If grit were a currency, Across 110th Street would be Fort Knox. It’s a movie dipped in gasoline, lit by the neon of a crumbling Harlem, and set to the smoky baritone of Bobby Womack. And while the title sounds like a public transit PSA or maybe a Motown b-side about unrequited love and bus fare, the film itself is a raw, bloodied knuckle to the jaw of 1970s urban cinema.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: Across 110th Street is a terrible title. It sounds like an off-Broadway musical about intergenerational conflict in a Bronx laundromat. But buried behind that clumsy marquee is a film that walks the crooked line between cops and criminals, loyalty and corruption, ambition and survival — and it does it with the swagger of a crooked detective and the desperation of a man with no options and one bullet left.
The Plot: Blood, Bullets, and Brutal Bureaucracy
Three Black men rob the Italian mob of $300,000 in Harlem, leaving seven corpses and a pile of questions. Cue the racial tension. Enter Captain Frank Mattelli (Anthony Quinn), an aging, violently racist Italian-American cop who treats due process like it’s a rumor. He’s partnered with Lieutenant William Pope (Yaphet Kotto), a younger, Black officer who believes in law and order — and whose patience is wearing thin.
The film unfolds not as a standard whodunit, but a why-do-it — peeling back layers of Harlem’s fractured economy, racial resentments, and corrupt institutions. The lines between good guys and bad guys are less blurry than completely erased. You’re either surviving, or you’re dead. The cops want the killers, the mob wants their money, and the streets want justice — any kind they can get their hands on.
Anthony Quinn: Meaner Than a Rattlesnake in a Church Pew
Anthony Quinn plays Mattelli like he’s made of pork fat, cigarettes, and broken dreams. He’s not a hero, and the film isn’t asking you to like him. He’s old, obsolete, and knows it — clinging to his badge like a drowning man hugs a cinderblock. His methods are medieval, but his motivations are terrifyingly human: a man scared of becoming irrelevant in a city that no longer runs on his rules.
And then there’s Yaphet Kotto, who plays Pope with quiet fury. He’s the moral compass of the movie — though he’s constantly trying to recalibrate it in a world where every direction points south. Kotto doesn’t shout. He simmers. He stares down Quinn’s rage with the weariness of a man who’s had to explain to his white colleagues for the hundredth time that not every Black man in Harlem is a suspect.
Their dynamic? Imagine Lethal Weapon if it had been written by Chester Himes during a whiskey bender and shot with the urgency of a live riot.
The Violence: Not Stylish, Just Ugly
There’s no John Woo slow-mo here. No Tarantino monologues about foot massages. Just brute, unromanticized violence. When people get hit, they stay hit. When someone bleeds, they don’t quip — they scream. You can smell the alleyways. You can feel the sweat behind the cheap suits. You don’t leave Across 110th Street wanting to be a cop or a gangster. You leave grateful you’re not either.
This is a film that doesn’t just show Harlem — it bleeds it onto the screen. The cracked sidewalks. The corner boys. The women staring from tenement windows like Greek choruses of hard luck. This Harlem is dying, and everyone knows it. Some fight it. Some feed off it. And some — like the poor bastards caught between cops and criminals — just hope to live long enough to count their money before someone takes it away.
The Soundtrack: Bobby Womack’s Gospel of the Damned
If the movie had done nothing else right, we’d still have Bobby Womack’s title track — a mournful, soulful prayer for the permanently stuck. “Across 110th Street” isn’t just a song; it’s a Greek tragedy in vinyl form. It doesn’t play with the action, it plays above it — like the voice of Harlem itself, fed up and heartbroken.
Try walking through any American city after midnight and playing that song in your headphones. Tell me it doesn’t feel like the ghosts of 1972 are watching you from the fire escapes.
Final Thoughts: A Classic Hiding Behind a Crappy Label
Across 110th Street deserves better than its title. If you didn’t know better, you’d expect a Sidney Poitier road trip movie with a jazz flute score and lots of hugs. But this is a mean, muscular crime drama — a fusion of Blaxploitation grit and 1970s neo-noir grime.
Sure, there are rough edges. The pacing hiccups in the second act, and a few of the mob characters come off like rejects from a Scorsese parody sketch. But those sins are minor compared to the film’s brutal honesty and streetwise charm.
It’s a film about people who don’t fit cleanly into good or bad, right or wrong. It’s about men forced to work together who would rather trade blows than badges. It’s about the way cities eat their poor and then ask why everyone’s starving.
Rating: 4 out of 5 bullet-riddled suitcases
Across 110th Street: Come for the gunplay. Stay for the heartbreak. Just don’t judge it by the title.
