Plenty of genre movies have been set in New York City, such as Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (dev­ilry on the Upper West Side), Wal­ter Salles’ Dark Water (ghosts on Roo­sevelt Island), Guillermo Del Toro’s Mimic (ver­min in the sub­way), and Spike Lee’s Inside Man (thiev­ery on Wall Street). The Tak­ing of Pel­ham One Two Three, directed by Joseph Sar­gent from the novel by John Godey, is one of the few New York movies seem­ingly made for New York­ers. Plenty of the world’s cities have under­ground tran­sit sys­tems, but this par­tic­u­lar story could be set nowhere else. It’s a potent premise that has been remade twice, first as a TV movie in 1998 and again in 2009 as a big-budget star vehi­cle for John Tra­volta and Den­zel Wash­ing­ton, directed by Tony Scott. It was even an indi­rect inspi­ra­tion for the famous color-coded crim­i­nal aliases used in Quentin Tarantino’s Reser­voir Dogs.

The Tak­ing of Pel­ham One Two Three is a time cap­sule, full of curiosi­ties about how the New York City sub­way looked and func­tioned in the 1970s. It also reveals a great deal about how the city itself was per­ceived and por­trayed in pop­u­lar cin­ema at the time. The cityscape is gritty, grimy, and graf­fi­tied. Women are just now begrudg­ingly being let into the M.T.A. work­force. A cyn­i­cal City Hall is will­ing to nego­ti­ate with ter­ror­ists if it means more votes in the next elec­tion. Hook­ers and pimps share the sub­way with drunks and robust eth­nic stereo­types. The unhealthy filth of mil­lions of peo­ple liv­ing in close quar­ters is evi­denced by a cold going around (which becomes a key plot point).

“Some­body down there knows how to drive a train. You don’t pick that up watch­ing Sesame Street.”

The movie’s racial pol­i­tics are dated, but per­haps more hon­est towards flawed human nature. Lt. Gar­ber (Wal­ter Matthau) is openly con­de­scend­ing towards vis­it­ing Japan­ese offi­cials study­ing the M.T.A. He’s flatly racist in a way no hero in a mod­ern film would ever allowed to be (he calls them “mon­keys”). But in fact, he actu­ally does get his come­up­pance. Matthau is, to say the least, an odd cast­ing choice for the hero of a thriller. But he was prob­a­bly about the cor­rect age for a Tran­sit Author­ity detec­tive, and had the right air of sar­donic dis­il­lu­sion­ment for a believ­able lower-level civic employee of the bleak New York City of the 1970s.

Speak­ing of roles that would never be con­ceived the same way in today’s Hol­ly­wood, the bad guys remain very effec­tively dis­guised through­out. Char­ac­ter actors Robert Shaw and Mar­tin Bal­sam were never exactly super­stars, but how many actors today would will­ingly dis­guise them­selves for most of a movie? I can really only think of Clive Owen in Inside Man and almost any­thing Gary Old­man does. Unsur­pris­ingly, no attempt is made to obscure the very expen­sive face of John Tra­volta for one frame of the 2009 remake. Note that Shaw unmask­ing is spoiled by his promi­nent appear­ance on the DVD sleeve.

“Excuse me, do you peo­ple still exe­cute in this state?”

Made decades before 9/11, The Tak­ing of Pel­ham One Two Three is nev­er­the­less a minia­ture night­mare sce­nario of one of the Manhattan’s myr­iad vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties to ter­ror­ism. In the 1970s, the famil­iar form of ter­ror­ism was to hold hostages for remu­ner­a­tion or to espouse a cause. Scott’s 2009 remake had to face 21^st cen­tury audi­ences (many sit­ting in New York City movie the­aters) for whom ter­ror­ism means mass mur­der. But Scott takes the con­ven­tional route and boils down the plot into a con­flict between two men, on a per­sonal level. Scott’s choices high­light how much the orig­i­nal actu­ally bucks cliché.

In the orig­i­nal, we know prac­ti­cally noth­ing about the per­sonal lives of Gar­ber or the vil­lain­ous Mr. Blue (we may guess he’s some sort of ex-mercenary or sol­dier of for­tune, but he gives no hint of his ide­ol­ogy or moti­va­tions). In con­trast to the ice-cool Mr. Blue, Travolta’s char­ac­ter is manic and unhinged, and rants in a bar­rage of f-bombs. Just as Sargent’s old school run­away train sequence is more thrilling than Scott’s rapid-fire edit­ing and CGI flair, the orig­i­nal also outscores on pure cynicism.

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.