Being a retrospective of Abel Ferrara’s cult gangster film King Of New York, and what it really says about the gap between rich and poor.
In a move itself worthy of a gangster movie, maverick New York film director Abel Ferrara once flew to Italy, sat down in a restaurant with a financier, and watched as he wrote out a check for $5m.
After years in development, that wedge of funding finally led the crime thriller King Of New York to the screen in 1990. It wasn’t a big hit at the time – it was largely eclipsed by the thematically similar but less memorable New Jack City. But by now, Ferrara’s opus has acquired legendary cult status; headed up by Christopher Walken’s colossal turn as the smooth-moving boss of a multi-racial gang of cocaine dealers, it’s a film beloved by rappers and connoisseurs of 90s cinema.
Ferrara distanced himself from it somewhat after its release, dismissing King Of New York as being too polished, slick and commercial (he once said it was initially inspired by The Terminator and a packed cinema’s reaction to its relentless pace). All the same, it remains an imperfect but electrifying film, both thanks to its performance and its offbeat take on a genre already dominated by the likes of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.
Walken plays Frank White, a drug lord who emerges older but unbowed from a lengthy spell in Sing Sing prison. Returning to Manhattan, he both resumes his life of luxury – he has a seemingly permanent suite at the Plaza Hotel – and sets about on an oddly personal one-year mission to “make something good.” He even appears to have designs on becoming New York’s mayor.
Meeting up with his old gangland compatriots, whose number includes the charismatically sociopathic Jimmy Jump (Lawrence Fishburne), White sets about wiping out rival gangs, taking their money with the plan to spend the takings on changing the city for the better.
In one scene, White meets Triad boss Larry Wong (Joey Chin) at a New York children’s hospital, and tries to lay out a scheme that involves moving a huge quantity of cocaine and donating some of the proceeds to a worthy cause. It’s a plan the Chinese-American gangster mockingly rebuffs: “If I was into socialised medicine I’d have stayed in Peking Province… You know something, Frank? This conversation made me realise how fucking crazy you are.”
Unperturbed, White sends his henchmen out on a bloody rampage, gunning down rivals and taking their cash. It’s a campaign that places White in the police’s crosshairs. But when their attempts to bring down White through legal channels fall apart, they too resort to more violent methods.
King Of New York is enlivened hugely by a number of standout performances. There’s Walken, obviously: all weird blow-dried hair and long, unblinking looks, he’s a mercurial character who talks at a whisper one moment and punching bullets into his enemies and roaring with anger the next (“You’re all welcome! To join!”).
Arguably his equal, though, is Fishburne’s Jimmy Jump – a cackling, fast-talking hoodlum who steals every scene and makes every line given to him instantly quotable. Quentin Tarantino once compared Fishburne’s performance to a young Marlon Brando, and rightly pointing out that the actor himself should be credited for his unforgettable swagger and dress sense – bowler hat, leather jacket, chunky gold chain. Jimmy Jump, Tarantino says, is nothing less than the “first hip-hop gangster in movie history. He invented that character.”
Crowded into smaller roles, the cast is similarly studded with actors who went on to bigger things: Wesley Snipes and David Caruso star alongside Scorsese veteran Victor Argo as the cops on White’s trail. Giancarlo Esposito and Steve Buscemi make brief appearances as White’s gang members, as does Harold Perrineau (later of Lost fame) as a mugger whom White employs as one of his henchmen.
Read more: Body Snatchers | Why Abel Ferrara’s 1993 sci-fi horror is worth a second look
Beyond being a showcase for some terrific acting – and Bojan Bazelli’s often exquisite cinematography – it’s initially a little difficult to pin down exactly what Ferrara and co-writer Nicholas St John were trying to say with King Of New York. White is sort of a Robin Hood figure, but he’s also mercilessly violent – although the people White and his gang kill aren’t exactly saints. The cops rightly want to put a stop to White’s criminal exploits, but their vigilante approach also makes them criminals.
Talking to writer Nicole Brenez for a 2022 interview, Ferrara suggested that Frank White is more of a metaphor for a particular kind of wealthy New Yorker than a realistic depiction of a gangster.
“How realistic is the film?” Ferrara asked, rhetorically. “You can’t get out of jail and take over the Italian mob in three days. The metaphor’s about a guy who’s saying, ‘Okay, my money’s going to build hospitals. We’re gonna pull people together. We’re gonna be a socialist mob.’ It’s a lot of contradictions.”
White may have emerged from prison with grand ideas, but as Ferrara puts it, “Saying you’re going to build a hospital and building a hospital are two different things.”
Many of Ferrara’s films prior to 1990 depicted the city from a working class angle: the increasingly unstable artist of 1979’s The Driller Killer (played by the director himself); the seamstress turned vigilante in Ms .45 (1981); the street-level cops and club bosses of Fear City (1984).
In King Of New York, Ferrara and St John contrast the lives of working class cops with those of the wealthy, with their luxury hotels, stretch limos, fancy nightclubs and charity benefit gigs (featuring R&B singer Freddie Jackson as himself). Thanks to his money and power, White can move freely through these places, even though he’s an ex-convict and murderer.
Apart from his line of work, White is largely interchangeable with the rich Wall Street bankers and dodgy politicians whose circles he finds himself in: “King Of New York is about the working class cops versus the nouveau riche drug dealers who are there for a brief moment, flaunting the bullshit money that they have.”
In one sense, King Of New York could be seen as a mockery of trickle-down economics: the idea that allowing the rich to increase their wealth – rather than redistributing it through taxation – ultimately benefits the rest of society. Advocates of the theory suggest that it will create more jobs (as White does when he throws a bunch of bills at some muggers, instantly recruiting them as his workers). Or that the wealthy will voluntarily spread their wealth around through donations to charitable causes – like White’s plan to build or fund hospitals.
We can’t know whether White would have ever followed through on his scheme, because events soon take a bloody turn. But what we do see is that White spends his time in bubbles: either looking down at the city from his penthouse suite or hived off in the back of his limo. He doesn’t see the effects the drugs he helps proliferate around the city have; he never sees first-hand the impact of his violent gang war on ordinary communities and families.
King Of New York also captures Manhattan in the process of change. The poverty and crime that underscored Ferrara’s earlier movies was in the process of being gentrified to the fringes. While Ferrara was still working on the script in the 1980s, Italian gangsters like John Gotti were still a familiar sight on the city’s streets; within a few years, a crackdown on organised crime sent the likes of Gotti to prison. The murder rate in New York City, which peaked at around the 2,200 mark in 1990, gradually fell to the low hundreds in the 2000s and 2010s.
In the process, the people who hold the money and power have changed, but the bubble that protects them still remains. The wealth is still concentrated in the hands of the few. Or, as Ferrara says of King Of New York, “It was a brief look at a prosperity that wasn’t ours. We were blue collar people. They might throw us some crumbs now and then, but… you know…”
At its purest level, King Of New York is about power – those who possess it, and those who don’t. The cops, frustrated and indignant at White’s hypocrisy, use violence to eventually take him and his operation down. But White is simply one mover in a power system filled with other people like him. They may not be gangsters, necessarily, but as King Of New York points out, it doesn’t much matter where the money comes from – simply possessing enough of it buys you access and privilege that ordinary folks can only dream of.
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