Across 110th Street

For the last several years, TCM has spent one night in late December running a night of movies featuring stars who died over the past year. This past December, one of those stars was Yaphet Kotto, who had died in March 2021. The movie they selected for him was Across 110th Street. Recently, I finally got around to watching it in order to do a review here.

The title refers to Manhattan's 110th Street, seen in New York City at the time as the dividing line between Harlem to the north and the more fashionable neighborhoods bordering Central Park to the south. It's also a fairly stark racial dividing line with blacks in Harlem and whites to the south. If there's one thing they have in common, however, it's a segment of the population engaging in organized crime. As we see in the opening, a white (specifically Italian-American) gangster is riding in his Cadillac toward an apartment in Harlem, where he and his partners are set to collect money from the numbers games. However, a couple of cops knock on the apartment door to inform the man about his parked car. Of course, they're not really cops, but rival crooks, who decide that they're going to bump off all these gangsters and take the money, totaling a good $300K, for themselves!

Unsurprisingly, pretty much nobody is happy with seven people having been murdered in one go, never mind if they were criminals. Nick D'Salvio (Tony Franciosa) is the head of the Italian-American mafia that was going to be getting this money, and as you can guess, he wants it back. But being a criminal, he can't quite rely on the police since they won't just give him that money should they recover it. Meanwhile, the black gangs are led by Doc Johnson (Richard Ward), who is no dummy, as we'll learn later. He owns a livery company which is really a front for the crime business.

And then there are the police. Lt. Pope (Yaphet Kotto) is a young detective who was called in to the murder scene and basically put in charge of it while the other cops come and go. And then showing up is Capt. Mattelli (Anthony Quinn), a much older cop approaching retirement but without all that much to live on, as again we'll learn later. He outranks Lt. Pope, and of course he's white, so he naturally believes he should be in charge of the crime scene, having no qualms about telling Pope this.

Meanwhile, we have the two crooks dressed as cops, Jim Harris (Paul Benjamin) and Joe Logart (Ed Bernard). They've gotten into crime in no small part because they see no other economic opportunity for themselves, especially considering one of them was already a criminal who'd never get a good job. They use Henry Jackson (Antonio Fargas) as their getaway driver, and it's Jackson who screws up first, mostly by being much too flamboyant and drawing attention to himself. D'Salvio and his men find Jackson first, and then the search is on for the other two.

Across 110th Street is a gritty, unrelentingly violent movie that was greatly helped by its use of location shooting. The lighting has a consistent blue-white glow, and is often rather dim, as befits the locations. Most of the locations, including the police precincts, are also quite shabby; the movie was made in 1972 which I refer to here as the era from just before Gerald Ford told the city to drop dead. The racial tensions add to a portrait of a city falling apart.

Reading a bit about Across 110th Street suggests there was a surprising number of poor reviews from contemporary critics. Part of that seems to be because of the violence in the movie, while another reason given is that the movie isn't really breaking any new ground. That may well be true, but what the movie does it actually does quite well. It fits in with any of the other crime movies from the first half of the 70s and holds its own, thanks to the good performances and verisimilitude. It's definitely more than worth a watch.