The greatest New York City movie ever made, according to Spike Lee
Ah, New York, the city that doesn’t sleep, due to the fact that everyone is wide awake trying to work out how they’re going to afford a sandwich for $30, let alone rent for a month. The spectacular collection of monuments to capitalism, where everything is much bigger, from the buildings to the egos of the under-30s working in advertising. Home to Robert De Niro, Jennifer Lopez and Spike Lee, who has made a career and a life out of broadcasting the place back to the world, warts and all.
His most recent movie, Highest 2 Lowest starring Denzel Washington was a retelling of the 1963 Akira Kurosawa police drama High and Low and was set in and amongst the towers of Manhattan, Washington playing an ageing, rich music mogul who gets held to ransom, battling not just with kidnappers but with his own confusion at the tech-based world he now lives in.
It marked the fifth time Lee has paired up with Washington in a partnership that has lasted some four decades since Mo’ Better Blues back in 1990. That was a musical comedy set in late 1960s Brooklyn that featured Washington as a jazz trumpet player, which also featured Wesley Snipes in an early role. But by then Lee had already begun making his native home the backdrop and subject of several projects, from student films to 1986’s comedy She’s Gotta Have it to the seminal 1989 movie Do the Right Thing.
That was the movie that many consider Lee’s finest, the Brooklyn-based story about relations between the black and Italian-American communities that highlighted police brutality, racism, and the day-to-day life of young men and women living in a New York far less gentrified than it is today.
It has gone down as one of the most important movies in history and was nominated for two Oscars plus a Golden Globe nomination for Lee as Best Director.
Asked by GQ what his own favourite movie set in his home town is, Lee responded: “I’m trying to think. On The Waterfront was shot in New Jersey, so that doesn’t count. I have to really go deep, there’s so many. So many. I’ll give you one right now: Dog Day Afternoon. Pacino.”
Directed by Sidney Lumet, who had helmed the Pacino-starring detective drama Serpico to great acclaim two years earlier, Dog Day Afternoon is a gripping, based on real-life tale of a bank robber who ends up stuck in a Brooklyn bank after a hold-up gone wrong, taking hostages and eventually having to deal with the situation being broadcast live on TV.
It is an incredibly tense, perfectly acted piece of cinema from one of the greatest to ever do it in the shape of Lumet. Pacino is at his peak, and it is very prescient in terms of how it explores the inherent voyeurism and desperation in society, coupled with a background theme of gender transition. It earned six Academy Award nominations, winning one for ‘Best Screenplay’ and Pacino, who originally passed on the script, won a ‘Best Actor’ BAFTA for his performance.
Lee, meanwhile, will be using New York, or more specifically Broadway, as the setting for another film he’s directing called Da Understudy, about a backup musical actor who would kill to get a chance at their dream role, plus he’ll be going back to Brooklyn for Prince of Cats, a Romeo and Juliet retelling scored by ‘80s hip-hop.
