DROP DEAD CITY: NYC in Film During the 1970s – Commentary by Yael Friedman (Guest post)
Fifty years ago, New York City famously found itself at the precipice: of bankruptcy; of crumbling infrastructure, with hollowed out buildings and empty lots that gave a visual language to the city’s many woes. This disfigured urban landscape seemed to both bear witness to and play a central role in the city’s fading fortunes, its ebbing safety nets and rise in crime, its white flight and arson epidemic, the ravages of the municipal workforce and tax base, and the anger and indignation that spilled over from every open window and overflowing trash can.
The wonderful recent documentary Drop Dead City by Michael Rohatyn and Peter Yost about the 1975 fiscal crisis is a fittingly dramatic retelling of this pivotal moment in the city’s history. It is, of course, titled after the famous Daily News headline from when President Gerald R. Ford allegedly told the city to “drop dead,” after Mayor Abe Beame and Governor Hugh Carey arrived in Washington, hats in hand, asking for federal aid. Ford did not use those words, but he absolutely articulated the same contempt, aided and abetted by two young staffers named Cheney and Rumsfeld. Ford described New York’s woes as being left on the front doorstep of the federal government, saying, “I am prepared to veto any bill that has as its purpose a federal bailout of New York City to prevent a default.” The film shows the disdain for New York held by politicians and folks elsewhere, and the righteous indignation of New Yorkers after seeing the headline. Ultimately, President Ford’s conviction to let New York City fail did not prevail, his coarse morality tale about the role of government and the spendthrift Sodom was disrupted. With aid from Washington and a new austerity plan created by the newly formed Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC), New York pulled back from the brink–––even if to emerge a lesser city in many ways.
The film is somehow the first documentary about this moment. And yet when one watches it, the images are almost too familiar–––like looking at the reels of a home movie–––even for those of us not yet born or living elsewhere at the time. It is a period endlessly summoned as a warning and romanticized in equal measure. In the recent mayoral elections, as in past campaigns, cynical candidates drew from its well by warning of a 70s-type hellscape that awaited if they were not chosen: an urban nightmare lurking in the shadows, waiting for the right conditions to overtake civilization, to mug you or worse. As Guy Trebay writes of those years in his beautiful lyrical memoir Do Something (2024), “New York, in short, is on the skids, and if its inhabitants are abandoning it in droves, who can blame them? Even in the fanciest sections sidewalks glisten with ominous carpets of shattered glass, residue of smash-in car thefts.”
However, Trebay also captures the haunting beauty of that city: “What is too little remarked on is how somnolent and dreamlike the city could be, how in many ways magical appeared this wrecked and depopulated metropolis, my classroom.”
This is the city that Colson Whitehead, Rachel Kushner and Garth Risk Hallberg used as the canvas for some of their most electrifying novels–––Crook Manifesto, The Flamethrowers, and City on Fire, respectively. Whitehead and Kushner were born in the late 1960s and Hallberg in the late 1970s. They captured an urban landscape they recalled in flashes of memories, in stories heard second hand, in the nightly news, in the myths of the city that beckoned maverick pilgrims. Whitehead grew up here; Kushner and Hallberg did not. While Whitehead may have more firsthand knowledge, the myth overtakes reality for even those who experienced it–––or at least makes that reality more vivid. Their veritable odes are full of grit and glamor so intertwined and baked into the idea of this city that no amount of gentrification could ever truly extinguish them. This sense of the city is far more potent than nostalgia, somehow continuing to guide those who feel it as a birthright.
Why is this image of the city so easily conjured, forever (and forever and forever) inscribed in the collective imagination across generations? It’s partly because it was such a pivotal moment: New York transformed so profoundly from a city defined by how it cared for its citizens–––a thriving working- and middle-class city–––to a portrait of decadence and decay with the devil’s bargain of 1975. The new austerity measures adopted then may have “saved” the city, but they also gave rise to the new globalized city and the FIRE industries (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) forming its new, more sterile core and filling the post-industrial vacuum. From a city with an already iconic skyline rose more, higher, thinner spires and an ever-widening gap between rich and not rich, with a housing crisis and cost of living that make it ever so concrete, so palpable to all.
As Drop Dead City recounts, 20th Century New York was a “pillar of opportunity,” a place where “the liberal spirit was not confined to Democrats,” with a trenchant belief that government could do everything. Indeed, it was two Republicans–––Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and Mayor John Lindsay––– who expanded government programs even further. It was a union town animated by a fundamental belief that everyone could be afforded the same opportunities, with extensive public services, well-compensated public servants, and the only free public university in the United States.
With a bloated budget partially due to the realization of these ideals, the city’s ability to make the numbers work died alongside urban manufacturing and the urban crisis it spurred. Economic policy that had nothing to do with New York devastated it like it did other cities across the country.
Soon New York’s municipal bonds–––which were auctioned off to the big banks every day, and which the city relied on to keep a steady stream of cash to pay its operating costs–––were no longer desirable. The deferrals they previously allowed suddenly evaporated; all the bills came due. In 1974 the city experienced the first municipal firings since the Great Depression.
The talking heads of the film are people who lived through the city’s fortunes (and misfortunes). Through people like Charlie Rangel, Donna Shalala, Betsy Gotbaum, Richard Ravitch, Harrison Goldin, Linda Greenhouse, and multiple union members and leaders, we feel the crisis unfold in real time. All speak as if still inside it or reflecting back with deeply personal attachment, either bemoaning the city that was lost or forever stunned by how close the city came to becoming a permanent post-industrial shell of itself.
Their voices narrate wonderfully edited footage of the many protagonists and supporting cast: Mayor Beame, President Ford, Vice President and former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, Treasury Secretary Bill Simon, the infamous United Federation of Teachers head Albert Shanker, and Felix Rohatyn. Rohatyn–––the benevolent banker (and father of Michael Rohatyn) who valued the ideals of the city he grew up in––– managed to broker a deal as chairman of MAC between the city, its unions, and its creditors to buy bonds and enable New York to continue to function. One of the most dramatic climaxes of the film, in a movie full of them, is when the almighty Shanker seemed to have the fate of the entire city in his hands as the lone holdout in an agreement to have each union buy the MAC bonds. Woody Allen immortalized Shanker in the movie Sleeper (1973; Shanker had already gained notoriety by then), in which the main character travels to a post-apocalyptic future where he is told that “a man named Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead.”
For an equally dramatic recounting of the fiscal crisis, Kim Phillips-Fine’s book Fear City (2017) ingeniously regrounds it and what is has wrought, providing incredible context and breathtaking narrative. And Bench Ansfield’s new, critically important book, Born in Flames (2025), takes a lens to one of the crisis’s most anguishing and resonant images: the burnt-out South Bronx. By the end of the 1970s, the South Bronx was an urban landscape comparable to cities obliterated by war, places like Dresden and Coventry, here ravaged not by bombs, but by greedy landlords incentivized by tragically flawed public policy to burn their own properties. Close to 500,000 people were displaced, with the borough losing 20% of its housing stock. From their windows and rooftops, residents would watch the fires draw closer, many going to sleep in their shoes with bags packed, just in case. Some were uprooted and made homeless multiple times. In the harrowing but inspiring film Decade of Fire (2018), filmmakers Gretchen Hildebran and Vivian Vazquez Irizarry revisit Vazquez Irizarry’s own experience of this time and place––– where close-knit communities were decimated and living amid rubble, kids played in smoldering ruins, but also where those who remained or returned fought back and reclaimed their neighborhoods in a city that had abandoned them. At the time, the tenants–––almost all Black and Puerto Rican–––were blamed for the arsons, but as Ansfield writes, “(the) evidence is unequivocal, the hand that torched the Bronx and scores of other cities was that of a landlord impelled by the market and guided by the state.”
And of course, one can look at the books written and published during the urban crisis, not least, everyone’s favorite NYC tome and totem, Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. It came out in 1974, and one can’t help but wonder how much Caro’s brilliant but relentless portrayal of Robert Moses was affected by the trajectory of the city Caro was living and writing in.
One reason why the city of the 1970s is so easy to conjure, why images of its blighted boroughs might feel like personal memories, is the cinema of the era. The movies of the 1970s have formed a collective memory and visual archive. Even as the city was being devastated by the death of industry, it also became the stage, setting, and character of some of the films we still consider among the most innovative and compelling America has ever produced. Many of us were raised on these movies, made roughly between 1968-1981, watching and rewatching The French Connection (1971), Taxi Driver (1976), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Gloria (1980), The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974), Serpico (1973), Mean Streets (1973).
These and so many others define the rise of New Hollywood and the new class of directors whose visions permeated their films in thrilling new ways. It is established orthodoxy that the New Hollywood of the 1970s was no less than a revolution. With the old studios in a death spiral, new space formed for experimentation and the edicts of individual writers and directors; new technology made it cheaper and easier to film on location; and a new generation of hungry film nerds took their cues from the French New Wave, Italian neo-Realism, film noir, and the counterculture in which they came of age. Cinema has historically been the slowest artform to react to society’s percolating tensions, but when the young finally took the reins in the late 60s and 70s, they had an audience. (Mark Harris’ Pictures at a Revolution, Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, is one of the best books on this, and one of my favorite books about film in general). For a brief moment, everyone was watching, talking about, reading about, and writing about movies. Filmmakers and audiences alike awaited reviews by Pauline Kael in the New Yorker and Andy Sarris in the Village Voice. As Susan Sontag writes in her essay The Decay of Cinema (1996), this era, ignited by the French film avant garde in the 1950s, “was (a)specific moment in the 100-year history of cinema that going to the movies, thinking about movies, talking about movies became a passion among university students and other young people. You fell in love not just with actors but with cinema itself.”
And New Hollywood was a New York revolution. As Peter Biskind writes in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1999), “the 70s was (also) the decade when New York swallowed Hollywood, when Hollywood was Gothamized.” The “movie brats” that defined this era, steeped in film history and often film school–––John Cassavetes, Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Peter Bogdanovich–––and their actors–––Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman–––either grew up in New York or found their intellectual bearings and creative sensibilities there. Also, as Biskind writes, “Youthful veterans of the Golden Age of live TV In the 50s joined the rebellious refugees from the New York theater and other mavericks to fashion a new kind of movie,” and “the revolution…facilitated ready access for Brits like John Schlesinger, John Boorman, Nicolas Roeg, and other Europeans–––Forman, Polanski, Malle, Leone, Bertolucci…and brought out the best in journeymen directors like Sidney Pollack and Sidney Lumet.”
City policy also unwittingly helped create this New York-defined golden age of cinema. In 1966, Mayor Lindsay, in one of his earliest acts, created the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting to encourage film production in the city. In 1965, only two features were filmed in New York. During Lindsay’s 8 years, 366 were made, and by the second year of Mayor Beame’s administration, 46 features were produced. In his book Starring New York, Filming the Grime and Glamor of the Long 1970s (2011), Stanley Corkin muses, “That (Mayor Lindsay) abetted the production of so many powerful narratives that portrayed his city as dirty, dangerous and morally suspect is ironic.” In her 1971 essay “Urban Gothic,” Kael writes, “When Mayor Lindsay began his efforts to attract the movie-production business, it probably didn’t occur to him or his associates that they were ushering in a new movie age of nightmare realism…the New York-made movies have provided a permanent record of the city in breakdown.”
The end of the Motion Picture Production Code also catalyzed these stark new narratives. Between 1933-1968 The Code served as a self-censoring guideline for the film industry. It began to weaken as foreign films and directors that flouted its conventions became more widely seen by Americans. In 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America adopted a rating system to supplant the Code. Finally setting aside family fare and bottled studio sets, a newer crop of films sought greater emotional and cultural poignancy: a greater reflection of the world as it actually was. As Corkin writes, this was “a means to those seeking greater ‘realism’ in Hollywood films, and realism became a kind of shorthand for urban textures that often featured scenes of New York City.”
Together, the movies set and filmed in New York in that era–––even the most exploitative and outrageous, like Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981), and The Warriors (1979)–––seem like a multi-part documentary, leaving audiences feeling they were experiencing the city as it was. The Warriors might be a goofy, surreal fever dream, but the city which the Warriors gang must make their way through without being caught by either rival gangs or the police–––from The Bronx to Coney Island (the climactic last scene is actually filmed in Rockaway!)–––feels indelibly real. The graffiti on the subways, the dismayed and sometimes horrified passersby, the pure anarchy of this urban western. So many of these films verge on the western, a new kind of frontier on once-charted territory, not quite post-apocalyptic, more so gunslinging on lawless lanes. A friend who is truly one of the world’s foremost teachers of New York and cities regularly screened The Warriors for his students and created citywide scavenger hunts based on the it, running from Woodlawn Cemetery to dinner in Coney Island. These movies made the city viscerally legible in unexpected and lasting ways.
The sudden proliferation of realism in movies set and shot on the streets of New York meant a growing identification with the films themselves. Again, in Urban Gothic Kael writes, “I doubt if at any other time in American movie history there has been such a close relationship between the life on the screen and the life of a portion of the audience.” In Dog Day Afternoon (1975), not only is Sidney Lumet portratying a very real and recent crime, but the Pacino-played protagonist embodies a breaking point that too many could relate to. Sonny–––holding up a bank with Sal (John Cazale) in order to get money to pay for his partner’s sex change–––is something far more interesting than an unhinged man on the edge or a misfit from the margins. Pacino’s Sonny is a frustrated and burdened man that everyone can relate to in some way or at least sympathize with, not merely an outcast that the gathering crowd outside the bank and audience in the theater watch with morbid curiosity. When Sonny starts chanting “Attica! Attica!” in one of the most memorable improvisations in film history, the crowd, having recently endured betrayal and failure by so many of the institutions controlling their lives–––Vietnam, Nixon, the urban crisis–––was also on the side of the aggrieved. The long takes of Dog Day Afternoon must have felt like actual television footage, an extension of Vietnam and the Watergate hearings playing in everyone’s living rooms.
In Taxi Driver (1976), De Niro’s Travis Bickle might be the most terrifying manifestation of the societal anxieties and urban nightmares of the time. He appears to have arrived fresh from some kind of hell (Vietnam perhaps) as a near-alien bearing witness to the moral decay around him, the hypocrisies of those in power, as well as a world he clearly does not understand and human beings he does not know how to connect with. We peer out with him and at him, and both views are unnerving. But as he drives through and around Times Square and other parts of the city, we also take in the ecstatic energy of this carnival; the sights and sounds saturate a scene as far away from the South Bronx as possible. Midnight Cowboy also sends us right into the fray, into the bright lights of midtown and beyond with Jon Voigt’s Joe Buck, the strapping stud from Texas, arriving in New York with his dreams of becoming a hustler and not much else. In an early scene, Buck approaches a well-heeled Upper East Side matron on Park Avenue and asks her for directions to the Statue of Liberty. The wink-wink come-on doesn’t quite work as expected, and we watch as the cocky cowboy slowly but surely loses every shred of arrogance, confidence, and dignity he arrived thinly equipped with. His odyssey with Dustin Hoffman’s limping, sleazy, sick but streetwise “Ratso” Rizzo shows not only the big dreams smashed but the depths of pain and humiliation one can plumb, with New York providing the variety of grotesque forms that can take, its indifference to his plight the worst of all.
Both films use Times Square as ground zero for all good and bad, for all the promise and pain the city can offer. One of the hardest images to dismantle is of the Times Square of yore: the lights and sounds, the seedy bars and working girls weaving in and out of old theaters now catering to new adult tastes. The show The Deuce tries its best to leverage the romanticized longing for this pre-Disneyfied center of the city, the one that Trebay describes as “the raunchy gaud of midtown, simultaneously bleak and gorgeous, washed in yellow light from the marques of opulent movie palaces form the early part of the twentieth century, now decadent…and relegated to soft-core triple bills or blaxploitation features.”
Almost all of the films give us a rollicking tour of the city and its landscape. Some are expansive, with car and foot chases crisscrossing almost every borough (The French Connection used 86 separate locations), or different locations showing where the city’s rot can bloom, as in Serpico, taking us from the idealism of his personal life in the Village, to the corruption and danger in the Bronx and elsewhere outside of Manhattan. Some immerse us in more claustrophobic scenes, the anxiety and frenzy of their characters everywhere in their environment – the insides of bars and homes and cars in Mean Streets, inside Babe’s apartment in Morningside Heights, Zell’s visit to the diamond district, and one of the most harrowing car chases in cinema across Yorkville in Marathon Man. And of course, Manhattan (1979) is the city at its most visually lyrical, an open love letter to the borough. These movies integrate the viewers so thoroughly in the city that it feels impossible to separate oneself from it.
These movies also memorialized a built environment that still recalled the city’s history. As Trebay writes in Do Something, in the 70s: The visual textures of Manhattan remained shaped by the landmarks and folkways of a much earlier era…the midtown skyline was still shaped by the elegant Art Deco ziggurats of the Chrysler Building and the spire of the Empire State Building and throughout Manhattan there survived still a congeries of ethnic enclaves, first established as ghettoes, hanging on as seemingly imperishable Old Country holdouts of Hungary or Poland or Ukraine or Germany.
So many of these movies present as “authentic” because of the new ways of filming, directing, and storytelling, but also because New York was still a sum of its historic parts. Its makeover was imminent, but it feels in suspended animation, with so much film footage making it even more so. Chasing authenticity seems like an old urban sport, but it really began when this world was lost, a world captured so thoroughly. This city is almost impossible not to romanticize, long for, and have such distinct memories of; we can describe it in detail. In the recent Netflix series Black Rabbit–––apart from the obvious homage to The French Connection with its main characters surnamed Friedkin–––it was a joy to realize that the Black Rabbit restaurant was located on the same site as one of the most important locations of that film.
These movies let us tag along with the most seasoned New Yorkers, or those just arrived, looking at it and absorbing its blows. The characters are so of their city or so enveloped by it that it becomes almost anthropomorphized. “Ratso’s” famous “I’m walking here,” Travis Bickle’s “You talking to me?” and Al Pacino’s “Attica!” are almost impossible to separate from New York. We identify with them so distinctly that fact and fiction, and the boundaries between viewer and viewed, become blurred. These stand-ins for New York endure, defying space, time, medium, and language. (I’m sure someone’s made a reel of the Simpsons and Seinfeld episodes that recreate parts of these movies; my favorites are when Seinfeld sends up Marathon Man and Midnight Cowboy.)
Most fans of these movies and of New York City have to make their peace with romanticizing incredibly problematic notions about the ungovernable city; Popeye Doyle is forgiven his lawless antics because it would be impossible to achieve “justice” otherwise, and the anarchy and violence that these films crystallize seem to rationalize the gentrification that must take place. But not all movie-goers reveled in these portraits of their city. During the filming of Fort Apache, The Bronx, in which Paul Newman plays a wizened but incorruptible cop in the South Bronx, the community pushed back. As recounted in Decade of Fire, a community leader asked to see the script, and once she realized that the Black and Puerto Rican residents would stand in as an angry mob and their neighborhood used to portray every city ill, they tried to fight to have the script revised. In fact, it helped finally galvanize the community to come together to push back against the city and save the South Bronx from what felt like a sealed fate.
One movie nearly stands alone in this portrait of the city. The Taking of Pelham 123 shows public servants and different municipal agencies working in concert as a city should–––even if the mayor is a putz. While we watch the different train lines light up as Walter Matthau, Jerry Stiller, et al., try to manage the hijacking of a train, there is also a certain pride in this incredible system–––a joy in seeing inside it and the competence of those operating it. Even as the city was ailing, those serving it remained devoted and steadfast. Most of the films of the 1970s present us with a city that no longer works, with cops and criminals hard to distinguish from one another, trash-strewn empty lots, and urban ruins in a landscape that God has forsaken. But Pelham, in its way, as much as Manhattan, is a symphony of civic pride.
The main joy of revisiting the best of these films is not the nostalgia they indulge, but remembering just how good they are. Because they bleed into one another, it’s hard to recall their power and craft, none of which fade with the intervening years. So many movies once considered original cannot be rewatched with the same sense of excitement as when they first appeared, their innovations adopted so many times as to become trite. But not these. Midnight Cowboy and Mean Streets and Gloria and Dog Day Afternoon and so many others remain as raw and jarring as anything I have ever seen. The 70s were a brief window in film history when risk and vision were not relegated to independent cinema, when everyone was in thrall to them. While we bemoan their demise as a mainstream artform, they live on through our conception of the city today.
A new dazzling short film, Song of My City, by David Roberts, combines all of these movies in a beautiful montage. As Roberts, describes it, the movie “Is an attempt to capture the New York I grew up imagining. As a kid in Alabama, I had never set foot in the city, or was even alive in the ‘70s, but I knew its gritty streets through the lens of Scorsese, Lumet, and others. Now, living with incurable cancer and finally in the city of my dreams, I wanted to create a city symphony filled with celluloid ghosts, resurrected to remind me why I fell in love with NY in the first place.” Roberts’ film is a beautiful coda to this 50th anniversary, of a city on the brink, but also of a city immortalized by the movies that will forever tie us to it and to our ideas of what is possible.
ABOUT YAEL FRIEDMAN
Yael Friedman is a journalist based in New York. She covers art and culture and their intersection with economics, politics, and history. She has written extensively about urban history and urban planning, particularly New York’s, analyzing its past and assessing its present and future. Her articles have appeared in Bloomberg CityLab, 1843, The Conversationalist, The Economist, The Daily Beast, Haaretz, Forward, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Urban Omnibus.