Yes, it’s the original ‘Pelham One Two Three.’
In 1974, the New York City subway system was the largest in the world, with 7,000 cars and 237 miles of track. This fact is burned into my memory not because I’m a fiend for 1970s-era subway trivia, but because it’s a line of expositional dialogue in that year’s action extravaganza “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.”
It’s one of the most influential action movies of all time. Its basic premise was swiped by “Die Hard,” and one of its most clever touches, of criminals using colors as aliases, was appropriated by Quentin Tarantino for “Reservoir Dogs.” It’s one of the quintessential “dirty Gotham” movies of the 1970s, which is no small achievement in an era rife with cinematic dramatizations of a city on the brink of financial and sociological collapse. But what is beyond question is that “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” is the single greatest New York subway movie ever made.
The story is simple. One by one, four men board the titular train, whose call sign, we’re told, comes from “the name of its terminus and the time of its departure”; this one, a 6 train, departed at 1:23 p.m. from the Pelham Bay Park station. Armed with semiautomatic weapons, they separate one of the train’s cars and take its occupants hostage, demanding the City hand over $1 million in cash, or they start shooting passengers. The leader of the terrorists is the erudite Mr. Blue (Robert Shaw, one year before his role in “Jaws”); Mr. Green (Martin Balsam), a former subway motorman, handles the driving, while Mr. Grey (Héctor Elizondo) and Mr. Brown (Earl Hindman) provide the muscle.
The story was first told in a bestselling 1973 book by Brooklyn-born novelist Morton Freedgood, writing under the pseudonym John Godey. He deeply researched the logistics of the subway system, shared them with his readers and puzzled out a dramatic narrative that seemed firmly rooted in the day-to-day realities that straphangers encountered. The book was published in February of 1973; United Artists issued a press release in September of that year announcing their acquisition of the property and its shooting, on location, that fall. The screenwriter was Peter Stone, who had penned the book for the Broadway hit “1776” and several screenplays, mostly in the light comedy-thriller mode; the director was Joseph Sargent, whose filmography was a mix of television and film.
A month later, the studio announced its unlikely leading man: Walter Matthau would play Lt. Zachary Garber of the New York Transit Police, who attempts to stop the plot, or at least buy the City enough time to spare the lives of the passengers. Matthau was, at the time, best known for his comic work in films like “The Odd Couple,” “Cactus Flower” and “The Fortune Cookie” (for which he won the Oscar for best supporting actor). But he was in the midst of readjusting his screen persona, appearing in noncomedic leading roles in a pair of 1973 crime pictures, as a crook and a cop in “Charley Varrick” and “The Laughing Policeman,” respectively. Sargent would surround Matthau with a cast of distinctively East Coast character actors, including Dick O’Neill as a grouchy dispatcher, Tom Pedi as a blowhard transit worker, Julius Harris and Kenneth McMillan as NYPD officials and Jerry Stiller as Lt. Rico Patrone, Garber’s right-hand man. (Stiller’s son, Ben, would recall visiting the set and hiding in a backset while Matthau and his father shot a scene at a toll booth on the Triborough Bridge.)
City officials were initially hesitant to get involved in the production, fearing that a large-scale dramatization of how to hijack a subway car could prompt copycat crimes. Their concerns were presumably eased by a $250,000 check to the New York City Transit Authority (plus another $75,000 for insurance), for which the NYCTA provided the services of 15 transit employees, several subway cars and (most importantly) access to Brooklyn’s decommissioned Court Street station and its nearby track. That station, which now houses the New York Transit Museum, had been out of service since 1946; it had only operated for a decade, as a one-off shuttle to the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station, and legend had it that it had only been built in the first place at the insistence of then-Mayor William O’Dwyer, to save himself the two-block walk to Hoyt. (The City’s sole editorial stipulation was that the subway cars seen in the movie could not be defaced with graffiti — an inaccuracy that many a New York film critic pinpointed in their reviews.)
City officials were initially hesitant to get involved in the production, fearing that a large-scale dramatization of how to hijack a subway car could prompt copycat crimes.
As the train in question was running on the IRT line (now the 4/5/6), “Pelham One Two Three” art director Gene Rudolf recreated the architectural details of that line — color schemes, mosaics and lettering styles — at Court Street. He also built a replica of a motorman’s cab, with removable ceiling and walls to allow greater camera movement, for the many scenes of Mr. Blue and Mr. Green communicating via radio to Lt. Garber in the Transit Authority command center. For the other half of those conversations, Rudolf built a rough approximation (though not an exact replica) of the dispatcher’s room at Filmway Studios in Harlem, filled with practical equipment, including consoles with working switches and lights, intercoms, telephones, teletypes and 130 fluorescent light fixtures.
Godey packs most of his research into his prose, as a novelist can; screenwriter Stone had no such luxury, yet found elegant solutions for conveying necessary background. The hijacking interrupts Garber conducting a tour of visiting higher-ups from the Tokyo subway system, allowing him to share the aforementioned statistics of the system; even earlier, the script reveals that the fateful train’s motorman is currently in training, so he walks through the steps of conducting a stop with the more senior motorman who’s training him. (“I’m checking the passengers getting on and off, front and back — okay, it’s all clear — I’m shutting the doors, rear section then the front section.”)
This is all essential information; for the drama to play, we must understand both the macro (the scale of New York’s subway system) and the micro (the logistics of a car’s operation). That Stone is able to dump such copious exposition, and make it into dialogue that simultaneously tells us about his characters, is a minimiracle of adroit screenwriting.
Yet the script is full of such moments of pizzazz and panache. One of the most remarkable aspects of “Pelham One Two Three” is its timelessness. While it is inarguably of its moment, a semidocumentary snapshot of New York City at one of its lowest points, much of the picture still plays as contemporary (perhaps thanks partially to the system’s perpetually antiquated equipment). I’ve attended countless revival screenings with rowdy New York audiences (local theaters love to run it, and it always fills the house), and there is simply no expiration date on portraying New York’s mayor as a spineless, clueless nincompoop. And David Shire’s brassy, pulsing score captures the feel and sound of the city in a manner that’s never gone out of style.
The no-nonsense character actors embody their working-class City employees so convincingly that we feel like we might have ridden their trains home. And when one of them impatiently sputters, of the hostages’ chances of survival, “What do they expect for their lousy 35 cents — to live forever?,” it always gets a laugh. The price may be out of date, but the sentiment never shifts.
While few (if any) of us have ever been held hostage by armed terrorists on a New York City subway, we certainly know the feeling of being on the edge of a fraught, or potentially dangerous, situation on the train.
But what is perhaps most timeless, and most accurate, about “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” is its portraiture of the subway and its riders, a melting pot of crisscrossing cultures, classes, neighborhoods and professions. Sure, the pool of hostages could have been an assemblage of types from Central Casting: the hip Black dude, the uptight businessman, the single mother, the graduate students. But look around the train on your morning commute and you’re likely to find a similar mix; New York City is unique among major metropolitans for the ubiquity of its mass transit, spaces that are shared (often tightly) by a wide range of seemingly disparate riders.
“O.K., the hippie guy with an Indian-blanket poncho has vanished, but that’s about it,” wrote the New York Times’ Caryn James 20 years ago. “Otherwise, ‘Pelham One Two Three’ is filled with subway moments that might have happened 30 days, not 30 years ago.”
And while few (if any) of us have ever been held hostage by armed terrorists on a New York City subway, we certainly know the feeling of being on the edge of a fraught, or potentially dangerous, situation on the train. To that end, the mixture of camaraderie and fear shared by the passengers of “Pelham One Two Three” is strikingly authentic: exchanged glances, shared suspicions and, when all else fails, gallows humor. We’re all in our own little worlds on the train, hiding in our books and podcasts and (when we can get a signal) phones, but there’s nothing like a threat of danger to create a sense of instant teamwork, no matter how divergent our origin points and destinations. We’re all in this together, or at the very least, it’s us against them.
“The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” casts a long shadow. In addition to the influence on “Reservoir Dogs” and “Die Hard” (and many imitators, like “Speed”), it has been twice remade, once for television in 1998 and again for the big screen in 2009. (That picture didn’t work at all, for a number of reasons, from Tony Scott’s too-slick direction to John Travolta’s comically inept villain — but mostly because, as comedian Patton Oswalt perceptively noted, you simply never believe Denzel Washington, stepping into the Matthau role, might not come out ahead.) But its most impressive legacy may be its most secretive. Following the film’s release in October 1974, the New York City Transit Authority made a practice of no longer scheduling trains for departure from Pelham Bay Park at 1:23 in the morning or afternoon, lest it remind riders of the events of the film. A few years later, the policy was officially rescinded, but superstitious dispatchers reportedly still avoid departing during those two minutes of the day, to resist any temptation for life to imitate art.