NYPD Festival - A Tribute

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Monday, 29 August 2011 05:00

Written by L E Shannon

The NYPD Festival is taking place September 2 - 13, 2011 at Film Forum in Manhattan, New York City. The 19-film festival spotlights "New York’s Finest -- and Not-So-Finest" in commemoration of the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

New York City has been a living, breathing anthology throughout its history -- second only to heaven and hell as the place everyone has heard about most.

And nothing says "drama" like the word "police". Hollywood has mined the profession from as far back as the earliest silent films.

The two together have made for a rich history of stories both off and on screen, with cops running the gamut from heroes to hoods -- and sometimes both at the same time.

The NYPD festival has been programmed by Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum’s Director of Repertory Programming.

Film Forum was hosting a similar tribute to the NYPD when the tragic event occurred ten years ago. On September 11 and 12, 2001, Goldstein "had ironically scheduled two of the darkest visions of New York ever made":  

• William Friedkin’s Cruising, starring Al Pacino as a cop investigating the serial killings of gay men -- a highly controversial film, it was denounced by gay activists as virulently homophobic.  
• Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, with Harvey Keitel as a cop "who brings police corruption to new depths."

Both films had to be cancelled at the time. They are scheduled for screening September 12.

Playing on September 11, 2011 is Naked City, Jules Dassin’s "seminal all-location NYC Noir that opens with a murder on West 83rd Street and ends with a showdown on the Williamsburg Bridge."  

Says Goldstein, "Though other Hollywood sound movies had gone on location in New York before -- notably Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend and Henry Hathaway’s The House on 92nd Street -- it was Dassin’s Naked City that really started the trend.

It brought back Manhattan as the world’s greatest sound stage, by a native New Yorker later forced by the blacklist to live in Europe. No one ever painted a more loving portrait of the city, so I thought it was the perfect choice for 9/11."

Starting off the Festival are two classic NYC Noirs directed by Otto Preminger, both starring Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney:

• Laura, "one of the most perverse Noirs of the ‛40s" (Time Out New York), with Tierney as "the murdered Manhattan smart-setter and Andrews as a detective on the brink of necrophilia"
• Where The Sidewalk Ends, with Andrews as a corrupt cop going after a criminal kingpin and Tierney as a murder victim’s widow.

Other films included in NYPD festival are such quintessential New York movies as:

• The Taking of Pelham 123, directed by Joseph Sargent, with Walter Matthau as a quick-witted TA cop who closes in on Robert Shaw’s "Mr. Blue"
• The Detective, directed by Gordon Douglas, screenplay by Abby Mann, with Frank Sinatra
• Madigan, directed by Don Siegel, with "by-the-book commissioner Henry Fonda cracking down on sticky-fingered detective Richard Widmark"
• Sweet Smell of Success, directed by Alexander Mackendrick, starring Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, with "brutal cop" Emile Meyer
• Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man, with Henry Fonda in a case of mistaken identity;
• I Wake Up Screaming, directed by H. Bruce Humberstone, "arguably the first true American Film Noir"
• the late Sidney Lumet’s Serpico, with Al Pacino as the real-life whistle-blowing NYC detective Frank Serpico
• William Wyler’s Detective Story, 24 hours in the life of a precinct, with Kirk Douglas and Lee Grant (in an Oscar-winning role)
• Pay or Die!, directed by Richard Wilson, starring Ernest Borgnine as the true-life Joseph Petrosino, an early 20th-century Italian-American cop in a one-man war against "The Black Hand" (forerunner of the Mafia)
• Cry of the City, directed by Robert Siodmak, with "cop-killer Richard Conte relentlessly pursued by also-from-the-hood lieutenant Victor Mature".

Also included is Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, based on Ed McBain‛s 87th Precinct novel King's Ransom. Toshiro Mifune stars as a businessman whose son is kidnapped, and Tatsuya Nakadai is the cop heading the squad hunting down the kidnapper.

Paired with High and Low is another film based on an Ed McBain novel, the B Noir thriller Cop Hater, directed by William A. Berke, starring Robert Loggia and Vincent Gardenia.

The NYPD festival will be followed by an extended run of William Friedkin’s The French Connection, starring Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider, in a new 35mm print.

For more information, go to www.filmforum.org.

NYPD Festival
September 2 - 13, 2011

Film Forum
209 W Houston St.
New York City
212-727-8110

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