Directed by Joseph Sargent • 1974 • United States
Starring Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam
One of the definitive cinematic time capsules of New York in the good-bad old days of the 1970s, this crackling urban-jungle thriller begins when a quartet of gunmen in trench coats—led by the coolly methodical mastermind Mr. Blue (Robert Shaw)—hijack a subway train and hold the passengers hostage for a ransom of one million dollars. Now, harried Transit Police Lieutenant Zachary Garber (Walter Matthau), caught between the group’s demands and the endless frustrations of the city’s ineffectual bureaucracy, finds himself racing against time to deliver the money—or else.
Up Next in New York Stories
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News from Home
Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1976 • United States
Following her time living in New York in the early 1970s, Chantal Akerman returned to the city to create one of her most elegantly minimalist and profoundly affecting meditations on dislocation and estrangement. Over a series of exactingly compo...
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Town Bloody Hall
Directed by Chris Hegedus • 1979 • United States
Starring Norman Mailer, Germaine Greer, Jacqueline CeballosOn April 30, 1971, a standing-room-only crowd of New York’s intellectual elite packed the city’s Town Hall theater to see Norman Mailer—fresh from the controversy over his essay “The Pris...
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Permanent Vacation
Directed by Jim Jarmusch • 1980 • United States
Starring Chris Parker, Sara Driver, John LurieJim Jarmusch’s first feature displays the first hints of the deadpan, minimalist-cool style that he would refine in his breakthrough STRANGER THAN PARADISE. Young, alienated hipster Aloysius Christophe...
