Pelham 1 2 3: Riding into the Past

Without even trying, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, the new thriller starring John Travolta as a criminal who hijacks a Manhattan subway train and Denzel Washington as the transit employee who tries to stop him, is a tale of two cities: New York in 1974 and New York today.

In the American imagination, the New York City of the 1970s was a domestic war zone: Vietnam brought home. The murder rate had soared, the wrong kinds of drugs were available on any corner, and the whole place was filthy; Harry Smith, the CBS news anchor, called the city "Calcutta without the cows." New York was nearly bankrupt, and the President was disinclined to help, provoking the Daily News to the decade's iconic headline, "Ford to City: Drop Dead." An army of the emotionally disturbed, evicted en masse from state mental hospitals, made cardboard-box homes on the streets. Graffiti festooned many tenement buildings and scarred the exteriors and interiors of the city's decrepit transit system. Sitting inside a subway car, with its garish scrawls, was like being trapped in someone's deranged mind, screaming out madness from within its metal walls. (See photos of the inner workings of the world's megacities.)

Say this for New York in the mid-'70s: from its desperate blight emerged some pretty sharp movies. Back then, children, Hollywood was actually interested in reflecting contemporary society, and this poster child for urban dystopia provided the perfect setting. A raft of films — Serpico, Death Wish, Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver — navigated that stinky Styx with the expertise of a champion white-water rafter. A lesser but still pertinent entry was The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, which starred Robert Shaw as the criminal mastermind and Walter Matthau as the transit detective trying to talk him out of it. Among its many attractions, this was an action movie where the tension is conveyed mainly in phone calls betwen the killer and the cop.

Written by Peter Stone from John Godey's novel and directed by Joseph Sargent, the movie mixed thriller elements with rancid comedy to create a tarnished time capsule of Gotham crime, sludge and cynicism. The mayor is a do-nothing schlemiel ("Don't tell me — I don't wanna know"), and the hijacked passengers aren't so scared that they can't give a lot of lip back to their captors. The transit hierarchy is clogged with wise guys. "What the hell do they expect for their lousy 35 cents?" one executive says of the subway hostages. "To live forever?" Another MTA veteran boldly and unwisely struts down the tracks toward the kidnapped train. "Why don't you go grab a goddam aeroplane like everybody else?" he shouts to one of the gunmen. "'Cause we're afraid of flyin'," the bad guy replies, and — BLAM — kills him. The subway system had its murders too, and not just in movies.