Street Smart: The New York of Lumet, Allen, Scorsese, and Lee

359 Pages·2005·2.03 MB·English

by  Richard A. Blake

Prologue iii
RICHARD A. BLAKE
STREET
SMART
THE NEW YORK OF LUMET,
ALLEN, SCORSESE, AND LEE
The University Press of Kentucky
iv Prologue
Publication of this volume was made possible in part by a grant
from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Copyright © 2005 by The University Press of Kentucky
Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,
serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre
College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University,
The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College,
Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University,
Morehead State University, Murray State University,
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University of Kentucky, University of Louisville,
and Western Kentucky University.
All rights reserved.
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www.kentuckypress.com
All photographs are courtesy of Jerry Olingher’s Movie Materials Store in New York, N.Y.
09 08 07 06 05 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Blake, Richard Aloysius.
Street smart : the New York of Lumet, Allen, Scorsese, and Lee / Richard A. Blake.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8131-2357-7 (alk. paper)
1. New York (N.Y.)—In motion pictures. 2. Lumet, Sidney, 1924—Criticism and
interpretation. 3. Allen, Woody—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Scorsese,
Martin—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Lee, Spike—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
PN1995.9.N49B63 2005
791.43’627471—dc22 2005007622
This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting
the requirements of the American National Standard
for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Member of the Association of
American University Presses
Prologue v
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Prologue ix
Cinema City: All Around the Town 1
Lower East Side: Sidney Lumet 41
Flatbush: Woody Allen 101
Little Italy: Martin Scorsese 153
Fort Greene: Spike Lee 209
Epilogue 281
Notes 289
Bibliography 303
Index 307
Illustrations follow page 144
Prologue vii
Acknowledgments
A special note of thanks is due to several colleagues at Boston College.
First of all, thanks to John Michalczyk who, as department chair and
founder of the Film Studies program within the Fine Arts Department,
urged completion of this project and by creative accommodation made
it possible. With his support I was able to obtain a generous grant from
the Boston College university research fund that enabled me to secure
professional assistance to complete the manuscript preparation.
Thanks too to Karen Klein McNulty, Mark Caprio, Eugenie M’Polo,
Coleen Dunkley, and their student assistants in the Media Center who
managed to locate the films and make them available as needed. Finally,
a note of appreciation to the students of the two classes who took a
preliminary tour of New York City neighborhoods in American Direc-
tors, FM 389, and who asked the important questions, as tourists often
do.
vii
Prologue ix
Prologue
Over a week had passed since the collapse of the World Trade Center.
The afternoon of September 11, I managed to contact a cousin who
lives in our old neighborhood in Brooklyn but works near Ground Zero.
(I’ll call her Jean, even though it isn’t her name.) She was safe. In fact,
while running a bit late that morning, she heard a confused news bulle-
tin on the radio about a fire in the area and further postponed her de-
parture to avoid the possible inconvenience of a subway delay. Within
minutes of the initial news flash, television pictures began to reveal the
extent of the horror. Our conversation that afternoon was hushed and
monotone, like mourners gathered at a funeral, wanting to strengthen
each other but finding our words hopelessly inadequate, empty.
During the next few days, we lost contact. The phone company
temporarily rerouted its ruined lines from commercial centers near the
disaster area through residential sections in Brooklyn. As a result, the
circuits in some neighborhoods became hopelessly overloaded, and some
areas were virtually inaccessible to outside callers. My initial anxiety
about Jean’s safety gave way to worry about her coping with the trans-
figured geography of her life.
After a week or more had passed, workers toiling day and night
gradually managed to restore service. By the time we spoke again, the
merciful numbness was beginning to wear off as we, like most Ameri-
cans, started to feel the pain of the wound that had not yet begun to
heal. Our voices seemed more brittle and our sentences more edgy. Jean
described her persistence in calling coworkers and her relief in learning
that no one from the office had been injured. Their building was still
standing, with apparently only minor damage, but of course the area
ix
x Prologue
had been closed off while rescue crews went about their sickening task
of sifting through the smoldering rubble. Electric lines were out. Even
if they could reach the office, what could they do without phones, el-
evators, computers, lights, and ventilation? They were instructed to stay
home until power could be restored.
Bereavement, the sense of helplessness, and boredom during this
unexpected layoff from work took its toll. It was a long, empty, frustrat-
ing, and anxiety-ridden week. Like many people in those first days, Jean
was torn between the desire to return to a normal routine and the dread
of facing the area whose grotesque transformation had become eerily
familiar through television. During our conversation, she described fill-
ing the time with long walks through the neighborhood in the glorious
September sunlight. Each sentence unearthed a long-buried childhood
memory for me: sights, smells, and sounds as vivid today as they were at
midcentury: the neighborhood shops on Third Avenue, the schoolyard,
Owl’s Head Park. Time past fuses into time present. Will historians
continue to describe those days of crew cuts, penny loafers, and black-
and-white television, of Ike and Lucy, as a gentler, simpler era? What of
McCarthy, Korea, and air raid shelters in the basement? Yes, they were
frightening and exciting then, especially to a child, but in comparison
to the present, they seem gentler, simpler indeed.
A View from the Footbridge
Jean’s description of one walking tour in particular brought me back
through the decades as though I had never left home. It begins at the
old Brooklyn–Staten Island ferry slip, now a recreational pier at the foot
of Sixty-ninth Street, turns left, and goes up a short hill along tree-lined
Shore Road toward Fort Hamilton. On the right are three baseball dia-
monds and a playground. On the left are Marist High School and sev-
eral private houses perched on rocky bluffs overlooking the harbor. I see
it clearly. At Eighty-third Street one can turn right, enter the park, cross
a footbridge over the Belt Parkway, which connects the City to the South
Shore of Long Island, and descend to a bicycle-and-pedestrian path at the
water’s edge. The concrete treads on the water side of the bridge are deep
enough that a skillful thirteen-year-old can bounce a Schwinn down the
steps and keep pedaling all the way to Coney Island, whose parachute
ride and Ferris wheel were once visible in the distance.
Prologue xi
In her walk that particular afternoon, Jean crossed the bridge, in-
tending to stroll back along the water to the ferry slip. It was a natural
route to follow. On a cloudless late summer afternoon, the path pro-
vides a spectacular view of the Statue of Liberty and the Battery at the
tip of Manhattan. At this point, Jean hesitated in her narrative. “I crossed
the bridge. When I looked over toward Manhattan, they were gone,”
she gasped. “There was nothing there. Only brown smoke.” Her voice
trailed off into silence. Perhaps I heard a gulp or even a muffled sob. My
own throat swelled shut and my eyes watered at that stark observation,
so brief in the telling, yet so poignant in the hearing; so empty of po-
etry, yet filled with anguish, like the smoldering void itself.
Like everyone else, I had spent most of the previous week sitting
stupefied in front of the television, obsessively watching the obscene
events replayed again and again. I read the newspapers and listened to
the commentators, trying to grasp the enormity of the crime, seeking
some plausible explanation amid the torrent of reports and rumors. Like
many others, too, I remained in a state of emotional denial. Somehow,
possibly because of shock, possibly because of the numbing repetition, I
had somehow managed to keep the atrocity at a distance, as though it
were an earthquake in some distant land. No longer. A telephone con-
versation, a walk taken in imagination and memory through a park in
Brooklyn that I had not seen since adolescence, opened the path to tears
and, one would hope, healing. It was my world that had been violated.
Why? How? I had left Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, nearly fifty years ago,
before the low-lying horizon of Staten Island became bracketed by the
Verrazano Bridge at the mouth of the harbor on the left and on the
right by the World Trade Center at the tip of Manhattan. Neither had
been built by the time I left Brooklyn, and the Dodgers had not yet
moved to Los Angeles. I had not lived in any part of New York for fully
sixteen years before September 11, and on periodic visits, I began to feel
progressively more the visitor. Family had scattered, and most friends
and associates had moved on. Even the subways had been rerouted be-
cause of endless work on the Manhattan Bridge, and I have been in the
astounding situation of having to ask strangers for directions on a tran-
sit system that had been part of my life since beginning high school.
Even so, Jean’s words reminded me that it was my psychic landscape
that had been defiled, as surely as if my home had been ransacked by
strangers. Despite the distance of miles and years, I am a New Yorker.
xii Prologue
A View from the Movies
The experience of that telephone conversation also had another, totally
unexpected impact on my life. It added a human dimension to an aca-
demic project about New York City and its place in American films,
especially by filmmakers whose lives, like mine, have been inextricably
woven into the fabric of the City. For several months I had been read-
ing, gathering notes, and trying to organize my thoughts about them.
In what way did the experience of growing up in the neighborhoods of
the City influence their artistic imagination and consequently color the
films they put on the screen? Is their New York different from
Hollywood’s New York? The project seemed then, and now, an interest-
ing topic to explore through a book-length study. After September 11,
the project suddenly gathered an immediacy, a personal emotional in-
vestment of the kind that rarely intrudes into academic inquiries, which,
by their nature, tend to be scientific, objective, and dispassionate.
But in my own visceral reaction to this act of unspeakable violence,
I discovered a personal validation of my postulate. Imagining the de-
struction from a particular point of view, from a footbridge in a park in
Bay Ridge, made a difference. In a very real sense, I had never left Brook-
lyn; I was still connected and still viewed great events of the world from
that psychic vantage point. If in the weeks following September 11, 2001,
I realized how much the cityscape was still part of my perceptual and
emotional life, then the same might be true of the New York filmmakers:
Woody Allen, Sidney Lumet, Martin Scorsese, and Spike Lee. Are their
lenses tinted with the New York experience, and more to the point, are
their films? How could they not be?
Of course, these four filmmakers provide a mere sampler. Many
others come from New York, and countless directors from all parts of
the country—indeed, from around the world—have at some time used
the City as a backdrop for their work. There’s no great trick to creating
an authentic New York atmosphere on a California soundstage, as the
industry has proved again and again. These four artists, however, add
something to Hollywood’s skillful but artificial “authenticity.” Each grew
up in one of those ethnic neighborhoods that form the backbone of
New York City. What is more, each of these four has set several major
works within the metropolitan area, and each is at home shooting and
doing postproduction in the City.
Prologue xiii
What makes the study of these four particularly interesting is that
each traces his roots to very different backgrounds within the vast met-
ropolitan area. One need not be a sociologist to appreciate that ethnic
residential areas of the City, of any city, are wildly diverse. They remain
mysteries to outsiders, a category that includes people who live on the
next block as well as in distant cities. My middle-class, mostly Irish Bay
Ridge, Brooklyn, for example, might be on another continent than Spike
Lee’s African American Brooklyn or Martin Scorsese’s Italian Lower East
Side of Manhattan, and this in turn is a world apart from Sidney Lumet’s
Jewish Lower East Side a few blocks away or Woody Allen’s affluent,
artistic Jewish community on the Upper West Side. But none of these
neighborhoods has much in common with the glittery worlds of show
business, high finance, and violent crime that come to mind when one
thinks of the popular movie presentations of New York.
As a result, native New Yorkers live the paradox of being extremely
small town and provincial while inhabiting one of the most cosmopoli-
tan areas in the world. Like my cousin and like me, we stand securely
rooted in a neighborhood and look across the water (actual or meta-
phorical) at the wonders of a distant city. The New York of skyscrapers
and champagne might as well be Katmandu, Shangri-la, or Oz. Most of
us have never spent New Year’s Eve in a swank nightclub, nor do we
mingle with celebrities backstage. Most families working in New York
understand that only rich people and tourists can afford theater, con-
certs, and elegant restaurants. These things are not for those of us who
ride the subway to work. We learned that this world exists not from
personal experience, but from the movies. Still we took comfort, and
perhaps even pride, from knowing that they are close by, parts of our
city.
Even today, the Brooklyn I remember may be subtly filtered through
childhood experiences, and the Manhattan I imagine never really ex-
isted except in the movies I saw from the balcony of Loew’s Bay Ridge
or the RKO Dyker. My mind may have concocted an artifice: a Brook-
lyn of nostalgia and a midtown Manhattan that stirs both admiration
and resentment. How could it be otherwise for one who has grown up
in New York? Midtown and neighborhood alike have of course been
recycled many times in the movies. The relationship between the two is
symbiotic, especially, I suggest, on the part of the four filmmakers un-
der discussion. Their New York is as real as the smell of the neighbor’s
xiv Prologue
onions in the stairwell of their apartment building, but it is as artificial
as the Midtown they saw in the movies and tried to recreate in their
own films. They turned their experience of life and movies into art, into
more movies, and these in turn now shape our understanding of New
York.
In the chapters that follow, I look at four extraordinary American
filmmakers with New York eyes. We will look at a few “New York”
films, not to evaluate accuracy of detail, but rather to try to trace the
strands of authentic New York experience that give these films a par-
ticular texture. In the process, I address the larger issues of their artistic
sensibilities, social perspectives, and even philosophical questions. I try
to locate their own neighborhood footbridge that provides their per-
spective on the City, and consequently on the human drama they have
recorded through their films.
The pages that follow will deal with films rather than personalities
or urban history. The introduction will sketch some of the key concepts
in the relationship between New York, its filmmakers, and their films.
In this section, I sketch out some generalizations that can be later exam-
ined in light of the films. Although the analysis of the films necessarily
involves some discussion of the setting, the geography and architecture
are far less important than the effect the material world has had on the
filmmaker and his creation. Looking at the films with awareness of its
New York origins merely provides another critical tool, much like read-
ing the films with the conscious awareness of one’s ideological perspec-
tive as, say, a postmodernist, Marxist, feminist, or Christian. Each
perspective offers its own vantage point from which to view a central
reality.
The subsequent four chapters that focus on individual filmmakers
are a convenient, and I hope useful, organizational strategy to deal with
a complex topic. This does not pretend to be an auteurist treatment of
each of the four. Auteur criticism, which emphasizes the role of the
director to the near exclusion of collaborators, has been largely sup-
planted in recent years as critics have become more self-consciously sen-
sitive to the complexity of the filmmaking process.1 As a result, these
chapters examine individual filmmakers, but they do not attempt the
“complete works” treatment used by classical auteur critics. Rather, they
are limited to only those few films that best illustrate the directors’ rela-
tionship to New York City. Those who find the arguments convincing