Movies set in New York City before 1969

Dinner at Eight, Sweet Smell of Success Reflect City's Glamour, Grit

Mar 23, 2009

As the song New York, New York goes: "If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere." If "it" refers to a movie, then that's not quite true.

Granted, some films set in New York arguably could be made in virtually any other urban setting. Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window is set in New York's Greenwich Village neighborhood, but the entire film's action takes place in two apartments and a common courtyard in the apartment complex, so any apartment complex would do. Aside from aesthetics, the film's sensibilities had a big-city feel, but not necessarily that of the Big Apple.

King Kong would seem like a New York film, with the mighty ape fighting U.S. planes atop the Empire State Building, but that's the film's climax. Much of the film took place on an island, but it was Skull Island, not Manhattan island. The bombast of bringing a giant ape to New York City smacks of New York attitude, though.

The U.S. film industry's take on New York can be broken down into two periods: pre-1969 and post-1969, the year a film called Midnight Cowboy revamped much of the paradigm and unleashed a more gritty , realistic take on the city that lasted through much of the 1970s.

Woody Allen's love affair with New York City

This piece, though, will deal with pre-1969 New York films, most of which have a sensibility expressed best by Woody Allen's character during a monologue at the beginning of his 1979 film Manhattan, in which he ascribes the following characteristics to the city:

He closes the monologue, in which his character in the film is composing the beginning of a book: "He adored New York City, although to him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture ... New York was his town, and it always would be."

To those not from there, the city may seem cynical and ruthless, but native New Yorkers have been known to bask in their sense of worldliness, heavy on the world-weary and jaded. As Billy Joel sings in New York State of Mind: "Some folks like to get away, take a holiday from the neighborhood, hop a flight to Miami Beachor to Hollywood, but I'm taking a Greyhound on the Hudson River Line. I'm in a New York state of mind."

Like Allen's Manhattan character, Joel feels New York City is his town, warts and all. His heart beats to the rhythm of the rumbling subway.

Movies that reflect New York's edgy character

And now, the movies, and this selection isn't meant to be exhaustive, only representative:

Dinner at Eight (1933)This early Golden Era film revolves around a New York socialite's dinner party plans, and the corporate and social intrigue leading up to the party. In the 1930s, during the Depression, New York films were in escape-from-reality mode. If it wasn't a New York-set musical, like 42nd Street or Broadway Melody, then it was a high-society comedy like Dinner at Eight. Tinseltown brass decided the public didn't want to see people in Manhattan bread lines for 100 minutes, but did want to see the rich and the eccentric, and the box office proved they were right.

Along with the sentimentality, there are plenty of rough edges as an alleged Santa Claus tries to convince a cynical city that he's the real deal. It all begins with New York's iconic Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade and remains true to Gotham's grandiose sense of itself as being the center of the universe.

Burt Lancaster plays a hard-nosed newspaper columnist, and Tony Curtis plays his sleazy, ambitious press agent, set in a jazzy, seedy Manhattan. The film's acknowledgment of marijuana use was one of the earliest for Hollywood, and the gritty take on the city was a preview of what came in the cinema of 1970s New York. The Sweet Smell of Success shows how tough the city can be, but it also has a love-it-or-leave-it edge, as Lancaster's character suggests when, after passing a couple brawling loudly outside a nightclub. he quips: "I love this dirty town."

Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)

Audrey Hepburn plays a call girl who basks in the New York party life while looking for a rich Mr. Right. George Peppard plays a struggling writer and gigolo who is "kept" by older, wealthy Patricia Neal. Both Hepburn's and Peppard's characters typify the well-worn New York cliche, that of outsiders coming to make their fortune, doing anything and everything to make it there. The opening scene, with Audrey eating a continental breakfast on a window ledge while looking inside the posh Tiffany's store says it all: window-shopping for a dream in the Big Apple.

West Side Story (1961)

Sure, the new post-World War II teenager culture had been depicted before this in films like Blackboard Jungle, but West Side Story had a sharp melting-pot feel probably not depicted on the silver screen so explicitly since A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in 1945. The film follows two warring New York street gangs, one Puerto Rican, the Sharks, the other an Anglo-ethnic mix of Italians, Irish and others, the Jets, who evidently don't view their immigrant roots as comparable to the "PRs'." Add a Romeo-and-Juliet-style romance between the sister of the Sharks' leader and a former member and co-founder of the Jets, and you have a recipe for high romantic drama and urban racial tensions that turn deadly, punctuated by sharp musical numbers.

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