Owned version: The 2014 Blu-ray released by Kino Lorber under their KL Studio Classics imprint.
Acquired: July 30th, 2016 from Amazon.
Seen before?: No.
"You wanna drink?"
"Oh no, I don't drink."
"You will, Pope. You will."
Captain Matelli (Anthony Quinn), the offering party in this exchange with the named young lieutenant angling for his job, drinks. He drinks for a lot of reasons. In this instance, he needs a drink because it's late and he and Lt. Pope (Yaphet Kotto) have spent a long day('s journey into night) running through the rattled cage of early-'70s New York City. Matelli drinks because he's been running through this cage for decades, through many long days and nights like this, and the thread is getting to the end of the spool. He's been a fixture in the Harlem precinct for years - you can see it in how he deals with the public, how he wends his way through a crowd of aggrieved residents of the neighborhood and promises them he'll fix whatever has brought them to his station tonight, and how the residents react to him because they know his word is good. But he is now 55 and some of his more aggressive policing methods are rightfully going out of style and the top brass are not-so-subtly suggesting retirement. He drinks because he can feel the city shifting and changing around him, getting angrier and more violent, and maybe he doesn't know where he fits anymore. He drinks because he's getting old and soon there won't be anything else to do but that.
Across 110th Street knows Matelli, like a lot of people, is getting old and being left behind by a society that's working to move past him and what he represents. The tension between the old guard and those trying to burst free from under the thumb of the old guard is what drives much of this sweaty, snarling film. It's a 24-hour period in the life of a neighborhood - and a city, and a country - in the midst of a fierce upheaval. As appropriate for a film about people of a certain age feeling like the world is moving past them, 110th Street races through its day-in-the-life at a helter skelter pace - it's not so much juggling its three major character groups as it is pitching them to the ground and letting them bounce, scoot and ricochet off each other. The opening scene, the inciting incident, starts as a business-as-usual situation, a monetary exchange between the black gangsters who control Harlem and the Mafioso who lord over the entire city, and as such the concentration is on business being done the way it's been done ten thousand times before: dexterous fingers counting bound stacks of cash, hands writing carefully in well-used ledgers, calculators tap-tap-tapping as ambient noise, dialogue limited to grunts and mutters. Then two men in cop uniforms show up and suddenly it's blaxploitation via Sergio Leone - the film rapidly cuts from tense face to tense face, occasionally jumping to a close-up of the barrel of a submachine gun aimed and ready to chew up the room. One wrong move, a suitcase falls; when it hits the ground, the movie explodes like a starter pistol and doesn't stop its mad sprint until the final gunshot.
Shear tends to use his crosscutting effectively like that, concentrating on speed and tension and going for head-knocking effect whenever possible (like the cut from a man screaming as he's knocked down an elevator shaft to another man jolting awake and screaming in junk-sick pain). He shoots handheld and restless, appropriate for a film seemingly wired into the nerves of a screaming city; his framing goes heavy on the closeups and body-crowded medium shots, often pulling in just close enough so that we can count the beads of sweat on the foreheads of the subjects. Yet he's also experienced enough to allow a moment to breathe when needed, as in the scene where Matelli and Pope have to break the news of a man's death to his wife, played by Marlene Warfield; she gets a closeup held just a beat longer than average for this movie, and there's a subtle loosening on her face, a practiced hard exterior slipping away in confusion and shock, that works beautifully as a moment of grieving humanity inside a whirlpool.
For all its lurid bombast, Across 110th Street sticks like it does because of its knack for these small moments and its willingness to push its characters in unexpected directions. It's there in the defeated embarassment that takes over Quinn's face when it's revealed he's on the take and beholden to the Harlem kingpin Doc Johnson (Richard Ward), in a crucial moment during the climax where ex-con Jim Harris (Paul Benjamin) steals a glance at something behind him and loses what remains of his empathy, in the visible discomfort on the faces of Doc's chief henchmen as they witness unhinged Mafia enforcer Nick D'Salvio (Anthony Franciosa) drop a half-dozen racial slurs while stringing up a black man by his feet. The way the last bit cited there is cut, with three or four significant cutbacks to the two black gangsters looking halfway between offended and sheepish, led me to believe it would lead to an eruption of violence by them against the frothing D'Salvio; that it doesn't play out that way, that they stand by and let D'Salvio do what he will exchanging meaningful glances all the while, implies to me that they understand they don't need to act against this man - that he's already on his way out and his brutality is an extension of his moribundity.
It comes back to that, to the idea of being pushed out. Matelli is being forced out at 55, and D'Salvio is, at the age of 45, stuck doing the dirty work for an institution whose grip is already slipping. "We can't lose Harlem," says a Mafia Don at the outset, but it turns out it's already gone - Doc Johnson has more clout and more smarts than his ostensible Italian overlords and there's nothing a "punk errand boy" who's only where he is because the Don is also his father-in-law can do to stop this shift. He's being left behind just like Matelli, and he's none too happy about it. Power is a hard thing to have to give up, which leads Matelli and D'Salvio both to rage against their obsolescence in their own ways. It's a handy parallel... except it's not just that. Rather than a mirror, Across 110th Street has a triangle, as befitting the three main character groups. The third side is Jim Harris, the brains behind the opening smash-and-grab and a 42-year-old black man with multiple convictions and a crippling dope habit. Where the two aging white guys are acting out of the desperation of losing their perceived place in the food chain, Harris's desperation comes from having found a way out of the food chain in which he's perpetual prey. The opening rip-off was a foolhardy proposition from the get-go, but it's understandable as the act of a man with no recourse left to make something of himself, yet people died when they didn't have to, and that seals it for him. The tragedy of innocents caught in the crossfire, both literal and otherwise, pops up a number of times here (Warfield's scene, significantly, also has in the background a little girl); the tragedy of Harris, then, is his knowledge that, because it went bad and people died, the odds of him truly making it out are scant no matter how hard he fights or how far he runs. (A late-film exchange between him and his co-conspirator Joe Logart (Ed Bernard) sums up the fatalism: "Whatever happens we're gonna end up rich... or dead, man." "There ain't no better way.") Power is a hard thing to have to give up, but it's harder to never have had it in the first place, and either way you will be called to answer for the collateral damage you've left in your heedless wake.
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