I was going to do some real work yesterday but got sidetracked by the This channel again. In the morning the channel broadcast an old Barbara Stanwick-Sterling Hayden-Raymond Burr noir I'd never heard of called Crime of Passion (directed by Gerd Oswald and released in 1957). That was followed by a terribly truncated showing of Richard Lesters's brilliant Juggernaut. While that was on in the background, I noticed that the next film to be aired was The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. I settled in to watch a great double feature of '70s cinema, but when Pelham began, it turned out to be a TV movie version originally broadcast in 1998, previously unknown to me.
The original Pelham, released in 1974 and directed by Joseph Sargent from a novel by John Godey and a script by Peter Stone (Charade), is one of those great New York City paranoia films. Released around the same time as Death Wish and other films that portrayed NY as a city out of control, it has a tremendous cast, including Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw, and a terrific score by David Shire that creates a jangly symphony of a city.
The TV
Pelham is directed by Felix Enríquez Alcala, who has done a lot of Fox shows as well as episodes of BSG and the Steven Seagal film
Fire Down Below. Alcala also photographed
Pelham (which was made in Toronto), and it has a fine crisp look, sometimes contrasty and two-toned down to practically black and white. It's a necessarily stripped down version of Sargent's movie, for example there is no mayor here, just an assistant who shows up at the command center, and with a lot of the NY flavor from the original present only in vestigial form. Edward James Olmos (who has worked with Alcala a lot) is in the Matthau role and Vincent D'Onofrio is in the Shaw role. It is no intended insult to say that D'Onofrio, much less many actors, can match the force that Shaw brought to the role, but it must be noted that D'Onofrio, whom I otherwise admire in his
Law and Order series, is here at his most Brando-ey mannered.
The most significant indice of the difference in the film's quality and achievement is to compare the "counting the money" scene, which is substantially there in the TV movie but without the verve and detail of Sargent's and without the Shire score. Also indicative is the "they don't know if the money's arrived" realization and the "dead man's hand" realization, which occurs on a city street as Olmos talks it out in a cursory manner with the Jerry Stiller equivalent, Lorraine Bracco. These diminutions don't bespeak laziness, necessarily, but under-budgeted exposition. Nevertheless, Alcala's
Pelham looks and feels like no other TV movie I've seen, and at the time of its airing must have been impressive to some viewers tired of the "talking head" form of TV movie.
All of this is of some currency because Tony Scott is coming out with a third adaptation on June 12, 2009, with Denzel Washington in the Matthau role and John Travolta in the Shaw part, with Brian Helgeland apparently writing it from scratch from the source novel. The original film is still a masterpiece, but I like Tony Scott and look forward to his version.
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