New York City as Setting (The Taking of Pelham One Two Three) The Taking of Pelham One Two Three

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) is a New York film in the way that The French Connection is a New York film — the city is not backdrop but mechanism. The subway system is the setting, the subject, and the constraint that shapes every decision the characters make. The hijackers can only move as fast as the trains. The police can only respond through the infrastructure. The film's tension comes from the system itself: a million people riding metal boxes through tunnels, governed by signals and switches that one person with a gun can reroute.

The film treats the city as a workplace, not a spectacle

Olivia Rutigliano, writing at CrimeReads, identified the film's central trick: it makes the ordinary operation of the subway as interesting as the crime disrupting it.

"The genius of Pelham is that it represents the everyday world of the subway while it tells the story of an exceptional, unprecedented event." — Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads (2022)

"The film walks a line, tonally, between complete and utter frustration at the subway, and a grand admiration for the entire thing." — Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads (2022)

The control room operators, the dispatchers, the transit police — they are not the film's background characters. They are its subject. The hijacking is the disruption; the system's response is the story.

Matthau's Garber is a city employee, not a hero

Walter Matthau's Lieutenant Garber does not volunteer for the crisis. He is on duty when it happens and handles it the way a competent professional handles anything — with irritation, competence, and the dry awareness that the system will make everything harder than it needs to be. He is also, at the moment the hijacking begins, giving a tour of the control center to a Japanese transit delegation, and the film treats this obligation as no less real than the hostage situation.

Rutigliano located Matthau's appeal in exactly this ordinariness:

"There is no actor finer than Matthau at locating the colorfulness in ordinariness." — Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads (2022)

Roger Ebert saw the same quality:

"Walter Matthau is gruff, shaggy and sardonic as a Transit Authority lieutenant; Robert Shaw is clipped and cruel, and the supporting performances are allowed to grow and take on personality." — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (1974)

Hector Elizondo called the city irreplaceable

Elizondo, who played Mr. Grey, was a New York actor who understood what the location gave the film that no set could replicate. In a 2016 interview for the Kino Lorber Blu-ray, he was direct:

"The Taking of Pelham One Two Three couldn't have been done anyplace else." — Hector Elizondo, HighDefWatch (2016)

The film captured New York at a specific breaking point

The production shot from November 1973 through April 1974. The city was approaching the fiscal crisis that would nearly bankrupt it the following year. Crime was rising, the subway was deteriorating, and the graffiti the Transit Authority insisted the film not show was covering every surface of every car in the real system. The film's New York is functional but strained — a city that works because its employees keep showing up, not because the infrastructure supports them.

Jessica Winter, writing in the Village Voice, noted that the film now operates as a period document:

"Sargent's whole enterprise doubles as a '70s archaeological dig." — Jessica Winter, Village Voice

David Shire's score was designed to capture exactly this texture — organized chaos, a system that sounds dissonant but keeps time. See David Shire Score for how his twelve-tone-over-funk approach turned the city's energy into music.