Joe's View

40 years ago, the combination of “white flight” to the suburbs and New York City being on the verge of bankruptcy hurt the image of Manhattan and the other five boroughs around the country.

Instead of “Fun City,” wags started calling The Big Apple “Fear City.”

Ironically, that gritty period was preserved forever in dozens of movies that were shot on location after Mayor John Lindsay created the New York Film Commission which made it easier than ever to film on the streets of the city.

Lindsay made the policy change in 1966, not realizing that moviemakers would be drawn more to the squalor of Manhattan in those days than the glitz that could still be found in various enclaves of the rich and famous.

The 1970s might have been a terrible time for New York City’s municipal finances and crime rate, but it was a Golden Age for the moviemakers who worked in the city then.

It was the period when Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Sidney Lumet and Paul Mazursky did much of their best work. The pictures shot in New York in the 1970s have a raw quality — you couldn’t hide the fact that the city was in the middle of a social and cultural breakdown — and the reality of the backdrop pushed actors to be as authentic as the setting.

Method specialists Al Pacino and Robert De Niro emerged from the New York films of the 1970s, but so did Diane Keaton and Jill Clayburgh.

One of my favorite 1970s New York pictures — “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” — was horribly remade four years ago by director Tony Scott with Denzel Washington and John Travolta starring.

Although the original “Pelham One Two Three” was endorsed by critics and audiences in 1974, it wasn’t a “prestige” hit like “The French Connection” (1971) or “Serpico” (1973).

It was only with the passage of time that film buffs and young moviemakers such as Quentin Tarantino began to appreciate the incredible filmmaking craft that went into this thriller about a subway hijacking.

The criminal gang — led by mercenary Robert Shaw — all dress identically and call each other by color-coded names (Mr. Blue, Mr. Green, etc.), a device that Tarantino tipped his hat to in “Reservoir Dogs.”

What separates “Pelham One Two Three” from most of the other 1970s New York crime pictures is the black comedy that director Joseph Sargent and screenwriter Peter Stone found in such an explosive premise.

The transit cop who negotiates with the hijackers is played by Walter Matthau (above) in one of his best and most droll performances. The actor captures the essence of the seen-it-all New Yorker who is ready to cope with whatever bizarre situation he faces next.

Stone also uses the financial catastrophe of the city for some wry joking. When the hijackers demand $1 million, the mayor and his minions aren’t sure if they can raise the cash in a few hours.

“Pelham One Two Three” must have been a logistical nightmare —with much of the film shot on subway platforms and in the tunnels connecting them — but it has a documentary feel that you just don’t find in contemporary Hollywood movies.

February always sees the release of romantic dramas and comedies tied in with Valentine’s Day — the new Rachel McAdams/Channing Tatum film “The Vow” is expected to sell a lot of tickets this weekend — but I doubt that any of the new stuff will be as romantic or as sexy as Louis Malle’s 1958 drama “The Lovers.”

I just caught up with the movie via The Criterion Collection and was blown away by the power it still packs in Jeanne Moreau’s performance as an upper middle class woman who throws everything away for a guy she barely knows.

This would be my pick for a perfect Valentine’s Day movie.

As Malle says in a long interview on the DVD, he wanted to explore the idea of “love at first sight” and to see if he could make that phenomenon believable for a sophisticated moviegoing audience.

The director believed that sexual attraction had to play a major role in this phenomenon and so he pushed through some of the barriers filmmakers still faced in the late 1950s to give his love scenes more heat than audiences were used to at the time.

“I did away with the camera panning over to the window,” Malle says with a grin of the devices directors had to use as sexual symbols in movies at the time. (The following year Alfred Hitchcock made fun of these cop-outs in his famous closing shot of the train racing into the tunnel at the end of “North by Northwest.”)

While the movie is still very erotic — mostly because we sense the growing connection between the two characters before they have sex — there is only a brief flash of partial nudity in the long bedroom scene near the end of “The Lovers.”

Still, because Malle tried to do away with silly visual euphemisms, his movie stirred up a huge controversy on both sides of the Atlantic.

In this country, more than one city declared the film “obscene” and in Ohio a theater manager was arrested for showing it. The legal case fought on behalf of “The Lovers” by its U.S. distributor went all the way to the Supreme Court — the ruling there was one of the first steps in the liberation of moviemakers who wanted to deal with adult subject matter in an adult way.

If you’ve never seen the film, check out the beautiful Criterion DVD — the romance and the sex in “The Lovers” have lost none of their charm (and charge).

On Sunday, I was very pleased to be asked to host a screening of the controversial 1982 Sam Fuller film “White Dog” (above) at the Bridgeport Library.

The film was presented by the African-American Historical Society of Fairfield County as part of a month-long series of screenings marking Black History Month.

Rather than focus on “uplifting” racial dramas such as “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” or “Sounder” the group is presenting pictures that stirred up audiences when they first came out and that still have the power to unsettle a viewer.

L. Llewellyn James, the director of special programs and marketing for the historical society, is a savvy movie buff who shares my belief that an off-center picture that provokes discussion can be a lot more interesting to see with a group than a tame mainstream production that leaves you with nothing to hash over.

“White Dog” addresses racism in an indirect manner through the story of a young actress (Kristy McNichol) who adopts a German Shepherd she hits with her car on a dark Los Angeles road. The McNichol character bonds with the dog right away and is grateful for the protection he provides when an intruder tries to rape her.

But then she finds out that her dog is a “white dog” trained by racists to attack black people. Horrified by the revelation, the actress tracks down a movie animal trainer (Paul Winfield) who is black and has always wanted to “deprogram” one of these animals.

The picture delves into the whole notion of racism being programmed into us by society and whether or not that condition can be reversed. Fuller and his co-screenwriter Curtis Hanson (who would go on to write and direct “L.A. Confidential”) use this parable with great skill but end the movie in an ambiguous manner.

The picture was threatened with a boycott by the NAACP while it was in pre-production and Paramount was so nervous about “White Dog” that it never theatrically released the film in this country. It wasn’t until the Criterion Collection produced a DVD a few years ago that Fuller’s provocative film became widely available in the U.S.

The audience at the library Sunday was clearly moved and stirred by the film and we had a very lively discussion afterwards.

The free series will continue this coming weekend and the following weekend — Feb. 18 and 19 — with other movies that scared mainstream distributors and never became widely known.

Two highlights are the Feb. 12 screening of “Putney Swope” (below) and “Goodbye, Uncle Tom” on Feb. 19. Both films will be shown at 2 p.m. in the Media Room of the Bridgeport Library.

“Putney Swope” is Robert Downey Sr.’s scabrous 1969 send-up of the advertising industry and black-white relations in which a black man accidentally becomes the head of a major Manhattan ad agency and replaces much of the white staff with militant blacks who want to use advertising for revolutionary purposes. I haven’t seen the picture since it was first released but remember it as a vicious but very entertaining satire of late 1960s pop culture and race relations.

“Goodbye Uncle Tom” is a pseudo-documentary that ran into major distribution problems in this country (as a result, it’s a movie I’ve only read about). The picture was made by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, the same Italian filmmaking duo responsible for the 1960s “shockumentary” “Mondo Cane.”

The filmmakers recreated many of the most horrifying abuses of the slave trade in docudrama style and the results were so incendiary that theater operators in major urban areas wouldn’t book the film for fear of audience disturbances.

For a complete rundown of the films and show times visit www.aahafilmworks.org

Harry Belafonte has been such a powerful presence in the entertainment world for so many years now that it’s easy to take him for granted.

A multi-talent who conquered the recording industry, Broadway and Hollywood, the now 84-year-old icon also played a pivotal role in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s (which fired him up to devote most of his subsequent years to social activism in a variety of areas).

Belafonte’s life and career are the subject of a remarkable documentary that is getting its state theatrical premiere tonight at the Bijou Theatre in Bridgeport.

“Sing Your Song” was directed by Susanne Rostock under the aegis of the HBO Documentary Films unit, and it gives us an in depth look at Belafonte from his birth in Harlem, through a youth spent in Jamaica, and then on to his barrier-breaking career as a singer and actor.

Belafonte became a star in the 1950s when black performers were still strait-jacketed by racial policies that restricted their choice of material. On more than one occasion Belafonte triggered controversy by working with white female performers, causing great consternation in areas of the country where segregation was still law.

One segment in the film shows how the star scored a huge middle of the road success on Broadway in a show with the dancing duo Marge and Gower Champion, but stirred up great anger in the South when the revue toured there. The fact that a black man and a white woman held hands during a dance routine became an incendiary stage moment below the Mason-Dixon Line.

When Belafonte became a headliner in Las Vegas, the racial policies there made it impossible for him to stay in the hotel-casinos where he was performing — instead the performer was forced to live in a ramshackle collection of trailers way off the Strip that were used for housing black entertainers.

Even as late as 1968, Belafonte stirred controversy in the South when he appeared with Petula Clark on an NBC special that included a moment when she held his arm while singing. Clark was horrified by a request to reshoot or edit the song and there were stations that didn’t carry the show.

Belafonte’s screen career included such important films as “Carmen Jones” (below) with Dorothy Dandridge. He became so frustrated with the material he was offered, however, that he started his own independent film production unit.

That effort was foiled too when changes were forced on his end-of-the-world drama “The World, the Flesh and the Devil” because the only surviving female was a white woman (played by Inger Stevens).

“Sing Your Song” shows how Belafonte helped John F. Kennedy in his 1960 election to the presidency and then worked side by side with Martin Luther King and other black leaders in ending state-sanctioned segregation in the South.

Rostock doesn’t delve much into the performer activist’s private life, other than a few of his own regretful references to the way he neglected his family life during the peak years, but when someone has done so much on the public stage in America the director’s approach seems entirely appropriate.

(“Sing Your Song” will be shown tonight at 8 p.m. at the Bijou Theatre in Bridgeport. For more information, go to www.bijoutheatre.com)

The terrible toll that World War I took on several generations of British people – both in battle and on the homefront — has powered the PBS series “Downton Abbey” (below) so far this season.

If you are as fascinated by this period as I am you will want to read the new Charles Todd mystery, “The Confession” (William Morrow), which follows a Scotland Yard detective Ian Rutledge who is still fighting the psychological demons of his war service as he tries to solve an exceptionally complex murder case.

“The Confession” is the 14th book in a series of mysteries about Rutledge which have been gathering more new readers with each installment. The books bring the post-World War I period to vivid life, are masterfully plotted, and feature one of the most fascinating sleuths in contemporary crime fiction.

“Charles Todd” is actually a mother-and-son writing duo — Charles and Caroline Todd — who together have created a seamless voice in books that perfectly balance history, character and storytelling.

One of the most daring elements in the series is the continuing presence of a Scottish soldier who died alongside Ian in the war. Depending on your own point of view, Hamish can be taken as a ghost or a more literal form of conscience in Rutledge’s mind — Hamish guides Ian, warns him of dangers ahead, and helps the detective sort through the complexities of each new case.

When I first heard about this device, I worried that it could turn the books into tales of the supernatural that might be a little too hokey for me, but Hamish is used with great precision — “he” also provides the stories with an ever-present reminder that Rutledge is still carrying the scars of the war, including treatment for shell shock.

The mystery in “The Confession” is a puzzle worthy of Agatha Christie, involving a man dying of stomach cancer who comes to Rutledge to confess a murder during the war. The confessor won’t tell the Scotland Yard detective much more than where the crime happened — a coastal village east of London — and before Rutledge can find out much more, the mysterious man is murdered and dumped in the Thames.

The oddities quickly start piling up — the man was not who he claimed to be, so why was he implicating someone else in a crime? And since he was in the final stages of cancer, why did someone bother to make his life even shorter?

Rutledge visits the village where the first murder supposedly took place — the rather creepy hamlet of Furnham — and begins to suspect a much larger crime (and mystery) in which the whole town might be implicated.

“The Confession” is in the historical mystery genre, but there is nothing musty about the Todds’ approach to the past — it’s another superb entry in one of the best continuing series in crime fiction.

Should fine acting in a terrible movie win awards?

That’s the question raised by Meryl Streep’s flawless performance as Margaret Thatcher in the really lame Oscar-nominated movie that surrounds her — “The Iron Lady.”

I caught up with the picture last week and was shocked by how little screen time is devoted to Thatcher’s life as one of the most powerful politicians of the 20th century.

When I heard Streep and director Phyllida Lloyd in their promotional interviews talking about the film as a story of a woman making it in a man’s world — and fighting against the stereoptyping any female faces in politics — I assumed most of “The Iron Lady” would be devoted to Thatcher’s rise to power and then the decade she spent as the first female prime minister of England.

Instead, the movie is mostly about the now-aged Thatcher — who is apparently suffering from both dementia and alcoholism — looking back at her life, with more scenes about her marriage and her relationship with her children than her life as leader of her party and her country.

It’s ironic that Streep and Lloyd talked so much about sexual stereotyping in their interviews and then delivered a movie that rushes us through Thatcher’s political accomplishments in favor of dreary domestic scenes (I can’t imagine any filmmaker — male or female — making a drama about Ronald Reagan with most of the action taking place during that terrible final decade of his decline into Alzheimers).

The flashback structure left this viewer with the impression that Lloyd and Streep feared we wouldn’t find a powerful Thatcher sympathetic — because of her conservative politics — and so we get scene after scene of a dotty, present-day Margaret talking to the ghost of her dead husband (Jim Broadbent) and being confused by what is said by the people around her.

Streep is completely convincing in every moment of “The Iron Lady” — and sports some of the best aging make-up I’ve ever seen — but the movie is a shambles that never lets us see sustained moments in which a powerful Thatcher savors her unprecedented clout.

If the makers of “The Iron Lady” had so little respect for Thatcher as a politician — or weren’t gutsy enough to be scathingly satirical — why did they bother making such a wan little nothing of a movie?

The story of exploitation filmmaker Roger Corman — and the big breaks he gave to some now-major directors and actors — has been told in many books and Hollywood documentaries.

But no one has told the story as well or with as much emotion as director Alex Stapleton in the 2011 documentary “Corman’s World,” which has just debuted on DVD.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, Corman ground out B-movies designed primarily for young drive-in audiences.

The producer-director made hot rod movies, Edgar Allen Poe adaptations and sci-fi thrillers — anything he could serve up cheaply and with the potential for a lurid advertising campaign.

Most of the Corman films are unwatchable now, but he holds an honored place in Hollywood history for giving big early breaks to directors such as Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme, and actors like Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Pam Grier and Bruce Dern.

The clips in “Corman’s World” from “Bloody Mama,” “The Trip” (below), “Wild Angels” and the rest are of the so-bad-they’re good variety, but the documentary gets its real power from the high caliber of the interview subjects who clearly still believe they owe Corman a lot for helping to launch their careers.

Nicholson gives a terrific interview in which he laughs about how quickly and cheaply movies like “The Terror” and “Little Shop of Horrors” were made, but then bursts into tears when he tries to express his gratitude to Corman.

Stapleton supplies us with a truly happy ending when we see Corman and his wife Julie at the Oscars a few years ago where the producer received an honorary award for his contributions to the industry.

If I was asked to pick the most unjustly neglected film of the past decade, I would probably cite the 2004 Jonathan Glazer picture “Birth” which has remained off most people’s radar despite a strong cult following.

The British critic David Thomson hosted the film in 2010 when the New York Film Festival asked him to sponsor a recent under-heralded title, but it was far from a hot ticket. The movie features one of the finest performances Nicole Kidman has ever given, but “Birth” was such a financial flop and so divisive critically that she didn’t receive an Oscar nomination for it.

It was only with the passage of time — and cable and video screenings — that “Birth” began to attract a growing cult of admirers, including David Thomson.

The drama about reincarnation opened to some very strong reviews (some terrible ones, too), but did not deliver the “Sixth Sense”-style supernatural thriller that early multiplex audiences expected. The box-office returns were so bad that the film was gone before it had time to find an appreciative audience.

There are tragic elements in “Birth,” but no horror or violence, so many of the people who saw the picture in its opening weekend dismissed it as boring or wildly improbable.

The commercial problem with this quite remarkable film is that it treats a supernatural experience with deadly seriousness — the upper class New York woman Anna played by Nicole Kidman has to confront the idea that the soul of her late husband has returned a decade after his death in the body of a 10-year-old boy, Sean (Cameron Bright).

Anna is still grieving but has agreed to marry Joseph (Danny Huston), who has been after her for years.

Jonathan Glazer wrote the original screenplay with Milo Addica and Jean-Claude Carriere (the latter writer worked on the 1972 Luis Bunuel classic, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie”).

“Birth” combines a provocative premise with superb craftsmanship — the movie’s wintry Manhattan looks stunning as shot by Harris Savides and the music by Alexandre Desplat subtly heightens the emotion in many scenes.

What really carries the movie, however, is the brilliant and daring performance by Kidman who makes us believe Anna is in the middle of a hellish dilemma — the man she adored and lost has come back in the form of a 10-year-old boy.

If you go on the IMDB site, there are absurd claims that “Birth” becomes a form of “kiddie porn” in the scenes depicting Anna’s growing realization that her husband has returned as a pre-teen.

The contact we see between Anna and Sean is unsettling but not due to any sexual subtext — we are unnerved because Kidman makes us believe what her character believes and we can see that there is no rational way out of the situation.

The wintry look and the extended close-ups of Kidman are reminiscent of the work of Ingmar Bergman who thought the human face was just about the most interesting thing you can look at in a movie and who therefore gave us up-close-and-very-personal views of Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson and all of those other great Swedish actresses he worked with.

In this age of lightning-fast cutting, and movies that use actors as expensive props, it is such a pleasure to see Kidman have the chance to use the camera as a tool and to have so many close-up oppportunities. There is an incredible sequence early on in which Anna and Joseph arrive at the opera late and the camera moves in for a tight shot of Kidman’s face that is held for a few minutes so that we can watch Anna’s dawning realization that her husband might be back in a new form.

Last year, I came across a very sharp assessment of the film from Chicago blogger Nick Davis, who wrote, “So how does a movie like Birth still get made? The auteurist formal control of the movie, awash with directorial signatures at every level and in every nook, feels anachronistic in itself, redolent of an emotional drift that hasn’t much been felt much in American movies since ‘Five Easy Pieces’ or ‘The King of Marvin Gardens.’”

“…Alexandre Desplat’s roiling, sonorous score, the most beautiful thing heard in years of movies, ebbs and rolls with a confidence to match its beauty, as if movies have been scored this way forever…And the script, which came to such grief among so many critics, resembles nothing so much as those gorgeously stuck, impacted stories of Henry James, like ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ or ‘The Altar of the Dead.’ Does the film take itself too seriously? Does it admit too little about too much? Maybe, but such bold and gorgeous reticence is a rare gift.”