If I’ve got to watch my language just because they let a few broads in, I’m going to quit. – The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)
Introduction
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) is a Neo-Noir crime thriller that turns a New York City subway car into the setting for a tightly organized heist, a hostage crisis, and a battle of wits between two highly capable adversaries. It combines the mechanics of a police procedural with the grit, cynicism, and urban anxiety that defined many of the best New York crime films of the 1970s.
Ratings
The film currently holds a strong 7.6 on IMDb. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a remarkable 98 percent on the Tomatometer, and 88 percent on the Popcornmeter. Those numbers reflect the film’s unusually broad appeal. It is respected by critics, embraced by audiences, and has steadily grown into one of the most admired crime thrillers of its era.
Director and Major Stars
Director Joseph Sargent was not a master of Film Noir in the same category as John Huston, Anthony Mann, or Robert Siodmak, but he made two especially effective noir-influenced crime films during the 1970s: White Lightning (1973) and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three(1974). Here, he demonstrates a remarkable command of pacing, confined spaces, procedural detail, and understated suspense.
Walter Matthau stars as Lieutenant Zachary Garber, using his weary humor and ordinary appearance to create an unconventional but completely believable hero. Robert Shaw is Mr. Blue, the cold, disciplined leader of the hijackers, and his calm professionalism makes him far more frightening than a louder or more theatrical villain would have been. Martin Balsam brings nervous humanity to Mr. Green, a former subway motorman whose knowledge is essential to the plan, while Héctor Elizondo plays the volatile and dangerously unpredictable Mr. Grey. Earl Hindman completes the criminal team as the largely silent Mr. Brown.
The Story
Four armed men using the code names Mr. Blue, Mr. Green, Mr. Grey, and Mr. Brown [SEEM FAMILIAR] board a downtown subway train at separate stations. They seize the lead car, take its passengers hostage, and stop the train inside a tunnel beneath Manhattan. Their leader demands one million dollars from the city and threatens to kill one passenger for every minute the payment is late. Transit Police Lieutenant Zachary Garber must negotiate with the hijackers while the police, city officials, and transit workers struggle to deliver the money before the deadline. Even if the ransom is paid, however, Garber cannot understand how the criminals expect to escape from a train surrounded by police underground.
Why This Film Matters
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is important to Neo-Noir because it is one of the finest examples of the urban heist film and the procedural noir. There is no traditional private detective, doomed romantic relationship, or seductive Femme Fatale. Instead, the film finds its noir qualities in the city itself, in the professionalism of its criminals, and in the bureaucratic machinery trying to stop them.
The New York subway becomes a modern noir labyrinth. The hijackers are trapped beneath the city, the passengers are sealed inside a steel car, and Garber must pursue criminals he cannot see. Much of the tension comes from voices traveling over radios and telephones, creating a duel between Garber and Mr. Blue long before the two men ever occupy the same physical space.
The film was partly shot inside the closed Court Street subway station in Brooklyn and on actual subway tracks, giving it the dirty, claustrophobic authenticity associated with 1970s New York filmmaking. Owen Roizman’s widescreen cinematography emphasizes both the length of the subway cars and the oppressive confinement of the tunnels.
It is also a remarkably disciplined heist movie. Mr. Blue is not motivated by passion, revenge, or madness. He approaches crime as a business transaction, and the other hijackers have been chosen for specific skills. That professionalism places the film in the tradition of The Asphalt Jungle (1950), and The Killing (1956), where a carefully constructed criminal plan begins to unravel because people are never as predictable as the plan requires.
At the same time, the film has a distinct 1970s sense of institutional cynicism. The police argue, the mayor worries about public opinion, city employees complain, and the entire rescue effort nearly collapses under the weight of bureaucracy. Yet the film never becomes completely bleak. Peter Stone’s screenplay uses dry humor and sharp dialogue to make the city feel populated by recognizable human beings rather than generic cops, criminals, and hostages.
Walter Matthau is central to that balance. Garber is intelligent and persistent, but he is not presented as an action hero. Garber ultimately solves the case not through brute force, but by careful observation, logical deduction, and his intimate knowledge of the subway system. Robert Shaw provides the perfect opposite. Mr. Blue is controlled, intelligent, and almost entirely without emotion. Their conflict is less a physical contest than a battle between two professionals trying to anticipate each other’s next move.
The result is a Neo-Noir that combines the fatalism and moral uncertainty of classic noir with the realism, language, violence, and institutional distrust of the 1970s. It is also one of those rare crime films in which the procedural details are not interruptions to the suspense. They are the suspense.
Noir Significance
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) is significant to Film Noir because it demonstrates how the genre successfully evolved during the 1970s without losing its essential themes of fatalism, professionalism, moral ambiguity, and institutional distrust. By replacing private detectives and shadowy back alleys with subway tunnels, police radios, and city bureaucracy, it transformed classic noir into one of the defining urban Neo-Noirs of its era. It remains one of the finest examples of the police-procedural and heist subgenres within Neo-Noir.
The ALL FILM NOIRS PROJECT
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is one of approximately 1,200 films included in the ALL FILM NOIRS PROJECT, an ongoing effort to identify and explore every significant Pre-Noir, Classic Film Noir, and Neo-Noir. Its inclusion demonstrates how the traditions of classic noir evolved during the 1970s, moving out of shadowy offices and rain-soaked streets and into the tunnels, control rooms, and failing institutions of the modern city.
Subscribe and follow the ALL FILM NOIRS PROJECT as we work through every Pre-Noir, Classic Film Noir, and Neo-Noir in the database. Some films will be celebrated masterpieces, others will be forgotten gems, and a few may leave us wondering how they ever made the list, as we journey through every entry in the database, one Noir at a time.
