: Lois Smith plays Anita, always on the brink of suicide; Christopher Walken is a handsome seducer/poet; Antonio Fargas is an outrageous black homosexual, and Ellen Greene plays Sarah, Larry’s girlfriend trying to adjust to his change. They even throw a “rent party” as many struggling poets and painters did back then. Larry’s Jewish mother is played endearingly, tenderly, without the irritability often associated with such a role, by Shelley Winters.
After this film, Lenny Baker went on to the hit Broadway musical I Love My Wife before his untimely death of cancer when he was only 36. The film ends brilliantly with the central character, having landed a part as a juvenile delinquent in a Hollywood movie (Mazursky himself left the Village for Hollywood after being cast as “Stoker” in The Blackboard Jungle) walking the neighborhood streets while eating a slice of his mother’s strudel, having left home once before for the Village but now truly saying good-bye to Brooklyn.

Paradise Alley

Released in 1978, Paradise Alley opens on a Hell’s Kitchen rooftop at night just after World War Two. There’s to be foot race between the Rat and the film’s central character/hero-of-sorts Cosmo Carboni. The race covers ten rooftops, with leaps between the gaps of the buildings; at the end, five bucks for the winner. Shot in slow motion with a good Tom Waits impersonator singing, we watch the race head-on as well as from between the gaps, but at the last leap the Rat falls, catching himself on a clothesline, and though Cosmo wins the race, the prize is nailed several times to the wall and he can only retrieve pieces of it.
Written, directed, and starring Sylvester Stallone following his colossal 1976 success with Rocky, Paradise Alley follows the three Carboni brothers and their desire to leave the crowded slum. Lenny, the oldest brother played by Armand Assante, is a bitter, wounded veteran working as an undertaker; with a leatherjacket and newsboy cap, Stallone plays middle brother Cosmo, the fast-talking hustler and con-artist, and Lee Canalito plays the youngest brother Victor, a gentle giant who carries blocks of ice up tenement stairs. Although all three want out of Hell’s Kitchen, Cosmo’s various plans to do so fail until he finally hits on the idea of turning Victor into a professional wrestler known as Kid Salami.
Echoing films such as Rod Serling’s 1962 Requiem for a Heavyweight and the more recent The Wrestler, and with Terry Funk—a real professional wrestler cast as Frankie the Thumper—this film is wonderfully acted, with marvelous visuals of the streets of Hell’s Kitchen and a cameo of Tom Waits, appropriately named Mumbles, on the piano in a smoky bar. But best is Stallone’s character, filled with humor, wit, street-smarts, and tenderness, all pouring out of him in an avalanche of words. Rocky won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay, and though its story is more involving and inspirational than Paradise Alley, we are reminded what a truly talented writer Stallone is, especially when he first came on the scene. Paradise Alley must be seen for the relationships of the three brothers, the great footage of the roof-tops and street corners, apartments and ice-house brilliantly photographed by Laszlo Kovacs, and primarily for Stallone’s wordy, clever, funny, tender, inventive script.

Moscow on the Hudson

If, for some hypothetical reason, we could tell only one story that defined New York City, surely it would be that of the battered, hopeful immigrant leaving the Old World for the possibilities of the new. This has been written and dramatized for two centuries now though primarily these stories focus on the weary and tempest-tossed passing through Ellis Island, but Paul Mazursky’s Moscow on the Hudson is a contemporary immigrant’s story, released in 1984 about a Russian saxophone player with a Russian circus who defects. Written by Mazursky and Leon Capetanos, the film stars Robin Williams in only his third movie role, but his performance is outstanding, quirky, funny, touching, even noble. A renowned impersonator, Williams is Vladimir Ivanoff, and his Russian accent is not only completely convincing but the film’s early scenes set in Russia are spoken in Russian with subtitles.
Nearly all the major characters in this modest film are minorities, thus showing the vast diversity found in our city: the security guard (Cleavant Derricks) who befriends Ivanoff is Black, the girl Ivanoff falls for is Italian (actually she’s adorable, Cuban-born Maria Conchita Alonso as Lucia Lombardo) though she rejects his advances even after he shaved his beard for her because she’s looking for a “real American” to marry. The taxi driver is Korean, Ivanoff’s lawyer is Cuban, and even the news anchorwoman is Chinese. The film follows Ivanoff’s struggles to assimilate, find a job, a place to live, but the film also reveals his hardships, rejections, and a mugging in the hallway of his East 7th Street apartment where in anger and desperation he upbraids the country in general and New York in particular by crying that at least in Russia you knew who was the enemy. Filmed with all the grit, threat, and vitality of the East Village at a tough time in New York’s history, Moscow on the Hudson quietly and without sentimentality tells one of New York’s most enduring stories and a testament to the hope this city still inspires in the many seeking that which people have always sought here: a better life.

Once Upon a Time in America

There are three versions of Once Upon a Time in America, but the one originally distributed in 1984 was so brutalized (cut by half) and the imaginative storyline so re-arranged that its heartbroken director Sergio Leone never made another film. Still, the copy shown at the Cannes Film Festival that year is the one available on DVD, and though The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather 2 (1974) set a nearly impossibly high standard for gangster films that follow, this poetic, epic, operatic story almost four hours long is in no film’s shadow.
During work on his Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), Leone read The Hoods by Harry Grey, a novel about young Jewish gangsters on the Lower East Side, inspiring him to make this epic story and giving recognition to this ancient tribe’s gangsters; after all, there’s Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Arnold Rothstein, Hyman Roth and Moe Green. Covering fifty years in the lives of a group of friends and traveling both backwards and forwards in time, the film stars Robert DeNiro in one of his finest but most unheralded roles. His young gangster of the 1920s recalls Jay Gatsby far more than a young Vito Corleone (also played by DeNiro), while his portrayal of an old man returning to his past and New York in the 1960s was so convincing I was sure that my own Uncle Morrie was on the screen. James Woods co-starts in the best work of his career, and the cast includes an irresistible Elizabeth McGovern. And in a film filled with enchantment–it begins and ends, for example, in a sensuous Chinatown opium den—the scenes of New York in the first decades of the 20th Century, with these same characters played by other, younger actors (Scott Tiler, Rusty Jacobs, Jennifer Connelly) are some of the finest and enhanced by the magical musical score of Ennio Morricone which actually was being played during shooting of the film.
“You’ll never lose that stink of the streets,” a wealthy, young Woods (“Maxie”) says scornfully to his partner, an equally young and wealthy DeNiro (“Noodles”).
“I like the stink of the streets,” Noodles replies, “I like the smell of it, it makes me feel good, it opens up my lungs,” then he adds with a smile, “and it gives me a hard-on.”

Sid and Nancy

Late on the morning of October 12, 1978, NYPD investigated an apparent murder in Room 100 of the Chelsea Hotel. A young woman had bled to death from a knife wound in her abdomen, while her boyfriend, high on heroin, lay muttering incoherently. He was arrested and taken through the lobby, then outside into a patrol car.
So begins Sid and Nancy, released in 1986, directed by Alex Cox, written by Cox and Abbe Wool. Originally entitled Love Kills, the film follows the self-destructive, so-called Romeo and Juliet of punk rock, a twisted love story about Sid Vicious—bass guitarist for the punk-rock group the Sex Pistols—and groupie-turned-girlfriend Nancy Spungen. Sid is played brilliantly by Gary Oldman, his work in this film rating him in Premiere magazine’s 100 Greatest Performances of All Time. Oldman transforms himself into Vicious, capturing not only the look but both Sid’s inner demons and fragility; Oldman even wore the actual chain and padlock Vicious often adorned. Spungen is played well by Chloe Webb, and though much of the film occurs in London, Vicious and the Sex Pistols had a deep connection to the punk-rock scene in New York in the late 1970s in such clubs as CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City. It was never clear if Vicious killed Spungen, the bloody incident in the Chelsea erupting from an argument about Sid’s desire to kick heroin and return to England. The film does not try to capture historic events as much as catch a mood between these doomed and desperate lovers, and the final scene is both tender and haunting: while out on bail, Vicious dances with some street kids, the skyline of lower Manhattan behind them, when a Checker taxi with no driver pulls up with Spungen in the back seat. He joins her and the taxi speeds away.
Though not in the film, several months after Spungen’s death, while continually ranting that “I want to join Nancy” and “I didn’t keep my part of the bargain,” Vicious overdosed on heroin in a Greenwich Village apartment.

Wall Street

Except for the harbor surrounding us (which has long passed its glory days), the stock market may have been New York’s next step into greatest. Conceived by a young Alexander Hamilton who insured that the financial capital of the new United States remains here, Wall Street symbolizes a world of big spenders, speculators, and investments far above most Americans baffled by what’s happening upon a seemingly coke-fused floor with terms as incomprehensible as those in medical dramas on TV. But we needn’t know anything about the terms or the game while watching Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, released in 1987 and set in 1985 with the junk bonds and insider trader scandals during a mad Bull Market under the Reagan administration’s greed which, like the crash in 1929, would later cost the country dearly.
Michael Douglas received an Academy Award as Best Actor for his portrayal of Gordon Gekko (there’s a name with double meaning, as is that of the young protégé he takes under his wing: Bud Fox, played by Charlie Sheen who, as in Stone’s Platoon, shows how a promising actor is lost to indulgence and easy, profitable acting jobs). A gruff, unhappy Darryl Hannah also appears as Gekko’s friend/call girl passed on to Fox; she received the Rozzie Award for Worst Supporting Actress.
Douglas is his arrogant, powerful, charming, totally-in-control best here, his style for the role based on his friend Pat Riley, then head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers. But the character is that of Ivan Boesky who gave something like the “greed is good” speech long before it appeared in the movie. Screenwriters Stanley Weiser and Stone himself also provided a realistic feel for downtown, from subways, crowds on the sidewalks, shots of the World Trade Center, South Street Seaport, Lower Manhattan street scenes, and the film’s final shot of Sheen walking up the stairs of 60 Centre Street (where Barzini was gunned down in Godfather) to testify against Douglas. What’s best–or worst—about the film seems how little has changed, how the same things in the film are still happening only by other high rollers. Stone may have been trying to capture a certain time and place, but unhappily–and like all great art—he caught what seems to be a universal story downtown, run by people making decisions over our 401k, and there’s plenty of great lines besides the film’s most noted. “You see that building?” Gekko says as if spoken today by Trump, “I bought that building ten years ago. My first real estate deal. Sold it two years later, made an $800,000 profit. It was better than sex. At the time I thought that was all the money in the world. Now it's a day's pay.”

Ghost

Released in 1990, directed by Jerry Zucker and written by Bruce Joel Rubin, Ghost is a romantic fantasy nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. It stars Patrick Swayze as Sam, a banker who’s murdered in an apparent hold-up, Demi Moore as his lover Molly, a talented potter, and Whoopi Goldberg as Oda Mae Brown, a con-artist posing as a medium who helps Sam communicate with Molly even after his death; for this role Whoopi won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. The loving couple lives in SoHo, and though they have a tender, sensuous relationship it may be impossible to watch their famous scene at the potter’s wheel without thinking of Leslie Nielson’s spoof of it. Still, with the soulful, melancholy Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody” playing and Sam’s attempt to save Molly from his killer who is also hired to kill her, this is a touching love story, well-acted and with exciting scenes in the subways where Swayze encounters a poltergeist played by Vincent Schiavelli. The murderer—for this was no random hit but actually planned by Sam’s ‘friend’ to kill Sam and then Molly to cover a bank scam—is played by Rick Aviles, a former Lower East Sider, stand-up comic, and host of It’s Showtime at the Apollo from 1987 until 1991. Some of us may have seen Rick perform on the streets before he landed minor roles in Carlito’s Way as well as The Godfather 3, but he died in 1995 from AIDS contracted through heroin abuse.
Filled with magic, other-worldly light, devils dragging both the hit man and Sam’s ‘friend’ presumably to hell after their deaths, and of course a ghost, this film is particularly touching since we know that Swayze, the star of Dirty Dancing and People magazine’s 1991 “Sexist Man Alive,” would die of pancreatic cancer in 2009. In a list of “20 Downtown Movies” that might be a little ‘guy movies’ heavy, this New York love story is for couples.

Washington Square

Generally, a true adherence to a good novel makes a poor movie. Where novels can take many hours to read–some we’re with for weeks, a month—a film’s running time is well-constricted. Fiction’s strength is internal, exploring a character’s heart and mind. Literary time is slow, the story told vertically, while films are horizontal, poor at internal explorations but great on characters in action. Yet one of the least likely writers whose work seems to inspire good movies is Henry James, a New Yorker though we often don’t think of him as one. His 1880 novel Washington Square has been made twice into very fine films, the first in 1949 entitled The Heiress, directed by the great William Wyler. Olivia de Havilland won an Academy Award for her role as Catherine Sloper, a rather plain, shy girl dominated by an arrogant, sometimes brutal father who believes any young man interested in his daughter must actually be after her father’s money.
In 1997, directed by Agneieszka Holland with a script from Carol Doyle, Washington Square has Jennifer Jason Leigh as the daughter whose father “never thought of her as delightful or charming.” Ugly and loathsome, the father is played by Albert Finney. He is brutal to his daughter, blaming her that his wife, her mother, died delivering her in childbirth. Amid this gloom is the charm of Maggie Smith as Catherine’s Aunt Lavinia, who captures stylish New York in 1850, not the 1880 when James wrote the novel. For part of the magic of the novel and both films is the beautiful recreation of New York before the Civil War, when Washington Square was the center of our most elegant society, before bohemians and NYU, when the Village was still distant estates along the Hudson. These films, each true in spirit though divergent in different ways from James’ novel, captures the spirit of the hypocrisy and injustice of its day but creating a determined and enduring female character that offers our best actresses such richly layered parts to portray.

9/11

What began as a documentary about the nine-month probation period of a rookie firefighter–a ‘proby’ as they’re called—suddenly and fortuitously turned the film makers, in their words, into the ones “chosen to be the witness” of New York’s greatest tragedy. Simply titled 9/11, this 2001 film by brothers Jules and Gedeon Naudet and James Hanlon begins by following the first few months on the job of Tony Benetatos, a sweet-faced, hulking young firefighter who chose his profession because he “wanted to be a hero.” Assigned downtown to Engine 7, Ladder 1 on Duane Street, Tony is eager to be tested and prove both to the veterans in the firehouse as well as himself that he’s a real firefighter. For months the camera records him scrubbing cooking pans and firehouse floors, washing the big, red fire trucks and heading out to his first call, only to find a trash fire. For his first two-weeks of work he excitedly receives his first paycheck of a little over $600.
At 8:30 on the morning of September 11th, Jules–who by now, along with his brother Gedeon, has been well-accepted by the other twelve men in the firehouse—rides on the truck to check a reported gas leak on Church Street, but as the camera focuses on a firefighter’s gas meter we hear a plane passing loudly overhead; the camera follows the firefighter’s glance as we see the first plane slamming into the North Tower, and though there will be hundreds of cameras focused on the second tower getting hit, this is the only shot of the attack on the first one. As the crew scrabbles back into the truck Jules asks Fire Chief Pfeifer if he may come along. The Chief says yes, and suddenly a documentary about a ‘proby’ becomes the only footage of those terrible hours inside the tower. Incredibly, the camera keeps rolling within the North Tower even as the South Tower is struck, and later we hear and, from inside the Tower, watch as the South Tower falls.
This is no dramatic re-enactment as depicted in Oliver Stone’s fine movie World Trade Center, and the last third of this extraordinary documentary records the slow, overwhelming search for survivors through the pile of the ruined towers. Narrated by the filmmakers as well as the firefighters, 9/11 is shown to all new probies. The last line of the film, spoken by one of the firefighters from the station, explains how to tell about September 11; “All we can do is tell them the stories and show them the tape.”

Piñero

Except for how robust and handsome is Benjamin Bratt compared to the rather scrawny subject of this film, Piñero is a most realistic, unromantic film about a writer, even down to the basic detail of the notebook in a back pocket. Written and directed by Leon Ichaso, the film explores both the creativity and destructive impulses of Miguel Piñero, Puerto Rican-born Lower East Side street poet, co-founder of the Nuyorican Poets Café (still thriving on East 3rd Street), and the only person nominated for a Tony Award who did hard time in prison. In flashbacks to the poet’s past, Miguel’s mother is played by Rita Moreno, and Manny Patinkin is Joseph Papp who in the mid-1970s first staged Piñero’s award-winning play Short Eyes at the Public Theater, the play based on Piñero’s time in prison for drug-dealing and robbery.
The 2001 film is shot almost entirely on the Lower East Side, with some great roof-top footage of Bratt (Piñero) reciting poetry with power and flair, the World Trade Center and the Empire State Building visible in the hazy background. Some of the film’s most compelling scenes are of Bratt reciting Piñero’s poetry, with both a feel and understanding of what we are hearing. Although showing Pinero’s own responsibility for his death of cirrhosis at 41 years old, the film also explores the legitimate conflict the writer had with a society still deep in discrimination towards the immigrant and Native-born Latino community; the film dramatizes the fight Piñero had with Papp because young, up-and-coming Italian actors such as Robert DeNiro were cast in roles meant for Puerto Ricans. The film ends most powerfully with a reenactment of the evening when friends and admirers of Piñero gathered in the backyard of the café to read Piñero’s renowned “A Lower East Side Poem” where he writes “I don’t wanna be buried in Puerto Rico/I don’t wanna rest in long island cemetery/…so please when I die/ don’t take me far away/ keep me near by/ take my ashes and scatter them thru out/ the Lower East Side.” Which is what they did.

Gangs of New York

Despite its violent excesses and historical inaccuracies, Gangs of New York is an intense, colorful recreation of an infamous part of the city in one of its darkest times. Released in 2002, directed by Martin Scorsese from a screenplay by Jay Cooks and inspired by Herbert Asbury’s informal history of the underworld The Gangs of New York, the film opens in 1846 but focuses primarily on events in 1863. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Amsterdam Vallon, determined to avenge the death of his father (Liam Nesson) at the bloody hands of Bill “The Butcher” Cutting played brilliantly by Daniel Day-Lewis. Based on a real person named Bill Poole (who died eight years before the events dramatized in the movie), Cutting rules the neighborhood of the Five Points–five streets that led into an open area known as Paradise Square. Daniel Day-Lewis is at his best; he won the screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actor though lost the Academy Award to Adrian Brody’s performance in The Pianist. Day-Lewis is sinister, witty, dapper, and totally deadly, ruling the Five Points through the fear he instills even in his own gang.
And there are many gangs; the film soon evolves into a fight between the Natives (those born here) and an Irish gang the Dead Rabbits. But there’s also the Swamp Angels, the Pug Uglies, the Bowery Boys, as well as thieves, beggars, he-shes, gin mills, the waterfront, Chinatown, all of it recreated for a New York fan to love and looking like Jacob Riss photographs come to life in color.
In addition to Day-Lewis’ great performance, Jim Broadbent does a remarkable job portraying New York’s most famous corrupt politician and Tammany Hall leader William “Boss” Tweed: “The appearance of law must be upheld,” he says, “especially when it’s being broken.” The film rushes to its climax with the Draft Riots, the city’s worst three days of violence after President Lincoln initiated the nation’s first Conscription Act. The Navy never fired into Manhattan (though gunboats were prepared to defend Wall Street) and the film greatly underplays the viciousness done to the city’s African Americans, but this uneven film has Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance and visuals of a time and place of old New York. The Five Points was leveled and build over more than a century ago, but it lives in much New York literature and this bumpy, bloody, at times brilliant film.  

Rent

Based almost exactly on the Broadway show, the film version of Rent was directed by Chris Columbus in 2005, more than fifteen years after the setting of Jonathan Larson’s story and music and nearly a decade since the show’s opening night at the New York Workshop Theatre on West 42nd. With nearly the same cast that molded the play for months, Rent occurs primarily on East 11th Street and Avenue A in the late 1980s though the script about the loves and struggles of a group of friends (straights, gays, lesbians, cross-dressers, heroin addicts, and those infected with HIV and AIDS) was set originally on the west side. But Jonathan Larson, himself a struggling composer working for ten years as a waiter at the Moondance Diner even while composing Rent, knew that–for his generation—more crucial and often tragic events were occurring in Alphabet City.
The film was shot both on a backstage in San Francisco as well as in New York, with Tompkins Square and roof-top scenes giving an actuality to the film despite how the backstage East 11th Street looks little like the real thing. Meant to be a modern rendition of Puccini’s La Boheme, its form owing much to Hair, Larson’s score lacks the great music of that ‘60s rock opera (not to mention Puccini) but tells a story just as powerful, covering roughly a year, from Christmas Eve to the following New Year’s Eve, foreshadowed in the opening number “Season of Love” (525,600 minutes). The dress rehearsal at the Workshop Theatre in January 1996 was a great success, but that night 35 years old Jonathan Larson, alone and making tea in his Greenwich Street walk-up while savoring his first taste of success, died of a heart aneurism, never to know the colossal run at the Workshop Theatre would lead to a twelve year run on Broadway, the Pulitzer prize, and Tony awards for best musical, book, and score.

Man on Wire

Surely the 45 minutes that Philippe Petit walked on a steel cable less than an inch thick between the still unfinished Twin Towers are New York’s most magical moments, and we can share a portion of that wonder with the man who did it in Man on Wire, the 2008 Academy Award winner for best documentary. Directed by James Marsh and based on Philippe’s own memoir of the same title (though originally titled Reach for the Clouds before the success of this film), it stars the real-life characters themselves: Annie Allix, Philippe’s girlfriend then and interviewed now, looking beautiful in both while the passing of time is evident in all of us. So too for Jean-Louis Blondeau, Philippe’s deepest, most dedicated confidant and co-hort. As with Annie we see Jean-Louis then and now, still trim, tender, passionate though with white hair. Perhaps the film’s most touching moments are when Jean-Louis, more than a quarter century later, is moved to the edge of tears and silence by the recollection of “the coup.”
That was the name of the event, “the coup”, to those planning it, and the movie unfolds like a spy thriller even though, like with Titanic or The Iliad, we know the ending: the big boat’s going down, Troy falls, and on August 7, 1974, a young man walked a wire connecting the Twin Towers. Never is September 11, 2001, mentioned, but there is something haunting in the many views we have of the Towers, for the film, like Philippe himself, has a passionate connection to them, an “intimate relation” he says: “In a sense, I married them.” Most engaging and remarkable is Philippe himself, who narrates the movie, telling us the story with energy and humor, without hubris or conceit. He is the city itself, dreaming and striving and sacrificing, and though having aged as much as the others he still teaches circus skills, and the film’s last, inspiring shots are of Philippe in his sixth decade but still walking a wire, his eyes even uplifted to the sky.