Alphabet City (1984) Atlantic/Drama-Thriller RT: 85 minutes Rated R (language, violence, drugs, some sexual content) Director: Amos Poe Screenplay: Gregory K. Heller, Robert Seidman and Amos Poe Music: Nile Rogers Cinematography: Oliver Wood Release date: May 4, 1984 (US) Cast: Vincent Spano, Michael Winslow, Kate Vernon, Jami Gertz, Zohra Lampert, Ray Serra, Daniel Jordano, Kenny Marino, Tom Mardirosian, Clifton Powell, Christina Marie Denihan. Box Office: $7M (US)
Rating: ***
When it comes to 80s movies, you hear a lot of talk about classics like E.T., Ghostbusters, Back to the Future and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I agree that they’re great but when I think of that particular decade, I think of all the cool B-level flicks that typically played one-week engagements before making way for the next one. A lot of them are forgotten now.
Is there anybody that remembers Alphabet City, a teen gangster drama starring Vincent Spano (Over the Edge)? I never hear anybody talk about it. Everybody knows the names Steven Spielberg and John Hughes but probably nobody knows who Amos Poe is. He’s the director of Alphabet City. Now you know. In any event, I remember it and it’s a definite product of its era. Slick but empty, it’s a 30s gangster movie tailored to fit the MTV generation with its lurid color scheme, low-key lighting and hyper editing.
19YO Johnny (Spano) rules the dangerous nighttime streets of Alphabet City located in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Tooling around in his Trans Am, he oversees the drug trade and makes collections at clubs where he’s not even old enough to get served (legally). It’s a job (and life) that comes with many risks. His wife Angie (Vernon, Pretty in Pink) isn’t on board with it. She wants him to get out of the life if only for the sake of their baby daughter. It may finally happen tonight.
Johnny works for a mob boss named Gino (Serra, Vigilante) that largely goes unseen throughout the movie. He wants him to torch a building, the same one where his mother (Lampert, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death) and younger sister Sophia (Gertz, The Lost Boys) live. Hey kid, it’s just business. This is when Johnny finally grows a conscience. Knowing that refusing to follow orders will cost him dearly, he makes plans to leave the city with his family and a huge stash of money. First, he has to convince his mom and sister to leave before somebody shows up to do the deadly deed. It isn’t as easy as it sounds; Mom is tough and stubborn. If somebody wants to burn down her home, they’ll have to burn her along with it.
Although I like Alphabet City, I never said it’s a quality movie. Poe wants us to believe his film is steeped in realism and while it serves up an ample amount of grit and sleaze, it’s less realism than MTV-influenced impressionistic fantasy. He shifts gears about midway through. It starts out as a character study of a mid-level criminal, showing Johnny’s life on and off the streets before descending into a routine crime thriller about a mobster fighting his way out a life from which there is only one exit. NONE of it is remotely believable. My biggest question concerns how Johnny is able to skim as much money as he does undetected by the higher-ups. Surely they’d notice an amount that high missing. Eh, whatever.
The screenplay- credited to three writers including Poe- is faulty. Namely, it’s underwritten. His mom and sister should be pivotal characters. It starts out that way with Johnny stopping by to warn them of what’s about to go down. While there, we see his mother’s disapproval of his lifestyle in the way she yells at him to get his dirty money away from her clean laundry. We also see Sophia, age 16, making the same kinds of bad choices as her older brother. In short, she’s a prostitute. He tries talking to her. She doesn’t listen. He literally pulls her out of her pimp’s limo and carries her back inside. They share a heartfelt moment on the stairs before he hands her a wad of cash and leaves. The acting in this scene, particularly by Lampert and Spano, is right on point. For a moment, we think Poe has stumbled onto something. What does he do with it? Absolutely nothing. We never see Mom and little sis again. It’s dropped and all but forgotten save for a quick throwaway line near the end when Johnny catches the arsonist red-handed.
Spano was one of the better young actors of his generation with winning performances in Over the Edge, Baby It’s You and Rumble Fish to his credit. He’s pretty good in Alphabet City too. While Lampert’s character is the most grounded, Spano makes you believe he’s an Italian-American kid from the Lower East Side with only one career option. He’s smart and dumb in equal measures. BTW, get a load of his clothes- i.e. the leather jacket, mesh shirt and spiked bracelets. So very 80s! Before he was sound effects cadet Jones in Police Academy (and its endless sequels), Michael Winslow played Lippy, drug dealer and friend to Spano’s character. It’s an interesting performance to say the least.
I’d like to talk about the wife played by Vernon. She’s an interesting person. She lives in a SoHo loft with her husband and baby where she engages in art and motorcycle maintenance; that is, when she’s not asking Johnny to pick up disposable diapers on his way home from work. She loves Johnny, but hates his job. When he asks her to leave with him, she’s against it. I can’t figure this chick out.
One thing Alphabet City has plenty of is style. Another is flash. I already described the look of the movie but I didn’t mention the set design. Poe takes us on a guided tour of the dance clubs, drug dens and abandoned buildings. At times, it’s too dark and shadowy to see much of what’s going on. A police raid on a drug den is incomprehensible due to the editing but at the same time, it captures what it’s like to get caught up in such a thing. It’s a frenzied jumble of activity, shouting, police with guns drawn and people running everywhere.
The climax of Alphabet City is fairly standard with Johnny getting into a shooting match in an elevator with a couple of thugs sent by his boss. Of course, his wife and daughter are right there. It culminates in one of the howlingly funny climaxes I’ve ever seen, one involving a getaway vehicle arriving at just the right moment. As for the soundtrack (always a crucial element of slick 80s movies), the only memorable tune is “Lady Luck” by somebody named Maura Moynihan played as Johnny runs through the dark streets trying to get to his money and family (in that order).
On many levels, Alphabet City is a bad movie. It’s another title on a long list of forgotten exploitation flicks of a time long gone. There’s no good reason to remember it, yet I can’t forget it. It’s painfully obvious Poe wants it to be the Mean Streets of its time. Well, he’s no Scorsese. BUT he does succeed in creating an engaging B-movie that belongs on the bottom half of a double bill.
