FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

In The Cruise, Timothy ‘Speeds’ Levitch is our genial-if-eccentric guide around Manhattan Island. Your choices, then, for what we'll be screening of Tuesday 14 July are out of three more films in which Getting Around Manhattan! is a key feature (though our guides are decidedly less genial). Up for the vote are...

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (Joseph Sargent, USA, 1974)

"What's good about Pelham's example of the form is that the performances are allowed enough leeway so that we care about the people not the plot mechanics. And what could have been formula trash turns out to be fairly classy trash, after all." Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Lead by a former subway operator (Robert Shaw's teriffying Mr Blue) a gang of criminals hijack a New York City train and hold its passengers hostage for a ransom of $1 million. As the train careens through Manhattan, the authorities (led by Walter Matthau's Lt. Garber and Jerry Stiller's Lt. Patrone) try to negotiate with Mr Blue - and to figure out just how exactly the hijackers plan to escape... With great chemistry between the three leads, the Taking of Pelham One Two Three is both a brilliantly black comedy and a thrilling heist movie.

Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, USA, 1976)

"What a mad and brilliant film it is: 1,000-degree proof Seventies cinema." Peter Bradshaw, Guardian

Robert De Niro stars as Travis Bickle - a disturbed young Vietnam vet who takes up taxi driving in a futile effort to combat his insomnia. Disgusted by what he witnesses on the streets of New York, Travis’s crippling alienation continues to fester as he becomes fixated on saving underage sex-worker Iris (Jodie Foster), while attempting to clumsily woo beautiful political campaigner Betsey (Cybil Shepherd)... Adapted from Paul Schraeder’s feverish screenplay, with fantastic support from Harvey Keitel as Iris's pimp, Sport, and a beautiful final score from Bernard Herman, Taxi Driver is arguably the pinacle of Scorsese and De Niro's collaboration and one of the greatest films of 70s New Hollywood.

The Warriors (Walter Hill, USA, 1979)

“There’s a night-blooming, psychedelic shine to the whole baroque movie.” — Pauline Kael

When a midnight summit in the Bronx for all the street gangs of NYC turns, perhaps unsurprisingly, to violence, The Warriors are falsely accused of being the instigators. Fleeing the scene of the crime, they have to make it back across Manhattan to the safety of their home turf of Coney Island - but with the added complication that every other gang in the city now out for their blood... Walter Hill's highly entertaining tongue-in-cheek thriller presents New York as a dystopian hell-scape, while each gang (The Furies, The Boppers, etc) have their own distinctive and colourful look.