[The Daily] “Ford to City: Drop Dead - New York in the 70s”

“Today,” begins Flavorwire’s Jason Bailey, “New York’s Film Forum begins a fabulous new retrospective series, Ford to City: Drop Dead – New York in the 70s, which draws its title from the notorious New York Daily News headline paraphrasing of President Gerald Ford’s response to the city’s 1975 request for federal funding assistance. The headline was a simplification of Ford’s stance, but it stuck, because it seemed such a succinct summary of how the rest of America viewed the city: a garbage-ridden hornet’s nest of crime, corruption, danger, and sin.” Bailey writes up ten capsule previews of “accidental documentaries of what the city once was.”

Clyde Haberman sets the scene in the New York Times: “The ’70s was the decade of the serial killer Son of Sam and of a nightmarish 1977 power blackout that led to widespread looting and vandalism. They were the ‘Bronx is burning’ years. The municipal treasury was broke. City workers—garbage collectors, hospital doctors, police officers—went on strike, heedless that it made them lawbreakers. Systemic police corruption abounded: Think Serpico [image above]. Crime soared . . . Broadway theaters moved up the evening curtain by an hour so that playgoers could get out of Times Square before the muggers took over.”

Today through July 27, “movie fans can relive those hardcore days of yore,” writes Benedict Cosgrove for the Gothamist. “Featuring dozens of the decade's signature actors and directors (De Niro, Pacino, Redford, Hoffman, De Palma, Scorsese, Cassavettes, Jane Fonda, Gena Rowlands, Jon Voight, George C. Scott, Gene Hackman, Diane Keaton—Jesus, do we have to go on?) in more than forty films, the series was put together by Bruce Goldstein, who has run Film Forum's repertory program for three decades and counting. . . . ‘I was living in New York in the '70s,’ Goldstein told Gothamist, ‘and I didn't really have a perception of the city as a frightening place, or a place of terror, which is what a lot of these films convey. I just thought this was an amazing group of movies.’”

The series opens with John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969), and, writing in the Notebook, Jeremy Carr argues that of all the movies up to that point, it “best captures the chaotic and manifold audio-visual essence of the setting’s disorder. Hugh A. Robertson’s rapid, jump-cut montage wildly distorts and distends the film’s spatial and temporal capacity, while the gritty cinematography by Adam Holender underscores a grainy aesthetic rendering of the fantasies and nightmares that drive the film’s central characters. . . . Nighttime, daytime, if there’s one thing Schlesinger’s film broadcasts, it’s that in 1969’s New York, everything is in view. There is no escape.”

“In the interest of breadth, there are only two Blaxploitation greats on tap (Shaft and Super Fly), though there is Anthony Quinn solving crimbs with Yaphet Kotto in Across 110th Street,” writes Matt Prigge for Metro. “But casting a wide net also means catching some wonderful, undersung oddities, like Elaine May’s absurdist murder-rom-com A New Leaf, in which Walter Matthau as an uptown blueblood isn’t even the nuttiest bit. Ditto Chantal Akerman’s minimalist News from Home, which is nothing but long takes of the New York streets—a time capsule for a city that today resembles an alien planet.”

“For every well-known picture like [William] Friedkin’s The French Connection or the abundance of Sidney Lumet movies (Network, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, The Anderson Tapes, and The Wiz), there’s a lesser-known alternative,” notes amNewYork editor Robert Levin. Ivan Passer’s Born to Win (1971), for example, “which stars George Segal as a Times Square heroin addict opposite a young Robert De Niro. Frank Perry’s Diary of a Mad Housewife, which depicts a love triangle involving Carrie Snodgress, Richard Benjamin and Frank Langella, is another notable rarity highlighted by Goldstein.”

It’s only tangentially related, but Michael Kruse’s piece for Politico Magazine, “How Gotham Gave Us Trump,” just has to be mentioned here: “How, at a moment when American cities are at a peak of wealth and success, can Trump argue so persistently against them? The answer starts with the New York that made him.”

For news and items of interest throughout the day, every day, follow @CriterionDaily.

from The Criterion Current http://ift.tt/2spqazi