5 Films About Crime in Gritty 1970s NYC

Death Wish stars Charles Bronson as a grieving vigilante who exacts vengeance on the lawless streets of 1970s New York. Director Michael Winner paints the city as a dystopian hellscape filled with muggers, murderers and rapists, and Bronson coolly dispatches dozens of baddies with his .32 caliber revolver.  

The 1970s New York of The French Connection is a seedy wasteland of junkies and racist cops, and director William Friedkin shot his Oscar-winning movie with almost documentary realism. Gene Hackman plays “Popeye” Doyle, an amoral cop chasing down a French drug-smuggling ring. The climactic chase scene between a car and a runaway subway train is a white-knuckle classic.  

In Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese's shocking masterpiece, the troubled cabbie Travis Bickle describes New York City as “an open sewer—it’s filled with filth and scum.” Robert De Niro’s Bickle is an emotionally scarred Vietnam veteran whose loneliness and anger explode in vigilante violence.  

A crime thriller set on a subway train packed with hostages, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is hailed as one of the great New York movies of the 1970s. Credit goes to director Joseph Sargent for casting Walter Matthau as a world-weary police officer trying to outwit a gang of ransom-seeking hijackers led by Robert Shaw. The passengers also feel like a cross-section of real New Yorkers living a subway nightmare.

Saturday Night Fever is the definitive disco movie of the 1970s, beloved for John Travolta’s smooth dance moves and a best-selling soundtrack by the Bee Gees. But what’s often overlooked is the gritty backdrop of 1970s Brooklyn steeped in racism, sexual violence and self-destructive drug use. The darkness and realism of Tony Manero’s daily life are what make his Saturday night dance floor heroics shine even brighter.