Review of Taking Of Pelham 123, The

Introduction

In the New York City subway a small group of armed hijackers board the Pelham 123 train from different stations down the line and take command of it for their own use. They organise seventeen of the passengers into one car so that they are holding them as hostages during their demands, they inform Lieutenant Zach Garber of the New York Transit Police, played by Walter Matthau (also known as Mr. Wilson from the movie ‘Dennis’) that if their instructions are not carried out precisely, then the passengers will be shot one at a time. One of those instructions is to get one million dollars to them from the Mayor within an hour, and the use of the train radio communicator is used to keep them informed on the progress. Using strict time scheduling by the minute and not allowing any leeway, the hijackers make the city rush around frantically to meet their deadlines before any one bites the dust.

Video

It is presented in widescreen 2.35:1 and is non anamorphic, the movie features sets and locations all relating to the theme, low height stations and train tunnels can be seen, the main rail network room and exterior shots of the train. The interior views look like environments a little cramped for the actors to work in, and therefore look realistic to real life. The picture transfer is clear enough with no apparent dropouts noticed, there is though a softness to the picture considering the age of the movie and this doesn’t help in the darker scenes as the detail just gets lost. In scenes where the train is in the tunnel darkness surrounds the picture and only the windows and various lights pierce the gloom not much else can be seen.
The skin tones of the characters are represented well and the black colours are bold throughout, the contrast seems to be richer once the hijackers turn out the train lights and everything lies in shadow. New York City streets with their big buildings, busy Police cars and public traffic are used in this movie as another source of the plot above the tunnels and shows the amount of help needed for the crisis. The light glare from the train lights during some scenes and the fast ‘tunnel cam’ angles, as the train speeds through are nicely effective.
The main rail network room where Lieutenant Garber commands from seems visually basic on the technical front to this day and age equipment. The silver microphones are cube shaped and are mounted on an adjustable bracket above the console, which is chunky and wide and is spaced out widely from the others over the set. The telephones are another give away. The hijackers wear long thick overcoats, hats, glasses and moustaches for their ‘heavy’ disguise, at first I mistaken them all for a comedy act as they just didn’t look mean enough until they pulled out the guns.

Audio

Despite the opening MGM logo being a Dolby Digital 5.1 audio mix, this DVD release is just Dolby Digital Mono 2.0 and is a shame as the movie has police cars racing around and the train itself, and would make good subjects for audio directionality. If you up mix the audio to Dolby Pro Logic setting, you get the centre channel for dialogue but it doesn’t make the sound any better unfortunately. The main theme throughout has a certain ‘gangster’ style to it and is quite catchy with its bits of brass and heavy beat. It most certainly has a seventies quality to it and sounds familiar to a few other seventies movies and TV series titles that I cannot place. The tune comes into play once again during the scenes where the money is being counted, although sounding a little more dramatic and different in places.
The dialogue is clear enough from the characters but what this movie lacks is the impact of audio effects. There are train noises and gunfire present but are a low quality of realism, sound empty or animated and have no life behind them, bass also seemed non existent when there should have been some.

Features

After entering a sub menu with a choice of languages on and over a red tinted background picture taken from one of the scenes, you are presented with the main menu. The title sits near the bottom and to the right are pictures of the characters, the available options are play, scene selection, languages and trailer.

Conclusion

I thought Robert Shaw, Walter Matthau and Tom Pedi (who played Caz Dolowicz) made impressionable performances, each character had a contrast to each other Shaw was mean and sly, Matthau was the calm sort and Pedi was loud and threw his weight around as boss. It was a good little cop caper that was similar in ways to an up to date movie called ‘The Money Train’ starring Wesley Snipes. I also found that the New York City locations and the scene where they raced against time to get the money, reminded me of the tasks in ‘Die Hard with a Vengeance’ that John and Zeus had to complete. And as with ‘Reservoir Dogs’ the hijackers named themselves after colours and make you think if this movie was the inspiration for ideas in later ones. A big pity though for the loss of a possibly good audio track that would have made this movie even more exciting.