Someone should tell this to movie producers today: there's no point in casting a bunch of young, gym-toned actors if you put them in a vehicle that's clinically obese. The average action movie today is so bloated and laden with unnecessary baggage that no matter how young and shapely the cast, one inevitably leaves the cinema with an impression of unhealthy corpulence, and a burning sensation akin to cholesterol poisoning. The Taking of Pelham 123, by contrast, is fronted by a cast of overweight middle-aged men, but you won't find a leaner, tauter, more athletic movie in all cinema. This 1974 thriller about the hijack of a New York subway train doesn't have a scene wasted, contains not a line of padding. Its pace is quite fearsome by today's standards, but at the same time the film is never rushed, never desperate to show us how fast it is; it just moves, unstoppably. It's got drive, it's got propulsion, it's got locomotion.
In Pelham 123 there are no extraneous "love interest" or "character development" scenes; characters are developed through the action, and not in parallel to it. There are no unlikely heroics, no gratuitous stunts or car chases, no explosions, and yet the movie is relentlessly exciting; it's a surprise to be told afterwards that almost all the action is confined to two small locations. What's more, there's no in-your-face directorial gimmickry, no coke-addled editing. Sargent, a professional hack and no auteur, gives us the best kind of direction: unobtrusive. His modest decision to be neither seen nor heard keeps the signal-to-noise ratio among the highest in cinema.
Peter Stone's script is phenomenally sharp and efficient, giving us all the information we need while at the same time cutting home with one-liner after one-liner. The comedy in Pelham 123 is rarely less than hilarious. Wit, satire and slapstick are well and good, but for guaranteed laughs, you can't do better than banter. There is nothing funnier than two people ripping the piss out of each other, and Pelham 123 simply has the best banter in the movies. Every character is ready with a quick insult and a lightning comeback, and it all seems totally authentic. One never gets the feeling that improbable witticisms are being scripted into their mouths.
Pelham 123 treats the city of New York with a gritty, grimy honesty; it's an almost documentary-like portrait of the city, and of the effect of the city on its people. The New Yorkers in the movie have built up a defensive front of hostility, which may or may not mask some underlying good humour. Their standard and instinctive response to all stimuli is aggression. Even the hijacked passengers don't bunch together, but bicker amongst each other. Everyone looks weary, oppressed, haggard, unhealthy; ill health seems to be a theme, with two of the major characters suffering from a flu-like illness. The characters are almost all deliberate stereotypes (in the cast listing they are named as "the pimp", "the homosexual", "the co-ed", etc.), but in big cities the great mass of "other people" do tend to become stereotyped in one's mind. Racism and sexism abound, and the movie doesn't attempt to smooth them over. Walter Matthau's reaction when he realises the police inspector is black is a wonderfully observed character moment, the kind of thing Ricky Gervais would later make his stock-in-trade.
The movie has a great cast, with legends like Matthau and Robert Shaw, and top-notch character actors like Martin Balsam, Hector Elizondo, Tony Roberts, Tom Pedi, and on and on. They portray, for the most part, a likeable bunch of people, for all their surface hostility. Even Shaw's coldly professional gang leader reveals a few flashes of humanity. The characters come across with enough life and weight that the few killings in this movie make somewhat uncomfortable viewing. One feels, however distantly, that a real person has died. (Though that cinematic bloodshed rarely induces such feelings is more an indictment of cinema in general.)
I must at some stage also mention David Shire's awesome score. You can probably blame it on Interstate '76, but there's a small place in the back of my brain that makes me wildly giddy whenever I hear funky 70s cop-show-style music. And the Pelham 123 opening theme doesn't just hit the spot, it is the spot. If the opening bars don't provoke you into an immediate Pavlovian stomp, then, I don't know, we must be made of different stuff. Shire's score, like Sargent's direction, also gains from being unobtrusive. Pelham 123 is very lightly scored. Music is mostly absent, and when it appears, it's really effective.
In short, The Taking of Pelham 123 is a contender for best American film of the 70s. It's certainly the one I most enjoy viewing. Like The Godfather series and The Conversation, it's based on a pulpy storyline, but unlike these films, it stays true to its pulp promise; it isn't too grand to serve up simple entertainment, it doesn't stray off into a discourse on the human condition. Which is not to say that such a discourse isn't there, amid all the excitement. In city of New York, the movie creates a character as flawed and interesting and human as anything in 70s cinema.