New Yorkers aren’t a sentimental bunch. But there are some things we’re fiercely protective of. One of those is the 1974 crime drama The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. This was a year before the infamous New York Daily News headline that blared “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” when the president wrote off the Rotten Apple, awash as it was in debt and depravity. It was a deeply unsettled time. My dad, who worked on Wall Street, was mugged twice, and when we drove into the city it was always with the windows up and the doors locked. Left for dead the city got even worse, with the “Summer of Sam” and all that. Poor dad, as victimized as Charles Bronson in Death Wish (1974; brutal year), was stuck in the chaotic blackout while we waited with bated breath for some news back home in New Jersey. John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981) wasn’t just a title, but a prayer for deliverance.

Thirty-five years later, things are very different, even in the face of an asset-sucking recession. The crime has moved to the crystal meth labs on Main Street USA. We partied through our last blackout. And, like you, we enjoy our porn at home, not on Eighth Avenue. We made it through 9/11 and we’ll survive The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, a remake for the unlettered. We dismissed a made-in-Toronto TV version in 1998 just by changing the channel. But this one, made on home turf—this one, we have to deal with.

The love for the original is easy as one, two, three. The movie took a hostage-taking scenario, outrageous even for its blighted times, and through it showed New York in all its resilient, workaday colors. It’s an appealingly plebian movie, with grumpy urban prole Walter Matthau pitted against the coolly European Robert Shaw, a pairing that struck a template most successfully exploited by the Die Hard movies. (more…)