How the Movies Captured Times Square’s Grimy Golden Age

Joe’s chief desire is to make it as a hustler, seducing rich housewives out of their fortunes. But from the moment Joe receives his room key at a Times Square flophouse, the film moves not like a western but a film noir: a gradual descent, from naivete to disillusionment to abject misery. The role of femme fatale, of sly entrancer, is played, surprisingly, by Dustin Hoffman’s Rico “Ratso” Rizzo. As a quasi-homoerotic bromance develops between the two men, Ratso lures Joe ever deeper into the mire. Joe has traveled to Times Square looking for Sweet Smell of Success only to find himself imprisoned in a double feature of He and She and The Animal.

Joe’s descent is swift, inexorable, relentless. He’s in the red from the jump. The flophouse butler demands a tip, the television is coin-operated, and his first sexual conquest won’t give him a nickel but demands his money instead. Before long Joe is squatting with Ratso in a freezing, condemned building, selling his blood for eight dollars, and allowing a lonely man (a young and beardless Bob Balaban) to fellate him in a porno theater. The glamorous New York of Joe’s celluloid fantasies yields to a cold, harrowing reality: the reality of Times Square.

“The sidewalks were strewn with rubble, and many of its buildings were vacant,” writes Anthony Bianco of this period, in Ghosts of 42nd Street: A History of America’s Most Infamous Block. Broadway theaters moved up the evening curtain by an hour “so that playgoers could get out of Times Square before the muggers took over,” while the plight of the theaters that ran all-night sexploitation films was best typified by the Midway, which had descended to such a state that its “come-stained, soggy carpets” sprouted a “forest of mushrooms.” In Midnight Cowboy, the reality of Times Square rebukes Joe Buck’s dreams with the scorn of one of Ratzo’s consumptive laughing fits.

In his final humiliation, Joe comes to realize that his suit of armor, his fringe jacket and pearl-buttoned shirts, has not ennobled him, but has made him a laughingstock—or worse. “That great big dumb cowboy crap of yours don’t appeal to nobody except every jockey on Forty-Second Street,” sneers Ratso. “That’s faggot stuff!” His manhood threatened, his virility shot, his leather jacket soiled, Joe is forced to give up his dream of New York and accept an even grimmer destiny (Florida).

As the Deuce continued to slip into lawless squalor, the moral calculation offered by films set in Times Square underwent a reversal. Absent was any pretense of New York as a city of opportunity and glamour. Montages of Times Square, typically during the opening credits, instead served to situate the viewer in a savage, debased reality, in which any chance of deliverance is impossible to imagine. “All the animals come out at night,” says Travis Bickle in the opening moments of Taxi Driver (1976). He cruises through a rainy Times Square with the languor of a predator, past a nudie book mart, streetwalkers, a marquee advertising a double bill of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Return of the Dragon. This is not Woody Allen’s New York: “Whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, pushers. Sick. Venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” Bickle will ultimately conclude that he is the rain.

John Shaft (Shaft, 1971) also concludes that he is the rain—and the thunder. He is so hard that he rents his detective shop in the middle of Times Square. The view from his window is nearly identical to the view from Joe Buck’s hotel room in Midnight Cowboy; it is through that window that Shaft tosses a mobster to his death. Where else in the world could Shaft credibly hang his shingle?

In Born to Win (1971), George Segal’s charming, heroin-addicted hustler J. embodies the recklessness that is the native attitude of Times Square. He is the type of guy who walks into a cocktail lounge on Forty-Second Street, heads straight to the business office and asks the secretary, with a flirtatious grin, “Where’s the safe?” He almost gets away with it, too, hauling the giant lockbox out of the club’s revolving door before dropping it on the sidewalk after being spooked by a patrol car, and sprinting off into the night.

Slapstick comedy may seem an odd genre for a story about the relentless decline of a homeless heroin addict, but this tonal discordance is the defining allure of the Times Square canon. (Andrew Bergman’s 1981 sex comedy So Fine, about an English professor who returns to New York to rescue his father from the mob, only to start an affair with a moll, pushes the formula even further, into abject farce.) If Times Square is a contemporary inferno, the heroes of these films take their cue from Satan (via John Milton): “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” The humor of Born to Win derives from J.’s commitment to his own dissolution, no matter the cost. Unlike Joe Buck, J. doesn’t fight his dissolution; he just wants to nurse the high as long as possible. His credo is best articulated by his accomplice and only friend, Billy Dynamite. “I love this life,” exclaims Dynamite, reclining on a bench in the middle of Times Square, in the final hours of his life.

Love it! Because when we get up in the morning, we know exactly what we’re going to do. Hustle for another bag. I wouldn’t give it up for nothing. No, because we got a purpose in life, you know what I mean? How many people can really say that?

J. and Billy Dynamite can say it. John Shaft can say it. Even Travis Bickle can say it. Viewers who haven’t seen Taxi Driver recently may forget that this bleakest of Times Square films does not end in the gore-splattered shoot-out at the child brothel, where Bickle lies bleeding from a gunshot wound to his neck. The screen fades to black and we pick up the action months later. We learn that Bickle, having miraculously survived his coma, has been lionized for rescuing a child prostitute from her predators (the newspaper headlines taped to his apartment wall read “Taxi Driver Battles Gangsters,” “Parents Express Shock, Gratitude,” and “Taxi Driver Hero”). In the final scene, Bickle even jilts the uptight flame (Cybill Shepherd) who jilted him after he takes her on a date to a screening of Sometime Sweet Susan at the Lyric in Times Square. Taxi Driver ends, in Aristotelian terms, not as tragedy, but as comedy.

Today it’s impossible to watch these films without communing with a different Grecian emotion: nostalgia. For the Hollywood entity that had the final say on Times Square was Disney. And Disney said: This cannot stand. Though Mayor Ed Koch first embraced the idea of transforming the district in 1980, it was not until Disney Co. agreed, in 1993, to restore the New Amsterdam Theatre on Forty-Second Street, that private investment pounced. Time Warner, Viacom, AMC, Toys “R” Us, McDonald’s, Morgan Stanley, and Prudential, helped by the aiding and abetment of various preservation societies and government planning commissions, systematically razed the old Times Square—and, with it, any narrative enticements it offered Hollywood. Can you name the quintessential Times Square film of the nineties—or any decade since?

These developments have not been uniformly catastrophic, or even, on balance, negative. Rat-devoured theaters were expertly restored; real-estate values surged; stabbings, rapes, and kidnappings declined. Mushrooms stopped colonizing sodden carpets. Yet something of value was irrevocably lost. Even a lifetime New Yorker cannot go to Times Square today and not feel like a tourist. We know what was gained: it is quantified in the tax rolls. But what, exactly, was lost? The answers can be found in the films that showed what New York was like then, before—when it was miserable and capable of surprise, bleak and unbowed, grim and aglimmer, which is to say, when it was alive.