Alphabet City (1984)

Until now, drug dealer Johnny (Vincent Spano) has had quite the career, going up through the ranks fast. Doubts must have trickled in already with the birth of his little baby Renee (Christina Marie Denihan), with his artist wife Angie’s (Kate Vernon) various attempts to talk him out of the life of crime, his partner and friend Lippy’s (Michael Winslow, yes, the guy with the noise imitation shtick) slow descent into addiction, and his younger sister Sophia’s (Jami Gertz) start into the life of a prostitute

The night the film takes place in turns out to be the final straw, though, when Johnny is tasked with burning down the tenement building his mother (Zohra Lampert) and sister are living in. At first he’s just not very happy doing it, but then decides completely against it, well knowing that this will probably lead to very unhealthy consequences for him, while the building’s just going to be burned down by some other asshole as some great career move.

So it’s clear Johnny, together with Angie and the baby, will have to flee New York at the end of the night. Until then, he’s going to drift through the night, steal the money he’s usually collecting for his boss as his own private pension fund (the guy’s going to want to kill him anyway, right?), and try to survive if there are already people after him (which of course there are).

On a plot level, Amos Poe’s Alphabet City sounds like a pretty typical and not terribly original crime movie. It certainly is as close as Poe – coming out of the New York No-Wave – ever came to mainstream cinema. It is still as stylized and weird as you’ll find this sort of plot treated, using the set-up as an excuse for Spano to drift through the neon-coloured New York night, encounter strange people and peculiar variations on standard genre situations. The drug den, for example, must be seen to be believed, and cannot be explained with the few words I have. The genre’s expected action set pieces are staged and filmed as weirdly as the director could get away with too, clearly made with a knowledge of the more classic way to do things and a decision against doing anything that way.

The film’s structure does of course make this an older sibling to other movies about characters drifting and running through neon lit city nights like Into the Night or After Hours, a sub-genre which to me always feels a little like condensed road movies, trying to express the richness and strangeness of a city – or at least a certain number of city blocks – through episodic encounters, trying to capture a spirit of the place more than paint an outwardly realistic picture.

Poe’s New York here is drenched in all the colours of Dario Argento, turning the gritty New York of its time into a dream- and nightmarescape, with Johnny as our increasingly desperate Virgil, pointing out the circles of the damned. Alphabet City is much more an attempt at creating a sense of place through mood and strangeness than a proper narrative; it is also never less than riveting, explaining the love and desperation many of its inhabitants seem to have felt towards their city when this was made in the only way feelings like that can be explained – ambiguously and with a bit of the weird involved.