Followup on Pelham One Two Three

We had a great turnout for the first Subway Series film -- close to 20 residents. The hour was a little late when we finished and we didn't really get a chance to talk about it, so I'm offering a link to my reaction when the remake came out earlier this year.

The first post I wrote about it last summer had to do with the way in which the original represents the subway car as a cross-section of the city: each one of the hostages seems to come from a different ethnic or social group, almost like animals on the Ark, but one-by-one, rather than two-by-two. I wrote at the time, before I had seen the remake:

When the [original 1974] film ended and the credits rolled, we saw that the characters had, in fact, been named for the types they were supposed to represent. The list, in part, taken from IMDB:

	Anna Berger	...	The Mother
	Gary Bolling	...	The Homosexual
	Carol Cole	...	The Secretary
	Alex Colon	...	The Delivery Boy
	Joe Fields	...	The Salesman
	Mari Gorman	...	The Hooker
	Michael Gorrin	...	The Old Man
	Thomas La Fleur	...	The Older Son
	María Landa	...	The Spanish Woman (as Maria Landa)
	Louise Larabee	...	The Alcoholic
	George Lee Miles	...	The Pimp
	Carolyn Nelson	...	Coed #1
	Eric O'Hanian	...	The Younger Son
	Lucy Saroyan	...	Coed #2
	William Snickowski	...	The Hippie
	Barry Snyder	...	The W.A.S.P.

A collection of social types, professions, ethnic stereotypes. The old man was an old Jewish man, I think, though he's not listed this way. The Pimp, who was black, might have been listed as the Veteran, since he mentions his service record, and at one point one of the hijackers calls him by the N-word before cracking him across the face with a machine gun, but I suppose they didn't want to type him by the N-word in the credits. It took me a second to figure out what one of the passengers had been The Homosexual. I'll be interested to see what comparable types turn up in the new version. Will the 6 train in 2009 be similarly depicted as a cross-section of the city? If so, how will the writers and directors imagine our social divisions?

One of the things lost in the remake, in fact, was this sense of a city's cross-section. The new film makes a stab at the city's diversity, but it seems more artificial than the original set of stereotypes, though I'm not precisely sure why. The original was also highly attuned to the era's social changes in race and gender in ways that the new one doesn't feel the need to mimic. In that original post I asked if this is related to the decline of recognizable New York accents between 1974 and today: the New York of today's global culture would even them all out. As I wrote after seeing the remake, "Instead of city types, even bad movie stereotypes, there's just a bunch of vanilla on a subway train. The passengers have no personality at all. They're just there -- like the rest of us, I suppose -- to be terrorized or eventually stand up and be counted. Let's roll, you know." (The rest of my reaction here.)

Those of you who've seen the original and/or the remake, any thoughts to share?

We did enjoy the moment in the film when, as the ransom money makes it way uptown via Centre St., the convoy of cop cars passed by our building. And the sounds of our own subway passing beneath us worked well with the movie. So we'll have more of these subway films to follow. Wild Style, anyone? Other suggestions?