Fun City movies, which occasionally managed to incorporate the phrase, overlapped a number of tendencies and cycles—the Hollywood New Wave, Hollywood’s Jew wave, blaxploitation, dope operas, and the law-and-order Nixon-era policier. Many were made by directors who hailed from and enjoyed working in the city. Coppola was born in Detroit but grew up in Queens. Other directors—like Sidney Lumet (a product of the Lower East Side), Jerry Schatzberg and Larry Cohen (both from the Bronx), and Barry Shear, Alan Arkin, and Woody Allen (Brooklynites all)—were natives. Michael Roemer (Washington Heights) was a Jewish refugee who escaped Nazi Germany as a child. Others, like Roman Polanski, Ján Kadár, and Ivan Passer, were European émigrés making their first American movies: Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Angel Levine (1970), and Born to Win (1971).

Don Siegel was one of the few Hollywood professionals to direct a Fun City movie, making two back-to-back. Opening in late March of 1968—between a legendary garbage strike and the Columbia University uprising—Madigan was praised by Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice as the best American movie so far that year. Henry Fonda’s icy police commissioner and Richard Widmark’s frazzled detective “express the two aspects of life in New York—Fonda the clouded view from the top, Widmark the desperate urgency around the next corner,” denizens of a town where “the moral arithmetic never quite adds up.”

If Madigan exemplified what Sarris termed coscreenwriter Abraham Polonsky’s “urban romanticism,” Coogan’s Bluff (1968)—Siegel’s next film—was an outsider’s riff, with Clint Eastwood cast as an Arizona deputy sheriff come to the land of filthy streets and dirty-mouthed kooks to extradite an LSD-crazed hippie fugitive and there finding himself cheated by cabbies, insulted by hookers (“Texas faggot!”), camped on by queens (“Get her!”), chastised by a liberal, protofeminist social worker, dissed as “Buffalo Bill in a fancy hat” by a hostile Black detective, attacked by his prey’s strident, vaguely Jewish mother, and ultimately arrested for impersonating a cop. (In a way, the film anticipates and flips the premise of Midnight Cowboy—in which a Stetson-wearing Texan hoping to make it as a hustler comes to New York and fails to impress—released a year later.)

As Coogan learned, New York was a town in continuous crisis. Not that crises weren’t fun: location comedies like You’re a Big Boy Now and Ossie Davis’s Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), adapted from a novel by Chester Himes, had a madcap roller-coaster energy. No less than Coppola, Davis created a Fun City cartoon by staging all manner of outlandish events on Manhattan’s mean streets. But where Coppola celebrated New York as a city of youth, Davis more programmatically represented his hometown as the province of African Americans, opposite a few, ineffectual white cops, Italian gangsters, and Jewish junk merchants. The first half of Woody Allen’s Bananas (1971), a farce concerning a revolutionary Caribbean island, has some tasty location work, notably a scene shot in a Times Square dirty bookstore, although much of the movie was shot on location in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Little Murders (1971), directed by Alan Arkin from Jules Feiffer’s screenplay, was a passion project for star Elliott Gould—among the most New York of New York actors—and is the most nightmarish of Fun City movies, so bleak in its worldview and extreme in its satire that it might have been made to be shown at midnight. While evoking a litany of muggings, subway crimes, blackouts, and strikes, the film was mainly shot in interiors; its relatively few location sequences were, however, all chosen to accentuate Manhattan’s dilapidation. The same might be said of Larry Cohen’s Black Caesar (1973), which, in transposing a thirties-style Warner Bros. gangster film to seventies New York, made spectacularly grim use of Harlem locations, where, according to Cohen, he placated local “gangsters” with small roles in the film.

“There are eight million stories in the Naked City and this was one of them” is the line with which Jules Dassin’s echt Gotham 1948 noir The Naked City ended. While some Fun City movies, notably Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975), drew on actual events, most were interested in another sort of authenticity—even if the ravaged, garbage-strewn streets around the Filmways studio on East 127th Street, just off the FDR Drive between Second and Third avenues, often stood in for Brooklyn or the Bronx or just “New York.”

Released in the dismal aftermath of Richard Nixon’s reelection, Barry Shear’s Across 110th Street (1972) is the great anti-fun Fun City movie. Using an exit sign off the Henry Hudson Parkway as its title card and fueled by Bobby Womack’s insinuating theme song, the movie is a bloody farrago of corrupt cops, ghetto hustlers, and downtown mobsters, directed from a novel by a former Channel 5 news cameraman. “Ugly & brutal,” I wrote in my film notebook after catching the movie in its second run at the Olympia Theater, a movie house on Broadway and 107th Street where a few years later, I (very) briefly served as house manager before being clobbered with a metal pipe up in the balcony. “A real vision of Hell & a quantum leap ahead of SUPERFLY, DIRTY HARRY or THE FRENCH CONNECTION . . . Really does take place entirely in bars, garages, police headquarters, tenements w occ. ref to places like the Port Authority.”

Fun City was the heroin capital of America; it’s been estimated that in the late sixties, fully half of the nation’s addicts were living in New York. Where The French Connection (1971) showed dogged cops on the trail of heroin kingpins, two dope operas released the same year focused on their junkie customers. In the deadpan comic-tragedy Born to Win, one of the least appreciated and most neglected movies of the American New Wave—given its world premiere at the 1971 New York Film Festival under the title Born to Lose—George Segal plays a smack-addicted hipster hairdresser. However different in tone, Born to Win rivals The French Connection for its location work, while, adding to the movie’s street cred, the young Robert De Niro has a small role as an undercover cop.

If New York City was the star, so were native actors, most spectacularly Alfredo James Pacino, born in East Harlem, raised in the Bronx, a high-school dropout, and a product of the Actors Studio and off-Broadway. The manic protagonist of Dog Day Afternoon, Pacino’s hyper-wired Sonny Wortzik personified New York mishigas, at least until supplanted two years later by De Niro’s even nuttier fellow Viet vet Travis Bickle.

Pacino made his film debut at age thirty, as the fast-talking junkie antihero of The Panic in Needle Park. Relative neorealism and open endings were not unusual in 1971, but Panic, directed by former fashion photographer Jerry Schatzberg from a script by glamour couple Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, is unusually sordid. Kitty Winn, a little girl lost slumming with a vengeance, is introduced taking a crowded subway home from a illegal abortion; the movie is punctuated by close-ups of junkies shooting and booting and, according to casting director Juliet Taylor, the extras were “people who’d come off the streets,” including “some real heroin addicts.” The movie features some choice locations, although Verdi Square, the small park where Broadway crosses Seventy-Second Street, stood in for the real Needle Park, Sherman Square, a block away.

No director was more associated with Fun City than Sidney Lumet, who, even before he began shooting Bye Bye Braverman (1968), had used New York locations in ten of his twelve previous features—and had been frustrated by the bureaucratic regulations that kept him from using even more four years earlier in The Pawnbroker. Bye Bye Braverman, Lumet told a New York Times reporter, was “the most personal picture” of his career—a dark, extremely ethnic comedy adapted from Brooklyn novelist Wallace Markfield’s wise-guy satire of Partisan Review–type New York intellectuals.

Bye Bye Braverman was perhaps the ultimate inside movie—“a strange comedy of Jewish New York,” per Daily News critic Kathleen Carroll, who thought it prudent to add, “It had perhaps better stay here—few people outside the city limits will appreciate it.” An equally knowing Jewish comedy, rich with Fun City locations and typecast nonprofessional actors, Michael Roemer’s The Plot Against Harry was shot in 1969, completed in 1970, and shelved for nineteen years. A Jewish numbers racketeer, who after nine months in stir discovers that he has forfeited his territory to his erstwhile second in command, accidently recovers his estranged family. On one hand, Roemer’s film is a prolonged Jewish joke—the gangster as schlemiel. On the other, it’s a bunch of New York actors, many of them amateurs, having a subcultural field day.

Cotton Comes to Harlem, Bye Bye Braverman, and The Plot Against Harry revel in their locations. Coogan’s Bluff and Little Murders used locations to produce an abstract city suitable to their respective theories of New York. Rosemary’s Baby and The Angel Levine did the same to evoke an imaginary Manhattan appropriate to their supernatural stories. Polanski milked maximum atmosphere out of a two-week location shoot, turning the stately old Dakota on Seventy-Second Street and Central Park West into Manhattan’s most infamous apartment house. More than the power of evil, Rosemary’s Baby evokes the sense of unease or even dread engendered by the condition of living in close proximity and relative isolation among countless strangers inhabiting vastly different mental worlds.

A haunting fable of ethnic tension, adapted by Bill Gunn from a 1955 Bernard Malamud short story, Kadár’s The Angel Levine recounts an urban miracle. Having applied for public assistance, an elderly Jewish tailor (Zero Mostel) with a dying wife (Yiddish actress Ida Kamińska) is visited by a shabby Black man identifying himself not only as a Jew named Levine but “a bona fide angel of God” (Harry Belafonte). Kadár was criticized for his “unrealistic” use of a lonely tenement on the posh Upper East Side as his primary location. On the other hand, perhaps the director (who shot the entire film in New York) realized as his reviewers did not that the area around Seventy-Seventh Street and First Avenue (my childhood home) had once been a Czech neighborhood and was not without rent-controlled apartments.

Native son Norman Mailer orchestrated his own political happening in the spring of 1969, running for New York mayor in the Democratic primary with journalist Jimmy Breslin as his sidekick, seeking the nomination for city council president. As recorded by British filmmaker Dick Fontaine, the two writers’ freewheeling and highly rhetorical campaign provides a flavorsome analog to contemporary Fun City caper films. Fontaine’s locations are priceless, and all sorts of local characters turn up—including underground filmmaker Barbara Rubin.

As made clear to anyone following the argument in the documentary Norman Mailer vs. Fun City (1970), the Lindsay years pitted the working class against the poor, ghetto dwellers against the police, peaceniks against hard hats, Manhattan against the outer boroughs, and the city against all. Lindsay’s early opposition to the war in Vietnam further alienated white ethnics even as his identification with and prominent appearances in Black neighborhoods can be credited with sparing New York the racial violence endemic to other large American cities.

Just before leaving office, Lindsay gave permission for a disaster flick set in the New York subways to be filmed on location—mainly in the tunnel of the abandoned Court Street station in Brooklyn and outside the subway entrance on Twenty-Eighth Street and Park Avenue South. Crosscutting between a hijacked subway car, the Transit Authority command center, Gracie Mansion, and city streets, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, directed by Joseph Sargent (born Giuseppe Danielle Sorgente in Jersey City, New Jersey) and based on a pseudonymous novel by Brooklyn-born Morton Freedgood, gives some indication of the practical difficulties in navigating (as well as administering) the city.

The first Fun City period film, Dog Day Afternoon immortalized (insofar as movies are immortal) a fourteen-hour drama that New York had made for itself. Set in the summer of 1972, soon after the collapse of Lindsay’s presidential aspirations, it was shot after Lindsay had left office and released a month before the legendary Daily News headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”