THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123 (1974)
Directed by Joseph Sargent
104 minutes
"Screw the goddamn passengers! What do they want for their thirty-five cents? To live forever?" Just a typical day on the East Side IRT, as a No. 6 train starts its downtown run from Pelham Station in The Bronx at the scheduled departure time of 1:23 PM (there's your title)–then gets hijacked by heavily-disguised men: Mr. Brown (Earl Hindman), shnurfling Mr. Green (Martin Balsam), trigger-loving Mr. Grey (Héctor Elizondo), and their icy-cold leader Mr. Blue (Robert Shaw)–color-coded aliases: are you listening, Mr. Tarantino? "This city hasn't got a million dollars!" kvetches the schmucky, flu-plagued Koch-lookalike mayor (this was the era, after all, when Jerry Ford told NYC to "drop dead") to hovering spin doctors when he gets that ransom ultimatum: cough up the dough in an hour or the 17 passengers (your typical fellow riders: a hooker, a philosophical old Jewish man, a mother with two bratty kids, Matthew Broderick's dad James as the conductor, et al.) get wasted, or one corpse for each minute late. Wisecracks and bullets fly as Walter Matthau's quick-witted TA cop Lt. Zachary Garber gives a guided tour to embarrassingly polyglot Tokyo subway execs; dispatcher Jerry "I'll believ