In celebration of the New York Transit Museum’s 50th Anniversary, the Film Forum is hosting a NYC In Transit series, featuring some of transit’s most notable roles on screen. Check out the lineup of iconic films where buses, elevated trains, and subway cars take center stage.
New York Transit Museum Members can purchase up to two tickets per transaction for Film Forum’s NYC in Transit series screenings at a discounted price of $14 by presenting their Transit Museum membership card to their box office or booking online with promo code (for details, see July 21 member email).
U.S., 1974
Directed by Joseph Sargent
Starring Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam, Héctor Elizondo, Jerry Stiller
Approx. 104 min. 35mm.
“Screw the goddamn passengers! What do they want for their thirty-five cents? To live forever?” Just a typical day on the East Side IRT, as a No. 6 train starts its downtown run from Pelham Station in The Bronx at the scheduled departure time of 1:23 PM (there’s your title)—then gets hijacked by heavily-disguised men: Mr. Brown (Earl Hindman), shnurfling Mr. Green (Martin Balsam), trigger-loving Mr. Grey (Héctor Elizondo), and their icy-cold leader Mr. Blue (Robert Shaw)—color-coded aliases: are you listening, Mr. Tarantino? “This city hasn’t got a million dollars!” kvetches the schmucky, flu-plagued Koch-lookalike mayor (this was the era, after all, when Jerry Ford told NYC to “drop dead”) to hovering spin doctors when he gets that ransom ultimatum: cough up the dough in an hour or the 17 passengers (your typical fellow riders: a hooker, a philosophical old Jewish man, a mother with two bratty kids, Matthew Broderick’s dad James as the conductor, et al.) get wasted, or one corpse for each minute late. Wisecracks and bullets fly as Walter Matthau’s quick-witted TA cop Lt. Zachary Garber gives a guided tour to embarrassingly polyglot Tokyo subway execs; dispatcher Jerry “I’ll believe anything” Stiller doesn’t believe it; the ransom-carrying cop car jackknives in Astor Place; and Matthau negotiates with the all-business Mr. Blue via subway squawkbox. A crackling adaptation by the late Peter Stone of the John Godey bestseller, featuring terrific (and accurate) Gotham locations, knife-edge hilarity, a thrilling jazz score by David Shire, and third-rail brand jolts—evoking a New York that, while not exactly the golden age, was a time when you could still buy a token… for thirty-five cents!
Presented with support from The Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film
