“I Don’t Need Forever!”: Abel Ferrara’s King of New York By Adrian Martin

Abel Ferrara’s King of New York roared into the American cinema of the 1990s as something new. Sure, it told a familiar story of gangsters fighting over the turf of a city; and it was spectacularly violent and fiendishly sexy as other, notable films (by Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, and others) had been since the 1960s. But other aspects of it immediately registered as strikingly different: its often melancholic, reflective mood; its remarkable visual style, which recalled the classics of art cinema; and, above all, its conception of the leading character, Frank White as vividly played by Christopher Walken.

When Ferrara was asked, some 25 years later, his opinion of White as a person, he replied categorically: “He’s a stone-cold killer”. Yet, to watch the film and become immersed in it is quite a different experience. White is a figure of contradiction: he murders brutally and with evidently sadistic relish, but he also channels his ill-gotten gains into civic works, such as a hospital. Is it all a scheme on his part, a grab for power, a mere means for him to realize his mad dream of becoming King of the city? The film, so elliptical and mysterious on many levels, makes it impossible to pass any easy moral judgment. Did Ferrara – whose films have frequently reflected and debated the tenets of Catholicism – intend White to serve as a modern Christ figure? Maybe, but he also embodies all the reckless energies and casual horrors of our capitalist society. It is a world, a milieu, in which both cops and criminals must go beyond the law, and the moral order, so as to live large and take action.

For Ferrara, filmmaking is always a collective activity; he prefers to say “we” rather than “I” when he recalls how the diverse elements of a work came together. King of New York would not be the rich, multi-layered film it is without the top-draw contributions of writer Nicholas St. John, cinematographer Bojan Bazelli, and editor Anthony Redman, to name just a few. Music is central to the drive and intensity of proceedings: not only Joe Delia’s moody, ambient score, but also Schoolly D’s assertive hip hop (with its taunting refrain, “Am I black enough for you?”). Nobody in the cast understood this musical grounding better than Laurence (then Larry) Fishburne, who seized the role of Jimmy Jump and immortalized him as the “hip hop gangster”. The film’s legacy has subsequently lived on in many rap songs. All the key members of this extraordinary cast – David Caruso, Victor Argo, Wesley Snipes – give themselves fully to Ferrara’s vision.

Ferrara is someone who intuitively combines many types and traditions of cinema. In King of New York, Pier Paolo Pasolini meets John Cassavetes; Martin Scorsese meets Carl Dreyer; and Samuel Fuller meets Bernardo Bertolucci. The film conjures the trajectory of Frank White in a particular, stylized way. As he exits his prison cell in the opening scene, he already has the pallor of a vampire, someone hovering between life and death. He longs to reintegrate himself into the vibrant life of the city, but is constantly pictured as an outsider, a lurker, someone who can only gaze longingly at what he truly desires. And after Frank is finally wounded (in an immortal showdown on a moving train, where he declares: “I don’t need forever!”), he wanders the streets like a phantom – a homage, no doubt, to Carol Reed’s 1947 noir classic, Odd Man Out. Many subsequent films will borrow from King of New York, but none of them quite match its volatile cocktail of ideas, moods, and sensations.

Adrian Martin is an Australian-born film critic based in Barcelona. His latest book is Filmmakers Thinking (Sticking Place, 2024).

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