New York Cinema in the ’70s Wasn’t All Bad

Traffic-choked streets and grimy tenement hallways. Gunfights and car chases. Mobsters, street gangs, urban blight, pervasive corruption. Plainclothes cops chasing suspects through alleyways and beating them senseless.

This was the dominant mode of New York cinema in the 1970s, and the all-is-lost vibe produced countless masterpieces steeped in cynicism, paranoia, and mayhem, from The Godfather and Mean Streets to Dog Day Afternoon and Taxi Driver to late-decade milestones like All That Jazz and The Warriors.

A friend calls them “burning-trash-can movies” because no matter what the plot, they were likely to contain at least one shot of a bunch of guys warming their hands over a burning trash can.

Source: New York Cinema in the ’70s Wasn’t All Bad