Quentin Tarantino The Taking of Pelham One Two Three

Quentin Tarantino (born March 27, 1963) is an American filmmaker whose debut feature, Reservoir Dogs (1992), borrowed its color-coded alias system directly from The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974). Peter Stone's screenplay gave the hijackers the names Mr. Blue, Mr. Green, Mr. Grey, and Mr. Brown; Tarantino gave his diamond-heist crew Mr. White, Mr. Orange, Mr. Blonde, Mr. Pink, Mr. Blue, and Mr. Brown — keeping two of the original four colors. The connection is the single most cited piece of Pelham trivia, and it did more than anything else to bring the 1974 film back to the attention of younger audiences.

Tarantino listed Pelham among his coolest films of all time

Tarantino included The Taking of Pelham 123 on his personal "Coolest Movies of All Time" list, as published in Wensley Clarkson's biography Tarantino: The Man, the Myths and His Movies (2007). The list is unranked beyond the top three (Rio Bravo, Taxi Driver, Blow Out), but the inclusion confirms what the borrowing already made obvious: Tarantino didn't just lift a device from Pelham — he considered the film itself part of the canon. (tarantino archives)

Multiple outlets have documented the connection in plain terms:

"Before Quentin Tarantino co-opted their colorful monikers for his crew of overzealous gangsters in Reservoir Dogs (1992), Misters Blue, Green, Grey, and Brown hijacked a New York City subway train in Joseph Sargent's The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)." — Screen Slate, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three

"He borrowed the code names — Mr. White, Mr. Blonde, Mr. Pink, etc. — from the original The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)." — Turner Classic Movies

Tarantino added uniforms and turned the aliases inward

In Pelham, the color names are operational — the hijackers use them on the radio and with the hostages, shielding their real identities from the police. The audience eventually learns who the men really are through the investigation. In Reservoir Dogs, the function is different: the aliases shield the criminals from each other. Joe Cabot assigns the names before the job so that if anyone is caught, he can't give up his partners. The threat is internal, not external.

Tarantino also layered in matching black suits, which serve a separate practical purpose he explained in an interview:

"It actually has a basis in reality, because a lot of times when robbers will commit a robbery, they want to adopt a uniform, could be suits, could be anything, could be Raiders jackets, it could be parkas ... the idea is that they go in and they do the robbery and they all look alike, alright, so when they leave and the cops come back later and go, 'Okay, what did they look like?' 'I don't know, they looked like a bunch of black suits, how do I know? Maybe one guy had red hair, maybe, I don't know.' They fail to be distinguishable from one another." — Quentin Tarantino, SlashFilm

Stone's screenplay didn't need the uniforms — his hijackers were already underground, unseen by the public. Tarantino's robbers operate in the open, so the suits solve a different problem: making witnesses useless. The color names and the matching outfits work together in Reservoir Dogs in a way the original never required.

The borrowing revived Pelham's reputation

By the time the 1998 TV-movie remake aired, Reservoir Dogs was arguably better known than the 1974 film it had borrowed from. Tarantino's open cinephilia — his willingness to name his sources rather than hide them — turned a piece of screenwriting craft into a piece of film-history trivia that sent viewers back to the original.

"Did you know that Quentin Tarantino borrowed Reservoir Dogs' colourful codenames from Sargent's film?" — Mark Harrison, Film Stories

The SBIFF retrospective program note made the lineage explicit:

"If this rings a bell to the cinephiles reading this, yes, this inspired Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs." — SBIFF

Tony Scott's 2009 remake dropped the color aliases entirely — the codenames had become so associated with Tarantino that reusing them would have felt like quoting the wrong film. The device Peter Stone invented for a subway thriller in 1974 had, through Tarantino, become the permanent property of a different heist movie.