Ambivalent king of the underworld
Abel Ferraras Neo-Black King of New York from 1990 begins with the release of gang boss Frank White (Christopher Walken) from prison. Cool shades of blue define the images of White’s walk along the prison corridors. Then we see White clad in a black coat getting into a limousine waiting in front of the prison and driving away. Next we see the Colombian gangster Emilio El Zapa (Freddy Howard) descending the stairs in his apartment with a half-naked woman in his arms. There are other scantily clad women in the living room. The entire scene is bathed in warm orange tones. El Zapa goes to the door to make a phone call in a phone booth. There he is shot down by three men. One throws a newspaper at the dead man. This shows an article that says that Frank White has been fired.
King of New York is a brutal gangster film with a charismatic Christopher Walken in the lead role. His Frank White is the white boss of an almost exclusively black gang. We don’t know anything about the story of White. We only see how he performs a joyful dance when greeting his gang members and how he cold-bloodedly shoots an Italian mafioso ignoring him. Frank White has two playmates – a blonde and a black. He is happy about his new gloves, which he got from the Colombian King Tito (Ernest Abuse) who was murdered by his gang. Frank White has all of his competitors eliminated one after the other. However, he doesn’t just want to become the king of New York’s underworld. Instead, White has ambitions to make it to the city’s mayor.
Despite his relentlessness, White also has a social streak. He supports the construction of a new hospital in a problematic New York district. So Frank White is a deeply ambivalent figure. At one point he tells the chasing police officer Roy Bishop (Victor Argo) that he didn’t kill anyone who didn’t deserve it. You almost want to believe him. The policemen chasing him are drawn just as ambivalent. Only Bishop is determined almost to the last to arrest White exclusively with the means of the law. However, his subordinate police officers such as Dennis Gilley (David Caruso) and Thomas Flanigan (Wesley Snipes) are also ready to use unfair means to bring down White. When they stage an attack on White’s gang by a supposedly rival drug gang, the differences between cops and gangsters finally blur.
Frank White’s gang is a daring gang that knows how to kill in cold blood as well as how to party wildly. Leading the way is White’s first husband Jimmy Jump (Laurence Fishburne). Cool, he strolls through the area with a broad grin that bares his gold teeth, hanging on gold chains. But he’s also White’s best killer. He really gets going to rap music when it makes the whole gang crash. Half-naked women are dancing around wildly. The cocaine to be sniffed piles up in great piles. These gangsters take whatever they ask for. The scenes in the gangster club are – like the rest of the film – perfectly lit. Cool shades of blue determine the hustle and bustle. You realize King of New York indicated that Ferrara had a significantly larger budget for this film than for his previous films. Visually, the Neo-Noir is downright opulent.
The violence in King of New York is tough and dirty. King Tito has just been wondering why there are tampons instead of money in the suitcase he got for one kilogram of cocaine. Jimmy Jump reveals to him that they are there to plug the bullet holes and shoots him over the heap. It’s worth rediscovering this cult film. An uncut version with good picture and sound quality has now been released by Ascot Elite on DVD and Blu-ray for ages 18 and over. King of New York is next to Martin Scorseses Good Fellas – Three Decades in the Mafia (1990) one of the best gangster films of the early 1990s.
Gregor Torinus
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