Black and Italian gangs have an uneasy alliance until three thugs gun down some of their crews in 1972's Across 110th Street. A Blaxploitation film making copious use of real locations in New York, the story is sometimes prosaic but the performances and atmosphere are terrific.
Anthony Quinn produced the film and gets top billing but his role is relatively small. He and Yaphet Kotto play a couple of cops at odds with each other in a subplot essentially copied from In the Heat of the Night.
The bigger and more interesting part of the film focuses on the three thugs and the forces of organised crime trying to find them. Two are are serious, down on their luck young men who were desperate for the cash they stole from the mobs. The third is Henry J. Jackson (Antonio Fargas) who unwisely uses his stolen dough to transform a bar into his own private reproduction of Caligula.
His demise is as over the top as his victory celebration and this movie definitely scores high on the old ultraviolence. There's a particularly nice car explosion on a Harlem street late in the film.
Jim Harris (Paul Benjamin) is the film's real protagonist. One of the three thugs, he's a very noir character--there's some ambiguity about how much his desperate situation is his own fault or how much the desperate circumstances of his life forced him into it.
Across 110th Street features songs by Bobby Womack, including a title track, "Across 110th Street". Quentin Tarantino used the song prominently in Jackie Brown where, frankly, it's done much better service. It seems to be a slightly different, and much better, version of the song, too. But Across 110th Street is a decent movie in its own right.
Across 110th Street is available on The Criterion Channel.
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