Week 111 (11/30/23): Take a Bite of the Rotten Apple - NYC cop/crime films of the 70s

Tonight, we’ll be talking a set of films that almost form a genre of their own.  

These films were often, though not always, “respected” by critics and the general public at large, but all bore that dark, almost despairing claustrophobia and realistic feel of what I and others were living every day out on the streets locally, far from the dayglo nonsense of the 60’s reruns or the sunnier Hollywood based fare of the day.  

The streets were crowded, filthy, filled with the detritus of the post-hippie era – the junkies, the odd artsy types, the gangs, the whores.  The days where you were damn glad to see Curtis Sliwa’s Guardian Angels on a subway…if you were crazy enough to use them at all. Everything covered in graffiti, buildings collapsing into tenements, crack houses, illicit hookup spots for rough trade cruising types.  Garbage in the streets, and decay in every sense of the word.  

These are films that wallow in what in later years would be referred to as urban blight, but not so much “celebrating” as providing a window into all the palpable danger and decline of an impoverished post-blackout Manhattan in the days after the Watts and Newark riots, not long past Ford telling the mayor and city to go screw ourselves when asking for Federal relief.  

These were the days of Studio 54, CBGBs and the original Saturday Night Live – but filled with menace. Hard drug use was rampant.  Muggings were so commonplace as to be a shrug of the shoulders.  Nobody in their right mind stepped into Central Park after sunset.  Washington Square was known for decades as Needle Park.  And the East Village?  Forget about Alphabet City, the Bronx or Brooklyn.  

This was a special breed of film, that focused on crooked, flawed cops working outside a busted system…but not with the heroic vibe of Reaganite action heroes.  These guys paid for painting outside the lines.  The denouments were never triumphant, all victories were pyrrhic.  Vigilante justice and community action were about as fantastic as these films got, and as close to actual comeuppance as anyone got.  

This is the story, in a way, of our childhood and early youth to young adulthood, as told in some very memorable films.

So join us as we go dumpster diving in the back alleys of most dangerous of neighborhoods, only here on Weird Scenes!

Week 111 (11/30/23): Take a Bite of the Rotten Apple - NYC cop/crime films of the 70s

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Take a Bite of the Rotten Apple - NYC cop/crime films of the 70s