In 1974, NYC was going bankrupt under the inept Mayor Abe Beame, after sinking under the well-meaning but similarly inept John Lindsay. It holds 44 seats with room for 136 standing.” -train conductor Bud Carmody (Jerry Holland) “Every car on the IRT is 72 feet long, costs $250,000, and weighs 75,000 pounds. And they’re screaming because the city is dying.Ģ. This silly thriller isn’t really about good guys and bad guys, it’s about a real city and the people trapped in it. But look closely: The bit-part character actors playing the hostages have been portrayed faithfully. The villain, Robert Shaw, is just a little guy in the background, and the hero, Walter Matthau, isn’t on the poster at all. The poster seems like more of the same-pure shock, screaming people in a traincar with a big gun looming in the foreground. It’s the stuff of cheap paperbacks, like the one by Morton Freedgood (under the pen name John Godey) that served as source material for the movie.
The city’s only defender? A schlubby transit cop making his plan up as he goes along. The plot of Joseph Sargent’s 1974 thriller The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three sounds ridiculous: Four mustachioed men hold a broke New York City by the balls by hijacking a subway car. “Screw the goddamn passengers! What the hell did they expect for their lousy 35 cents, to live forever?” -subway dispatcher Frank Correll (Dick O’Neill) The Dissolve is happy to turn the first Movie Of The Week of 2015 over to our friends at The Flop House Podcast, a biweekly podcast about bad movies.ġ.