Undeniably one of the toughest and most powerful gangster thrillers of the 70's 'Across 110th Street' hits hard with a thrill ride through the hell-raisin' hoods of Harlem! When a crew of gangsters make the fatal mistake of crossing a Mafia heist in Harlem things turn very ugly. But as the bullets start flying and the cops start dying a pair of New York's finest are forced to work together to bring justice to the streets before the Mafia brings the Ghetto to its knees! Up against
Across 110th Street is quite simply an underrated and underappreciated masterpiece that left an indelible impression on me. A brutal, gritty, grubby and bloody crime melodrama released in 1972, the film touches on many topics that are still relevant now as they were then.
The film's plot is built out of the accumulation of violent repercussions and payback. Some black gangsters and Mafioso matter-of-factly tally the week's bounty accumulated from the numbers game in an anonymous Harlem tenement. Two black small time hoods dressed in police uniforms burst through the door. Minutes later and the hoods with the help of a getaway driver have made off with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of dirty money whilst the bean-counters lie pulverised by a hail of bullets.
Across 110th Street is an unremittingly violent account of a pair of New York City cops - one black and by the book, trying to gain promotion on his own terms, the other a miserable, streetwise, crude white bigot on the verge of retiring - assigned to track down the three small-time Harlem hoods who held up the numbers game syndicate transaction stealing three hundred thousand dollars from the Mafia and killing seven in the process, including three black gangster flunkies, two Italian Mafia bagmen and two cops, clearly irking just about everyone in the city. Since two police officers were killed and in particular, because one of them happens to be white, there is a greater sense of urgency from law enforcement authorities in catching the three fugitives.
The gears of mob justice begin to crank as the robbers-cum-murderers are also being hunted down by the sadistic and blood-thirsty Mafioso errand boy gangster, Nick D'Salvio played to perfection by Anthony Franciosa who receives his assignment to retrieve the money and send a message to black Harlem that says never mess with the Mafia. He seeks revenge scouring the city in the knowledge that this mission is a last chance for him to win favour with his superiors and gain seniority in the mob.
From the moment after the robbery, the film grinds relentlessly and inexorably toward the ignoble outcome that you sense awaits the three fugitives who are being chased from all sides, echoing Fritz Lang's underworld masterpiece M.
The towering powerhouse of an actor that is Anthony Quinn plays the nominal hero Captain Mattelli, a fifty-five year old white detective whose secretly been on the take for a few years and threatened with being pushed out by a new upstart cop, Lieutenant William Pope, who also happens to be black. Mattelli spends much of the picture's time resisting two unplanned retirements; his superiors on the force cripple his authority by assigning him to work under no-nonsense Pope, while the Harlem thugs - headed by the vocally ravaged Doc Johnson played by the exceptional Richard Ward - who have long paid for Mattelli's services, hint that they're no longer needed. The two cops themselves have an uneasy partnership. Like D'Salvio, who is driven to psychopathic rage at the slightest provocation, and like the fugitives themselves, Mattelli speeds through the film in a state of crazy desperation, flailing savagely at the world while barely a step ahead of his own obsolescence. Despite their fragile relationship and different ways of working, the tow cops eventually come together to find the three destitute robbers before the mob spreads their blood all over Harlem.
Across 110th Street deftly interweaves the tragic actions of corrupt cops, vicious gangsters, and the criminals hunted by both. It's a gutsy affair, given a distinct lift by the Harlem locations, and between the bouts of physical aggression, there are wonderful moments of insight into the fraught relationship between Mattelli and Pope. The film also lays bare the blatant bigotry that is inherent in the police force through the interactions with the Harlem residents who become entangled in this violent mess. Every query or comment hints at ignorance and suspicion. For example, Mattelli in one scene appears to assume that because a victim's estranged wife is black she may not be able to read his contact details.
Violence at the expense of the black community, has seldom been more candidly dissected and critiqued in American film as it is in Across 110th Street. What distinguishes its bloodletting from that in other Hollywood films of the time is its unsparing inescapability and its matter-of-factness - these qualities give the work its moral charge. The violence visited upon the characters satiates no one, neither characters nor spectators, and none of the deaths is likely to bring a cheer even from the most sadistic audience. Violence is meted out with gusto, but clinically, with a clear, chillingly mundane purpose in mind - to preserve power. After all of the carnage, the status quo doesn't change one iota by the film's end. The Mafia consolidates its control over Harlem, and almost every major character and several minor characters (both the implicated and the innocent) face the highest probability of losing their lives in the crossfire.
There have been American gangster films and those about the mafia since the very early years of American cinema. But long excluded from these epic tales of power, crime, greed and corruption, has been the meaningful depiction of the black community both in terms of their heavy involvement in organised crime and as a major source of revenue through the various rackets, not forgetting to mention Harlem's undoubted lucrative reservoir of financial potential. This film depicts Harlem and its importance to the mafia as well as the influence of the black mob within this structure. The 110th Street title of the film is an informal boundary line where different factions control the underworld along racial lines. Beyond 110th Street is 'no man's land" for the Mafia; the only way they control Harlem is through the black mob that ultimately works for them.
One of the major themes covered in this work is the way in which people live and how they struggle. Those with maladies, no education and no hope are left with two choices; struggle or take the easy way out. For the three hoods, the easy way out proves to be the wrong choice.
Another of the film's important subjects is racism. The racially charged dialogue is on fire and speaks volumes on the futile struggle of race relations on multiple levels, leaving us feeling sympathetic with the plight of the three fugitives' lives, for all those caught up in their act of aggression and for black Harlem in general. It appears that the only way to attain power in the ghetto for a black man is to be involved in organised crime on a major scale, in other words to be a gangster. The exchanges between the white and black mob factions are incredibly tense and this tension isn't just relegated to the mobsters but also to the forces of law and order. The film also questions whether the American dream was designed with black people in mind.
Across 110th Street further benefits from one of the best musical scores of the 70s by J.J. Johnson and songs by Bobby Womack. Where music is also used is equally brilliant as the score itself. For example in the scenes of violence and torture, there isn't any music. Instead the soundtrack is filled with the blood curdling cries and screams of pain acting as a substitute for any musical alleviation. The lack of music intensifies the grim finality of those sequences. The film owes much of its notoriety to the memorable theme song from which its title derives, a majestic soul-funk classic in its radio incarnation. The picture itself appropriately presents a more downbeat version over its opening credits. It's a musical chronicle of inner-city pain that was also incongruously used by Quentin Tarantino in Jackie Brown.
Another noticeable strength of the work lies in the adopting of a documentary approach in many of the scenes that, when combined with the accomplished performances throughout the cast, adds to the realism immersing the viewer in this world of carnality, corruption and cruelty. The director Barry Shear chose to film on real-life Harlem locations, using a newly perfected portable camera and the capacity to shoot in close quarters contributes mightily to the film's aesthetic of claustrophobia. Shear has succeeded in creating a volatile expression of race relations through the use of a gun, knife or fist pointed at close ups of bugged out eyes, facial twitches and fear engulfed visages.
I'm not one for excessive violence but the gruesomeness in this debauched landscape stands out. There isn't a non-stop barrage of action but the brutality on display at key moments in the film is incredible. Squibs flow generously from bullet riddled victims and the torture scenes, whether onscreen or off, have a visceral punch about them that stands with today's level of ferociousness on the screen. One scene in particular that springs to mind is when Mafioso Nick D'Salvio locates the driver of the getaway car carrying the robbers, Henry Jackson, played by the charismatic and scene stealing Antonio Fargas of Starsky and Hutch fame, whopping it up and having a grand time in a whorehouse filled with loose women, transvestites and all manners of lowlifes. As Nick is about to savagely crucify Henry, one of the prostitutes that was enjoying Henry's time and money suddenly seems to not care about his fate as one of the gangsters gives her some money after handing over his clothes. If that isn't enough, after Henry's torturous ordeal at the hands of Nick and on his way to hospital in an ambulance, Captain Mattelli shows no humanity whatsoever as he interrogates Henry with an air of racial contempt so that he can get him to divulge information about the names of his associates.
Often unfairly marketed as a blaxploitation film - although it probably profited from this deceptive tag affixed to it - the film has a great deal more to say than simply showing enjoyably over the top car chases, shootouts and comic book heroes and villains. The Hollywood "black film" of this period thrived by providing its black inner-city audiences with vicarious thrills via the adventures of heroic black dicks or stylish black scofflaws who stick it to The Man. They were winners on both grand and intimate scales. In marked contrast, when D'Salvio defiantly hails Henry in a Harlem Bordello with a cheerful profanity, it's a prelude not to the mobster's own pistol whipping at the hands of a black James Bond but rather to the savagely inhuman beating of the fugitive. With the indifferent blessing of the black henchmen accompanying D'Salvio on his murderous errand, as prostitutes scream and businessmen flee for the exits, Henry is pummelled with jackhammer force.
The individuals and situations populating 110th Street are all too real. This is aided by the presence of strong performances right the way through the cast list and a tightly written screenplay with incendiary dialogue that make the more vicious sequences that more savage even when we see nothing at all. One of the rare dramatically race themed films out there to this day that transcends the brutally comic book confines of the genre, Across 110th Street emerges as a thought provokingly depressing view of, racism, chaos, and corruption in all manner of society from the squalor of the underprivileged and impoverished, to the civic protectorate and also the upper echelon of the crime syndicates that control whole cities.
The film's power stays with you long after you've seen it. You feel like you remember Across 110th Street as a bloodbath not because the story is filled with violence but because nearly every barbarous act yields equally ferocious consequences that we don't always see but the director cleverly leaves it to our imagination through the voices of actors describing the outcome of a heinous act. I vividly recall the scene when the robbers gun down the gangsters from whom they steal the money. The blood spilt from all over the dead bodies as seen from the POV of one of the robbers makes him realise the monumentally grave situation he inadvertently finds himself in and it's that sort of meticulous detail along with the depraved levels of brutal torture that the mafia lieutenant Nick D'Salvio concocts which make the film so memorable. In fact even before you see the acts of violence and torture, just through the wonderful performances of the cast, you realise that these characters are really mad and out to make an example of these hoods who dared to steal from their clan.
There are very few signs of redemption in this realist film other than from Pope played by the effortless Yaphet Kotto. You hope that Mattelli can attain whatever it is that he desires and Quinn's saddened face makes you long for him to redeem himself. What we have here is a negatively charged vision of American civilisation's decline and of humanity's dark dimensions. It's life as we dread it to be but know it so often is. In many ways, Across 110th Street is a non plot since nothing really changes within the cynical world of the story but yet we gain a sobering insight into the world of our main characters and something changes within us. There is the relentless and blood thirsty pursuit of the fugitives and the bleak outlook for Mattelli but there always appears a way out for the characters along the way and they seem to make life difficult for the hunters. I urge you to watch this film that will engross you from start to finish.
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Violent and bloody 'Blaxploitation' 70s thriller starring Anthony Quinn as Frank Mattelli, a good-natured but corrupt cop who, along with his young (and honest) black partner, Detective Lieutenant Pope (Yaphet Kotto), is assigned to track down three amateur crooks who have stolen $300, 000 from the Mafia. Anthony Franciosa co-stars as the sadistic and power-hungry mob boss, Nick D'Salvio. The title song, recorded by Bobby Womack, was re-used two decades later by Quentin Tarantino in his homage to 1970s crime flicks 'Jackie Brown'.
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