The Taking of New York City by Andrew Rausch
Jane Fonda was shocked when she returned to New York in 1970 after several years in Europe. The decay, the degradation, struck her as she prepared for her role as a call girl in Klute, one of dozens of films reviewed in Andrew Rausch’s new book, The Taking of New York.
His subject is a subgenre of ‘70s crime films. While many cop and crime flicks were made during those years in Hollywood-adjacent LA, New York was ideal because, in the minds of many Americans, NYC’s spiraling statistics of murder, robbery and addiction made it the epitome of an unsafe city. If Los Angeles was a setting for many crime films, New York was a character in the foreground.
Rausch gives just as much information as the average fan requires for each movie he includes, including conception and labor pains, casting and production history, box office and critical reception. He identifies The French Connection (1971) and Shaft (1971) as pivotal. One was a story of cops bending every rule to make a bust, the other a valorization of Black manhood. Rausch covers Mean Streets (1973), Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and all the expected classics, adding overlooked gems such as Across 110th Street (1972) and interesting unknowns like Cops and Robbers (1973). He’s unafraid of calling crap for what it is.
Seventies New York was exciting but dangerous, a place of cheap rent and thrills but hard to inhabit. Rausch recounts stories of film shoots shaken down by the Mob, the NYPD and Black militants, as well as threatened by junkies who mistook actors for narcs. The best and many of the mediocre ‘70s New York crime pictures mirrored a congested, dirty city with cops on the take, gangland slayings and a bankrupt city hall. Given today’s Disneyfied Times Square, some recall those years with fondness.
The Taking of New York City: Crime on the Screen and in the Streets of the Big Apple in the 1970s is published by Applause Theatre & Cinema Books.
