Across 110th Street

This reviewer witnessed personally some of the impact of what became known as ‘blaxploitation’ cinema, but in a roundabout way. After the ratings system came in, our local theaters in San Bernardino skipped a lot of rougher films, but the theater on our Air Force base showed everything from the major studios. That included titles like Shaft and Cotton Comes to Harlem, along with comedies like Watermelon Man. As I was one of the few white people in an auditorium of black airmen I got to see how welcome were movies starring black actors. The title tune for Shaft all but brought the house down, and the vulgar comedy and stick-it-to-the-man jokes of Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones were indeed liberating.

Back at UCLA most of the blaxploition cycle slipped by; I wasn’t interested in stories glorifying pimps and drug pushers. But I was impressed by a non- blaxploitation crime picture that had a killer soundtrack and was in no way a comedy. Across 110th Street is a crime tragedy about desperation in Harlem, with characters as doomed as the rebels in John Ford’s The Informer. Harlem vice is sewn up by several ruthless criminal enterprises, a description that also applies to some of the police force. Every effort to break out leads to a brutal dead end. Crime not only doesn’t pay, it’s a one-way ticket to a horrible fate. As quoted by Viavision from Variety:

“Across 110th Street is not for the squeamish. From the beginning, it is a virtual blood bath.”

Back in 1972 Across 110th Street was mostly known as a picture so unpleasant that it encouraged walkouts. It’s now better known for its great soundtrack score credited to J. J. Johnson, and the Quentin Tarantino- friendly title tune compossed by Johnson and Bobby Womack. On Blu-ray the film shapes up well, with a credible story, good performances and evocative location filming in Harlem.

The screenplay by Luther Davis (Black Hand, Lady in a Cage) makes no reference to larger issues of the time, like Vietnam. Four years earlier director Jules Dassin put together a literal ‘ghetto’ revision of The Informer called Uptight. Max Julien, Ji-Tu Cumbuka, Julien Mayfield, Ruby Dee & Raymond St. Jacques played urban radicals trying to foment a revolution. 110th Street drops the politics in favor of straight-up gangland mayhem.

We witness a grim twenty hours for some exhausted, desperate people. A trio of black gunslingers robs a numbers counting room in Harlem, where the minions of black boss Doc Johnson (Richard Ward) are handing over $300,000 in cash over to the accountants of white Mafia kingpin Don Gennaro (Frank Macetta). A machine gun goes off, leaving three Harlemites, two Italians and two cops dead. To let Harlem know who’s the boss, Don Gennaro orders his young associate Nick D’Salvio (Anthony Franciosa) to find the killers and wipe them out as gruesomely as possible. Doc Johnson ignores D’Salvio’s threats but lends his ruthless main lieutenant Shevvy (Gilbert Lewis) to the effort to locate the thieves.

The police are two steps behind in this murderous manhunt. Aging, on-the-take Capt. Frank Mattelli (Anthony Quinn) is told that he must yield leadership in the investigation to the young Lt. William Aliceworth Pope (Yaphet Kotto), an ambitious detective angry that none of the white cops respect him. Meanwhile, the three thieves are still at large. The getaway driver Henry Jackson (Antonio Fargas) goes on a bender at a local brothel, foolishly advertising his new cash windfall. Soulful ex-con Joe Logart (Ed Bernard) realizes that it’s time to run, and tips off the machine gun-toting Jim Harris (Paul Benjamin) and Jim’s girl Gloria Roberts (Norma Donaldson) that the Mafia now knows who they are. Each has an escape plan… but both the cops and the hoods are closing in fast.

Across 110th Street shares a lot of black talent with the next year’s Bond film Live and Let Die. Its main market was the black audience, with Anthonys Quinn and Franciosa on hand to encourage crossover viewers. Director Barry Shear was mainly known for A.I.P.’s breakout hit Wild in the Streets yet was not part of any ‘youth’ movement; he’d been working in TV from the early 1950s and had been producting TV since 1960. Shear doesn’t try to soften the script’s hard edges. The nasty story is concerned with little more than the violence and pain meted out by the mob to counter an embarrassing crime. The Mafia boss describes Central Park as ‘a moat between us and the niggers.’ His craven yes-man D’Salvio is a sadist eager to impress.

The script deftly sketches the pandemonium in the precinct hall, with Mattelli dispensing favors right and left among a mob of black arrestees. New detective Pope is outraged that Captain Mattelli routinely bludgeons suspects as a matter of expedience. The film presents bloody beatings as a standard part of the process.

We also get an eyeful of Antonio Fargas’s outrageously flamboyant Henry hiring several prostitutes with his newfound loot. He then accompanies them to the brothel’s bar wearing only a purple silk sheet, a choice he soon regrets. Henry’s brief fling is the only fun anyone has in this straight violence and revenge story. One victim of Mafia torture has his arm broken before being hung by his feet from twenty floors up. Another luckless thief dies screaming in an ambulance; it looks as if his face has been cut apart and his eyes gouged out. Later on we learn that the man was castrated and crucified alive. All that mutilation at least happens off-screen, so the filmmakers did see a need to take some mercy on the audience.

The most sympathetic crook is played by Paul Benjamin, of Midnight Cowboy, Escape from Alcatraz and Do the Right Thing. Tough customer Jim Harris is the thief we invest our hopes in — he has a loyal woman at his side and a halfway clear idea of starting a better life somewhere else. Harris puts up a good fight with his machine gun, decimating his tormentors and giving the audience the action finale they came for.

Movies of this kind really need action finales, just to let loose all the tension that’s been built up. Both ghetto-based thrillers Uptight and Report to the Commissioner fail in this way; it’s difficult to remember exactly how they end. Across 110th Street finishes with the no holds-barred action finale that Machine Gun McCain needed.

Anthony Franciosa is disturbingly convincing as the passed-over Mafioso who ups the sadism quotient to impress the boss at the next level, his father-in-law.  D’Salvio hugs babies but gets his kicks making broken men grovel in pain. Gang etiquette requres that D’Salvio not be afraid to verbally abuse a black chieftain, even when he’s in Harlem surrounded by black hoods. The Italians have to make a show of who’s boss, if only to hide their fear that the blacks will wipe them out of the drug trade entirely.

The great Yaphet Kotto comes off with more dignity even though his character’s conflict with Anthony Quinn is overly familiar stuff. Kotto plays his put-upon Lt. Pope low-key and subdued, making him seem all the more credible.

Anthony Quinn has an executive producer credit on the film. Quinn’s Captain Matelli also seems to know that his corrupt practices can’t go on forever. His fatigue looks genuine, but for a 55 year-old guy whose face looks even older, Quinn hustles up and down those fire escapes pretty well.

The film’s standout actors are all black, and all in top form. Antonio Vargas is fine as the crazy guy who blows everything and suffers the most for his foolishness — but he doesn’t rat out his friends. Richard Ward (Brubaker, Mandingo) is excellent as the gravel-voiced Doc Johnson, a leader with guts enough to laugh in D’Salvio’s face, give Captain Matelli the cold shoulder and even try to help Lt. Pope get his promotion. He runs rackets in numbers, dope and prostitution and yet is the only hood with anything resembling ethics. The three thieves come off as losers who should have had their plane tickets (and epilepsy medicine) ready before they picked up their guns.

We can tell that the filmmakers were impressed by actress Marlene Warfield, who plays a young widow too proud to cry in front of the cops. Ms. Warfield later won the plum role of the militant radical in Sidney Lumet’s Network, the woman whose Marxist rhetoric morphs into negotiation demands for ancillary rights to her new TV show.

The film’s strong suit is its realism — it appears to have been filmed entirely on location in Harlem, not an easy task to pull off in 1972 when large sections of Manhattan had become crime-ridden war zones. All that urban renewal, gentrification and cosmetic clean-up was still years in the future.