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Alphabet City

by Alex Kirschenbaum Oct 21, 2020

The appealingly atmospheric crime thriller Alphabet City (1984) debuts on Blu-ray this fall courtesy of Fun City Editions. Directed by Amos Poe, with a script by Poe, Gregory K. Heller (additional dialogue is credited to Robert Seidman), Alphabet City belongs in the company of After Hours and Into The Night (both 1985) as one of the ultimate ’80s nightmare nocturnes, and it is downright, well, criminal that Alphabet City is not better remembered today. Hopefully this Blu-ray will work towards amending that.

Alphabet City
Blu-ray
Fun City Editions
1984 / Color / 1.85:1 widescreen / 85 min. / Street Date September 29, 2020 / available through Vinegar Syndrome / 24.99
Starring: Vincent Spano, Michael Winslow, Kate Vernon, Jami Gertz, Zohra Lampert, Raymond Serra.
Cinematography: Oliver Wood
Film Editor: Grahame Weinbren
Composer: Nile Rodgers
Written by Amos Poe, Gregory K. Heller, Robert Siedman (additional dialogue).
Produced by Andrew Braunsberg
Directed by Amos Poe

As things kick off, our temperamental hero Johnny (Vincent Spano, fresh off Rumble Fish), a street hustler for the mob, leaves his SoHo painter girlfriend Angela (Kate Vernon, making her big screen debut) and their new baby daughter, Renee (Christina Marie Denihan), in the middle of the night to drive his white 1983 Pontiac Trans Am convertible through the rain-slicked streets of Manhattan. Producer and Chic guitarist/singer Nile Rodgers supplies the first of his many propulsive synth themes in the film for its signature title sequence.

Johnny, also known as “Chunga” during his illicit operations, is en route to a rendezvous with his strung-out compatriot Lippy (Michael Winslow of the Police Academy series, who manages to showcase his unique sound effects skills here, too) in the titular Lower East Side neighborhood. 

Lippy and Johnny have been tasked by their boss, intimidating mafioso Gino (Edward G. Robinson lookalike Raymond Serra, best remembered by this viewer as Chief Sterns in the first two live action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films), with torching a local tenement building, presumably to recoup an insurance premium.

Johnny visits his put-upon mother (Zohra Lampert), little sister Sophia (a young Jami Gertz), and his mother’s latest deadbeat beau (Bruno Damon)… in the very building he’s set to destroy, his childhood home. Johnny does his darnedest to dissuade 15-year-old Sophia from her life as a self-assured escort to the wealthy upper crust citizens of uptown, before laying down the ultimate hammer: Sophia and Mama need to depart the premises, tonight, before their apartment goes up in flames. 

He cancels Sophia’s uptown party, and compels her to help their mother leave, giving them money to stay in a hotel until they can relocate. Johnny then resumes his evening adventure. He checks into a derelict building, where he and Lippy distribute heroin to a long line of doped-out junkies. Their operation is soon broken up by local fuzz, though Johnny, Lippy, and their body men evade capture.

They lose $15,000 of business during the bust. As he and Lippy watch the arrests from a safe remote vantage point, he confronts the fatalistic Lippy about his friend’s growing smack dependency. Johnny, feeling he can’t rely on Lippy for the arson assignment, sends him off into the night.

In calling Johnny’s car phone, cigar-chomping boss Gino reiterates the importance of the arson mission. Johnny takes a detour to a lively nightclub, La Tropicana, where he strives to collect payouts from hedonistic local dealers Benny (Tom Mardirosian) and Tony (Kenny Marino) while navigating his way through breakdancers, coke heads and even a snake. Both men make it abundantly, violently clear that they would rather not pay him. 

Johnny darts home to Angie’s spacious penthouse loft, where he tells her that they need to leave town, posthaste, to avoid the retaliatory wrath of Gino’s goons — because there is no way in hell he’s going to burn down his family tenement.

Despite a very, very sexy attempt at pleading his case, Angie proves initially resistant to such a drastic uprooting, and skeptical that Johnny can really turn over a new leaf, even if he intends to double-cross Gino.

Meanwhile, another of Gino’s disciples, pimp Juani (Daniel Jordano, a childhood friend of Spano’s), has taken on the tall task of torching Johnny’s family’s apartment building. When Johnny confronts Juani, Juani assures Johnny that his family has escaped the building.

After Johnny fails to deliver on the arson project and royally rips off his boss to boot, Gino and his men descend upon Angie’s loft for a climactic shootout with the young family. The loyalty of a familiar face may swing fate in Johnny’s favor… or against it.

Cinematographer Oliver Wood and gaffer Joseph Bolesta light up the night with smoky, diffused neon-hued pinks, blues and greens, lending a colorful, soft-filtered surreality to the proceedings that gives the flick a distinctive aesthetic. Wood also employs some elegant canted framing, intriguing overhead shots, and dynamic, positively Hitchockian action choreography to make this exploration of the troublemaking denizens of the Lower East Side a stylistic marvel.

Unsurprisingly, Wood was able to parlay his work here into an extended stint photographing Miami Vice. The filmmakers use the movie’s low budget to their advantage, exploiting diegetic elements — especially flickering police lights, harsh shadows, and street lights — to develop a cool, evocative look. 

It’s nice to see that, for Alphabet City’s debut on the format, Fun City Editions has pulled out all the stops to equip the flick with the deluxe Blu-ray treatment it so richly deserves. For the disc, Fun City has made a gorgeous 2K restoration sourced directly from a 35mm interpositive film print. During a freshly-photographed introduction, a well-preserved Spano observes that the movie “captures a part of New York City that frankly is gone now.” Spano also sits for a longer discussion, “Prince of Alphabet City,” where he unpacks his formative years as a teen actor in downtown New York, the real-life dangers of Alphabet City in the early 1980s, Michael Winslow’s full-band impression of Led Zeppelin, and how his own sobriety inspired Johnny’s existence as a tea-totaling drug dealer.

The special features don’t stop there. A freshly-recorded video essay from filmmaker Chris O’Neill, “East Side Stories,” highlights the influence of German expressionism and film noir on the movie’s distinctive compositions, and the terrific grounding presence provided by Vincent Spano’s reserved performance at the heat of the flick. Poe sits for a new audio commentary, accompanied by author and essayist Luc Sante, writer of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (1991), among others. A trailer and an image gallery round out the extras.

Poe, himself only a few months out of rehab when cameras rolled, allowed his own experiences to inform his treatment of the flick’s physical and emotional terrain. “Probably 60% — something like that — of my friends and acquaintances were either in detox, about to go into detox, or had just come out of detox. Drugs were insanely prevalent everywhere.”

Poe details the resourcefulness needed by his team in working on the project. The cost-effective film, produced for a budget below $1 million over 20 shoot days, only utilized two sets (Angie’s loft and Mama’s tenement flat), filming on-location for the rest of its effectively gritty set pieces in the fall of 1983. This critic is, frankly, shocked that the nightclub was not a set. Production designer M. Nord Haggerty works wonders with finite fiscal resources here.

Poe truly delves into the nitty-gritty of the production during this indispensably specific commentary including the project’s fastidious rat wrangler, which fight scene the actors opted to portray sans stuntmen, the misinterpreted instructions that led to one of the film’s weirder Easter eggs, and the movie’s original scripted finale.

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