"I thought people like me were the legal system."

One of the seminal films of the 1990's...almost perfect as a stylistic exercise yet concurrently filled with such political commitment that it's simply overwhelming. Everything Ferrara hates is in this movie, including it's form which he criticizes in the commentary. "This is so uptight I can't even breathe. I'm glad I made this film because I would never make a film like this again. This is fascistic filmmaking." He's partially right, the film is incredibly tight, so tight that nearly every shot, every cut, every object has a specific purpose and function. It's some of the most "perfect" mis-en-scene I've ever witnessed, even down to the sheen on the wineglasses near…

Abel Ferrara's best looking film. It's a film of dualities.

The photography captures the contrasts of the decadence of elite Manhattanite dwellings to the filth of the streets. Ferrara's direction teases out the similarities between the two vastly different settings. Then he paints both worlds with a thick coat of sleaze and corruption.

Scenes are filled with well dressed men who suddenly explode into violence, their blood a fresh color on the grim tapestry of the city. The cops who are willing to bend and break the law. The crooks who clean up the streets by force. By the time it ends the moral lines have blurred.

Walken looks skeletal, ghostly. His face is gaunt and plastered with subtle expression.…

You could imagine during production that Abel Ferrara must have felt that his stylized neon saturated gangster film, complete with his biggest budget thus far, may prove to be his most mainstream and accessible feature, harking back as it did to the similar celluloid criminal mayhem that James Cagney would feature in in earlier days.

But upon its release in 1990, critics and audiences alike didn't see it that way at all. They gave it a resounding thumbs down, whilst some even booed the cast at screenings and demanded the profit went to drug rehab programmes in the titular city. Such reactions only further served the notoriety of Ferrara as an enfant terrible of American indie cinema scene. And so…

i never got away with anything.

Furious. Imagine seeing your mistakes in the toilet bowl every time you pissed, your own distorted face reflecting in the yellow-tinted not-enough-water just-been-dispatched fluid.

Ferrara often uses New York as a place for stories to launch from but never quite like this has the city become a catalyst for the head-splitting divide between situation and behavior or person and action or rise and fall. Violence has no real weight in the first half of this film ("ROOM SERVICE MOTHERFUCKERS!") mostly because violence has no gravitas or bearing on how the characters respond to their predicaments except as a dispensable/superfluous action in order to elevate the false facade of status they present to the rest…

"He is no worse than you," proclaims the rich wife in Griffith's One is Business, the Other Crime, after realizing that her upper-class husband is just as big a crook as the thief who had invaded her home moments prior, even though her husband's form of criminality (a bribery scheme) is technically classified, in societal terms, as "moral." A similar exchange occurs in Ulmer's The Naked Dawn after Maria realizes that Manuel, her civilized husband, would commit a criminal act at the drop of a hat, just like the thief Santiago, because his crime would technically be considered "righteous." Those two great films, and Ferrara's King of New York, highlight the attenuated boundary between civility and criminality, emphasizing how sometimes…

“When the D.A's office investigated the sudden death of Arty Clay, they found that he left a $13 million estate. How do you explain that? There there's Larry Wong, who owned half of Chinatown when he passed away. Larry used to rent his tenements to Asian refuges, his own people, for $800 a month to share a single toilet on the same floor. How 'bout King Tito? He had thirteen-year-old girls hooking for him on the street. Those guys are dead because I don't want to make money that way. Emil Zappa, the Mata brothers, they're dead because they were running this city into the ground.”
“You expected to get away with killing all these people?”
“I spent half my…