A Transit Season Pulls Into Film Forum

In honor of the 50th anniversary of the New York Transit Museum, the main hub of which is a repurposed subway station wedged between Downtown Brooklyn and Brooklyn Heights, Film Forum is mounting a series of films, “NYC in Transit.” The museum was established in conjunction with the country’s Bicentennial, and has broadened its scope to include buses, bridges and railroads. The movies selected for this particular birthday spend a majority of the time underground. Given their general drift, let me tell you: It’s scary down there.“NYC in Transit” starts off on an epic note with Allan Dwan’s “East Side West Side” (1927). The source novel by Felix Reisenberg was a best-seller and Dwan’s cinematic transcription a modest box office success. Though the book has largely been forgotten, the movie survives both as an artifact of Fox Studios and its one-time base in Manhattan, and as a consistently diverting 90 minutes.George O’Brien stars as John Breen, a pugilist adopted by a Jewish family on the Lower East Side. When he’s not in the ring, Breen has dreams of becoming an engineer in order to build a bigger and better New York City. All the while he struggles with daddy issues, love lost, and the repercussions of a Titanic-like sea disaster. A deft performer, O’Brien had his work cut out for him in 1927. He was also the lead in F.W. Murnau’s “Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans.” If your tolerance for melodrama is high, Dwan’s movie is recommended for its comedic byways and on-the-street milieus.Ted Wilde’s “Speedy” (1929) is the happiest film on the docket, but what else might you expect from a film starring that All-American go-getter, Harold Lloyd? For what turned out to be his last silent film, Lloyd the movie star threw his weight around: No Hollywood backdrop for this tale of a Yankees-besotted soda jerk out to save Manhattan’s last horse-drawn street-car. Lloyd took the cast and crew to New York City and braved not only the crowds who gathered to watch the filming, but the hazards of Coney Island, the amusements of which, by 21st-century standards, look to be a veritable minefield of potential litigation.“Speedy” isn’t as iconic as “Safety Last” (1923) nor was it as successful as “The Freshman” (1925), but it is top-notch Lloyd all the same. The gags are expertly contrived and beautifully executed, and there’s a guest appearance by Babe Ruth. Though some of the chase sequences were tweaked back in the studio, the majority of them were filmed on-site and they’re likely to have contemporary audiences dropping their jaws in wonder. As an addendum, Film Forum will be showing “In the Footsteps of Speedy” (2015), a marvelous short film by Bruce Goldstein, that revisits the locations used in the Lloyd film.Last month the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro presented a selection of his top ten films about trains at the BFI Southbank in London. Many of them were mild-mannered. Yet NYC transit-based entertainment became notably gritty around the mid-1960s and into the early 1970s. The inclusion of William Friedkin’s “The French Connection” (1971), with its untenable B-train car-chase, is a no-brainer, as is Joseph Sargent’s still-thrilling-after-all-these-years, “The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3” (1974). Anthony Harvey’s “Dutchman” (1966), an adaptation of a stage play by Amiri Baraka, suffers from an ideological rancor that hasn’t aged well, but the one-act drama about a bourgeois black man who withstands the attentions of a lubricious white woman benefits from strong performances by Al Freeman Jr. and Shirley Knight. Once seen, Ms. Knight’s Lula is not easily forgotten.Gene Hackman and William Friedkin on the set of ‘The French Connection,’ 1971. Sunset Boulevard/ Getty ImagesLike “Dutchman,” Larry Peerce’s “The Incident” (1967) is a sociological study that infuses the democratic nature of public transportation with a strain of existential absurdity. A by-the-book cross-section of New York ethnics are trapped in a single subway car by a pair of street toughs out for a night of hell-raising. The screenplay by Nicholas E. Baehr leaves little room for heroes, concentrating, instead, on the fallibilities of human behavior. The basic outlines of the story were defeatist enough to prompt the MTA into denying the filmmakers access to the subways. A stage mock-up, coupled with documentary footage filmed on the sly, constitutes the setting.Here in 2026, “The Incident” is likely to occasion notice from pop culture mavens for what is, in retrospect, an all-star cast. Martin Sheen makes his on-screen debut as an off-his-beam thug, coupled here with an equally menacing Tony Musante. Beau Bridges was in his mid-20s when he assayed the role of a midwesterner out of his element, and Johnny Carson’s sidekick, Ed McMahon, is on hand as a middleman frustrated by his wife, his life and his daughter. The television actress Donna Mills is here as are veteran troopers like Thelma Ritter, Jack Guilford, Brock Peters and Ruby Dee. Misery rides hand-in-hand with misanthropy on this particular train. But a bracing time is to be had for those with the fortitude to hop aboard the pictures pulling into Film Forum.

A Transit Season Pulls Into Film Forum

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