Crime and Conscience Across 110th Street

Posted by Dan

Saturday, April 6, 2013

You don't know what you'll do until you're put under pressure
Across 110th Street is a hell of a tester 

-Bobby Womack, Across 110th Street

It is impossible to talk about Barry Shear’s Across 110^th Street without making reference to Bobby Womack’s blistering theme song. Like Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, 110^th Street kicks off with that funky bassline and the unmistakeable echoey wak-chika-wak guitar of early 70’s soul/R&B – but unlike Tarantino’s homage to the history of Blaxploitation and strong women in cinema, the only thing Womack’s song speaks to is the sweltering image of the social pressure cooker that it narrates: Harlem. 

 
As the credits roll and viewers are introduced to the physical landscape of Harlem, Womack wails a call-and-response about the people who scratch and survive to make up the social environment, like a desperate mirror image to the theme from TV’s Good Times (1974-1979). Like the film itself, Womack’s lyrics and Shear’s visuals come together to suggest to viewers that 1970’s Harlem is something more than just a place or the people that live in it – it’s a unique mixture of the physical and the human that combines and recombines in complex ways. To Across 110^th Street, Harlem is social chemistry.

More after the ever-lovin' jump!

Richard Ward and Anthony Quinn share a tense moment while Yaphet Kotto stands sentry.

Although the film’s year of release, setting, plot and soundtrack may lead some viewers to anticipate the kind of overblown 70’s shlock that recent tributes like Grindhouse and Black Dynamite devoured and reinterpreted like manic DJs on a sugar rush, Across 110^th Street resonated far more with me as serious document of its specific time and place. Most of main plot, in which a manhunt breaks out after a black gang robs a Mob operation, seems to take a backseat to the conflict between people that is the real meat of the drama. Everybody seems to have a problem with one another on some level, and 90% of the time these problems stems from the crazy things that happen when the diversity and complexity of humanity is concentrated and squeezed into the bottleneck of an urban environment.

Whether black vs white, old vs new, class vs class, or even mass population vs authority, Across 110^th Street plays better for me as a “taster’s pack” of  urban social issues in the 1970’s than it does as a violent saga of a heist-gone-wrong.

Paul Benjamin's Jim Harris explains the hole he's in.

The most compelling moments in the film come from Paul Benjamin’s sympathetic robber Jim Harris, an ex-con with a history of seizures. In my favourite scene, where Harris’ girlfriend pleads with him to tell her why he would stoop to theft, Harris cries out that – unemployable by his history, his health and his face – he was simply left with no other choice. Although it’s closer to Serpico than Superfly, Across 110^th Street may still never be described as “cerebral” or “ complex” – however, fueled at every step of the way by the stew of economic, racial and generational tension that is 1970s New York,  Barry Shear’s film remains the kind of honest, socially-conscious crime thriller that seems to have become harder and harder to find in today’s Hollywood fare.   

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