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(More customer reviews)Some way into Abel Ferrara's 'King Of New York', two gangsters conspire in a small cinema showing F.W. Murnau's 1922 horror classic 'Nosferatu'. Playing the scene where the vampire disembarks his corpse- and rat-ridden ship docked in England, it has clear reference to Ferrara's protagonist, Frank White (Christopher Walken in one of cinema's great, mercurial performances), a drug-smuggler recently released from a long period in prison, hoping to reassert his local criminal power. White refers to his return as 'coming back from the dead', and Walken's long, haunted figure and dancer's movements have some of the aristocratic grace of a famous screen Dracula, Christopher Lee. Mostly seen at night, he gathers new recruits (fresh blood) around him to 'feed' on. One remarkable shot, after a prolonged sequence of speedy violence, has him lit so his eyes shine like some haunted undead; another has the camera following him through a railway station until it is stopped by bars - it can only impotently watch as White glides up the stairs to be swallowed by the night. The film even has as one of his opponents a cop played by future vampire-slayer Wesley Snipes.
But the 'Nosferatu' allusion points to something else - Ferrara's strange absorption of silent cinema. In terms of content, 'King' is a gangster film like any other: loud, ugly, violent, brutal, lurid, hysterical. But it has a purity and beauty very different from the stylised melodramas of Martin Scorcese, whose equally bloodthirsty 'Goodfellas' came out in the same year. The first ten minutes is an astonishing, virtually wordless, visual tour-de-force, not simply presenting the main character, his situation and environment, but introducing symbolic motifs that are all the more powerful for being real, a part of Frank's world, and not simply imposed. Bars and grids (in prison, gates, bridges etc.) are the most prominent, signifying initially Frank's literal imprisonment, then his difficulties with the law and fellow criminals, and his frustrated ambitions (including a Guiliani-like zero-tolerance programme to clean up the streets), but eventually, as we might expect from a Ferrara littering his film with religious iconography, something much more metaphysical, outside the confines of genre (hence the references to Melville).
After this, there is a lot of talk - noisy, profane, funny, aggressive, threatening - but the best sequences retain this silent aesthetic: the night-club double cross leading to a car chase and man-hunt under a bridge; a police funeral in which a limousine hit provokes the scattering of black-clad, bankside mourners; the 'Le Samourai'-like subway confrontation between gangster and cop [although the film's very greatest scene, Larry Fishburne's Jimmy Jump ordering fast food just before being busted for murder, depends for its effect on the conflict between talk and silence, his bluster oblivious to the soundless arrests playing out behind him]. The use of huge, intense close-ups recall the emotional silent era, as does Ferrara's camerawork, more deliberate and heavy than Scorcese's flash pyrotechnics. The staging of set-pieces is as artifical as Murnau's setscapes in 'Sunrise'; the underworld carnival is more Celine than Scorcese. Even the use of blue filter in key scenes is less a signifier of atmosphere or artifice than a nod to the practise of 'colorising' monochrome silents.
By employing this style from a period he clearly loves, Ferrara is able to inject a spirituality and ceremonial gravitas not immediately apparent in the crudity of the genre subject.
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