The Taking of New York City: Crime on the Screen and in the Streets of the Big Apple in the 1970s

by Andrew Rausch

For a time in the 1970s, New York City seemed to many to be genuinely on the cusp of collapse. Plagued by rampant crime, graft, catastrophic finances, and crumbling infrastructure, it served as a symbol for the plight of American cities after the convulsions of the 1960s. This tale of urban blight was reinforced wherever one looked—whether in the news media (memorably captured in the infamous New York Daily News headline “Ford to Drop Dead”) or the countless movies that evoked the era’s uniquely gritty sense of dread.

The Taking of New York City is a history of both New York and some of the decade’s most definitive films, including The French Connection (1971), the first two Godfather movies (1972 & 1974), Taxi Driver (1976), Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and many more. It was also an era in which the city wrestled with the racial tensions still threatening the tear the nation apart, never more so than in “Blaxploitation” classics such as Shaft (1971) and Super Fly (1972). These films depicted the city that never sleeps as a grim, violent place overridden with muggers, pimps, and killers. Projected at drive-ins and inside their local movie houses, rural America saw New York as a a vile dystopia where the innocent couldn't rely on the local law enforcement, who were seemingly all on the take. If one took Hollywood's word for it, the only way a person was able to find justice in 1970s New York City was by grabbing a gun and meting it out themselves.

Author Andrew Rausch meticulously separates fact and fiction in this illuminating book. Attentive to the ways that New York’s problems were exaggerated or misrepresented, it also gives an unvarnished look at just how bad things could get in the “Rotten Apple”—and how movies told that story to the country and the world.

280 pages, Hardcover

Published November 5, 2024

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is effective enough purely as a quick reference guide to '70s NYC movies, and for helping curate a potential watchlist for people like me who really dig those sort of movies (I definitely learned of a few new titles to track down while reading this). But still, there are two issues here that I think keep it from reaching the potential of what this book could have been. The first is that, for most of the movies featured, Rausch doesn't bother to include any sort of plot synopsis. The book seems to operate under the assumption that you've already seen all of these films and already know/remember what they're about, but that's obviously an odd assumption for a book of this sort. The other, and I think bigger problem is that there is very little critical analysis of the films. Apart from a few jokes or asides here and there (so sporadic that it's actually kind of jarring when they occur, quite frankly), we don't really get a sense of Rausch's voice, personality, or even why he's so interested in this sub-genre. For the most part, each entry just reads like a fragmented list of facts that he could have compiled from perusing the movie's Wikipedia page or IMDb trivia section. I don't really like using the "well, I could have done this myself" argument because, hey, I didn't, and Rausch did, and honestly, more power to him. But still, without more examination of the meanings or quality of these movies, you're sorta left wondering what the point here is supposed to be. Yes, there were a bunch of gritty crime movies made in New York during the '70s. And? The lack of insight or anything interesting to say ABOUT this phenomenon can especially be felt in how the book even just suddenly stops after the last movie entry, with no final statement or wrap-up on the whole enterprise. It's a testament to the fact that I'm just obviously into the same sort of stuff as Rausch that I still ended up finding the book "okay," for the reasons I stated at the beginning of this. But still, I wish Rausch seemed a little more interested in getting below the surface here, or at least sharing more of his own opinions on the films, rather than just end each entry with cherry-picked selections from what OTHER critics said.

[EVAN · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The Taking of New York” was certainly interesting and brought my attention to movies with which I wasn’t familiar. I could even take the overuse of Variety-speak (lensed, helmed, etc). However, and perhaps this is the publisher’s fault, the book was riddled with typos (tenants of Catholicism, rather than tenets), errors (Mean Streets being released in 1993) and just general mistakes (referring to a conversation between a real and a fictional character) which made it hard to read. Just my two cents.

[John Schorg · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very predictable book highlighting a memorable bunch of films that take place in New York City in the 1970s. The stories told here are quite familiar if you've read anything about the era, but collecting them in one volume has its value. Any book that pays homage to The Taking of Pelham One Two Three as one of the decade's best earns some credit.

[Eric Zerbe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great idea for a book and a compelling read. Learned new things about some of my favorite films and discovered a few new titles to check out. (Deducted one star for misquoting a famous line from Dog Day Afternoon.)