Viking Night: The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
By Bruce Hall
October 23, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
True to the splashy title, the film wastes no time establishing who the good guys are, although director Joe Sargent (who would later give us the gift of Jaws: The Revenge) sets a simplistic tone early by relying entirely on contrast to differentiate heroes from villains. Lt. Zachary Garber (Walter Matthau) is an aging member of the Transit Police whose day consists of such mundane tasks as escorting Japanese dignitaries around the control center. A series of cutaways establishes not only that Garber’s job is boring as hell, but that he must have done time at Pearl Harbor. Let’s just say at the time this film was made, political correctness was still a shimmering, rainbow gleam in some spaced out hippie’s eye.
Meanwhile, the hijackers go about their business in much the same way. They calmly case out the train, take it over and drop a few period racial and sexual insults at the passengers for good measure. In the process, we learn a little about how subway trains work, and the citywide organism that keeps them running on time. We also learn how sub-machine guns work, and that Zachary Garber picked the wrong week to quit smoking. It’s all very trite, but within ten minutes we’ve established that our hero is a desensitized drone who nonetheless takes his boring job seriously, his adversaries are desperate men with a daring plan, and that it’s going to be a long day for all the black and Asian characters.
You’ll be glad all these little details are addressed early. Pelham is a decent ride, but it feels a just a tad longer than 104 minutes.
The terrorists take on code names to conceal their identities, and are led by the nefarious Mr. Blue (Robert Shaw), a calculating presence who clearly has military training. Mr. Brown (Earl Hindman) is a stuttering fool who seems a little out of his element. Mr. Grey (Hector Elizondo) is just the kind of psychotic cutthroat you don’t want on a mission that requires clockwork timing and coordination. Mr. Green (Martin Balsam) doesn’t seem like a criminal at all; his persistent sneezing and hand wringing makes Woody Allen look like a stud. They’re a motley bunch, which leads to inevitable conflict – but for now, the train system quickly backs up once they take the train, leaving the city in panic. Mr. Blue ends up in contact with contact with Garber and demands one million dollars ransom, apparently unaware of how silly that will sound 38 years later.
Everything is going just as planned, and it looks like it’s going to be a long day for the Transit Police. Garber and his snarky sidekick Patrone (Jerry Stiller) race against time to coordinate crisis response with the Mayor’s office, appease the hijacker’s demands, and manage the rest of the train system, all with a watchful eye on the clock. Mr. Blue has promised to start killing people after an hour, and proves early on that he’s quite willing to follow through. So for a while, Pelham is far more gritty and tight than you’d expect. There are a lot of moving parts to a train system, and the added bonus of this one being in a tunnel adds the kind of pressure that you usually can’t get anywhere but in a plane or submarine. The situation underground is dreary and tense, with a SWAT team keeping an eye the train as the killers taunt them from afar. In the control room, Garber and his team sweat bullets as what first seemed like a sick joke proves a very real and very lethal threat.
Unfortunately it’s when we’re NOT in one of those places that the film tends to lose its way.
Without the gratuitous source of tension you get from being trapped in a tuna can and surrounded by gunmen, Pelham is forced to rely on more inventive sources of conflict. Some of them work, some of them don’t. It looks quaint today, but the big board they use to track the trains is an effective dramatic tool that’s well used. Peter Stone’s script is often informative and contains a few moments of witty dialogue, but most attempts at humor either fall flat or are simply lost on 21st Century ears. The race to coordinate the ransom drop is often thrilling, but this critical subplot makes spotty use of time. The frenzied police escort through jam-packed streets is one of the best parts of the film, while the vast amount of time wasted reminding us how hard it is to collect $1 million on short notice is not.
Still, the film manages builds up more than enough inertia to carry it through the dodgy parts. Planes, trains and submarines are great places to build tension, and bad places to be surrounded by people who want to kill you. And all the while you can’t help but wonder, as the police do, how the criminals hope to escape. The answer also seems quaint, but in the process we are treated to the spectacle of Robert Shaw, who came closer to killing James Bond than anyone ever has, up against the only guy on earth who could make Jack Lemmon look overbearing. An “odd couple” indeed (yeah, I just did that), but it’s hard not to be intrigued. Garber is the only person in a position of authority who seems to take the killers as seriously as he should but he does, and with all the laconic charm Matthau can muster.
It’s doesn’t seem an ideal casting choice, but it’s hard to imagine a man of action doing what Garber does for a living. I get it. Meanwhile, his nemesis seems a little more conventional.
Mr. Blue is shown to be quite the heartless bastard, but you wonder whether he was as committed to victory as much as he was to the fight. He plays the sadist card well, but he’s a bit like Lex Luthor without Superman - very diabolical but without a worthy opponent, he’s forced to play to the level of his competition. And while the City does respond to the hijackers, their initial attitude toward the crisis is curiously pithy. This could be just another symptom of living in a time when domestic terrorists don’t seem so far-fetched. But it’s also a sign of a film that isn’t entirely sure how seriously it wants to be taken. Someone spent a lot of time trying to make the subway sequences feel real, only to leave the characters transparent.
It’s a missed opportunity because Pelham IS fun, and two-thirds of it IS exciting. The last act sags somewhat and a bland, procedural aftermath follows a fairly underwhelming climax. But it serves the story, and the ending is enough for me to make it worthwhile. You’ll spend most of the movie trying to convince yourself that Steve McQueen would have been a better choice than Walter Matthau, until the very last shot reminds you that The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is just a modestly enjoyable trifle that gives no more than it asks in return. And that’s okay.
So trust me. Stick around.