Directed by Lionel Rogosin • 1956 • United States
Starring Ray Salyer, Gorman Hendricks, Frank Matthews
Lionel Rogosin’s landmark of American neorealism chronicles three days in the drinking life of Ray Salyer, a part-time railroad worker adrift on New York’s skid row, the Bowery. When the film first opened in 1956, it exploded onto the screen, burning away years of Hollywood artifice, jump-starting America’s postwar independent-film scene, and earning an Academy Award nomination for best documentary. Developed in close collaboration with the men Rogosin met while spending months hanging out in neighborhood bars, ON THE BOWERY is both an indispensable document of a bygone Manhattan and a vivid and devastating portrait of addiction.
Up Next in New York Stories
-
Shadows
Directed by John Cassavetes • 1959 • United States
Starring Lelia Goldoni, Anthony Ray, Hugh HurdJohn Cassavetes’s directorial debut revolves around a romance in New York City between Lelia (Lelia Goldoni), a light- skinned black woman, and Tony (Anthony Ray), a white man. The relationship is p...
-
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One
Directed by William Greaves • 1968 • United States
Starring William Greaves, Patricia Ree Gilbert, Don FellowsIn his one-of-a-kind fiction/documentary hybrid SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM TAKE ONE, director William Greaves presides over a beleaguered film crew in New York’s Central Park, leaving them t...
-
The Angel Levine
Directed by Ján Kadár • 1970 • United States
Starring Zero Mostel, Harry Belafonte, Ida KaminskaJán Kadár, codirector of the Oscar-winning Czechoslovak New Wave touchstone THE SHOP ON MAIN STREET, made his Hollywood debut with this unique, long-overlooked adaptation of a Bernard Malamud story, ...
