As It Was, But Not Much Better

Lately I've been feeding my nostalgia for the 70s by watching contemporary crime movies. Mind you, I graduated from high school in 1973 and I hated the time (just as most teenagers hate their high-school years).  What jumps out from those movies set in New York City is how much has changed there since then. I have first-hand knowledge because I was actually in NYC in 1973-75 and was overwhelmed by the grit, filth, and crime. In Times Square, you could stand on a street corner and watch violent crimes happen. Everything seemed smothered in graffiti. The ambiance was of inevitable collapse. The movie Heavy Metal has a scene of a science-fiction New York rife with corruption and decay and there was no reason that it wouldn't turn out that way. Of course, the Big Apple has since morphed into a theme park for the rich and is America's largest gated community. My sister lives in Midtown Manhattan and when I tell her how it was back in the day, I might as well be talking about mastodons and saber-tooth tigers. In Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro) holes up in a tiny studio apartment that can best be described as squalid. Today, the same space would be a million dollar condo. Easy. Al Pacino's character in Serpico rents a garden-level apartment in Greenwich Village, then the bohemian nexus of the East Coast. By modern standards the place is run down but was acceptably chic for its day. Nail boards together, paint everything white, and decorate it with eclectic flourishes.

What else jumps out from these movies is the undercurrent of racism. Pretty much all the riff-raff criminals in The French Connection, Serpico, and Death Wish are black. In those days that was actually seen as progressive because in prior years, blacks weren't even portrayed as that. Sadly, if you go back further, the situation was worse. I was watching one of Humphrey Bogart's lesser known titles, High Sierra, and was dismayed by the character Algernon, played by Willie Best. Given his role as the mountain camp caretaker, Best could've been allowed to play his part with more dignity and realism. But he was costumed in threadbare clothes, shuffled about, was inclined to laziness, and spoke the required "sho nuff" dialog. At least, I suppose, he got a substantial speaking part. Unfortunately, like most black actors from that era, in later years he was denounced as a witless stooge, though, as he pointed out, he didn't have much choice. Either take the part as is, or get out.

Which makes me think that despite our "wokeness" in this hyper-PC environment, future generations will look back at us and ask, "What were they thinking?"

New York, New York!

I'm on a seventies retro kick lately. Those times were the formative years of my adolescence and early adulthood, and I don't have fond memories; I wanted the era to be done with and we should move on already. The way we process ''the good ole days" means that people are now cycling through the 1970s using the rosy-tinted lenses of nostalgia. To help ground me with the past I've watched some movies from that decade, specifically The French Connection and Taxi Driver. I saw both when they were first released, and at the time, neither impressed me. Mostly because I was young and those stories challenged my notions of right-wrong as I had little regard for moral ambiguity. What further tainted my appreciation--as it were--of the 70s was that I visited New York City at its worst.

Fast-forward to today. Every modern depiction of the city shows it as a polished theme park for the well-to-do. There might be shots of grungy alleys and forbidding sewers, but that's to establish mood. Pan the camera away and we're back to an urban landscape catering to the affluent and hip. Everybody seems lives in a spacious pad decorated with designer appointments, with a sweeping view of course. (However, not all who've lived recently in the city share this opinion. The comedian Emo Philips says that whenever he misses New York, he simply fills his humidifier with urine.) What jumps at me from movies like The French Connection and especially Taxi Driver is the unremitting grime and seediness. Garbage piled the streets. In TD, Robert De Niro lived in a squalid apartment that today is probably a million-dollar condo. His surroundings were filthy, his kitchen cabinet was a battered milk crate nailed to the wall, clothes hung from extension cords strung about the place. Even fancy destinations in the city were gilded in plastic tawdriness. In today's New York, everyone aspires to a bite of the succulent big apple and its promise of opulence and fortune. In the 70s New York, the decay sank everyone to the same filthy level. Mostly you wanted to survive without getting too dirty.