In 1991, Christopher Walken was still a fairly young actor, gradually cultivating the mystique of a true original and just a couple of years shy of the cameos in Pulp Fiction and True Romance that would cement his reputation for a generation of filmgoers. With his leading role as drug kingpin Frank White in Abel Ferrara’s King of New York, Walken foreshadowed the nutso gangster persona he would play with varying degrees of intensity for decades to come. And while the film was critically panned and performed poorly when it was released only a few months after Goodfellas, Ferrara’s gritty vision and a trio of jaw-dropping performances demand a reassessment of this under-appreciated juggernaut of urban violence and sleaze.
New York City in the early ’90s was still recovering from the murder and grime hangover of the previous decades, still years from the Disneyfication of Times Square, and it’s into this festering environment that Frank White returns after a stint in prison at Sing. He’s a smooth cat who moves like a dancer in a nice suit with a weird glint in his eye–hey, he’s Christopher Walken–and it’s never explained how he came to be the leader of a gang comprised almost entirely of Black men. Their deference to him is fierce and uncontested, and he commands the city from his perch in a suite at the Plaza Hotel.
The plot, from screenwriter Nicholas St. John, is simple enough: a bloody war for gang territory as White kills off his competition and cultivates a Robin Hood role by promising to bankroll a hospital serving the Harlem community. Standing next to a sick child’s bed, he makes a shady deal with the Chinese mob that will end up putting a pile of bodies in the morgue. Here’s the enigma of White’s character. He’s prone to outbursts of savage violence, but he moves through a room like a lounge lizard charming the crowd, peeling a smile that’s both beatific and carnivorous. Walken’s performance is relatively controlled in comparison to that of Laurence Fishburne as Jimmy Jump, who truly tears up his scenes. He’s a motor-mouthed killer in peak ’90s fashion, with hammer pants, Kangol cap, gold chains and teeth grills, spitting dialogue like a fire hose. Imagine young Morpheus on PCP. A fresh-faced Giancarlo Esposito also appears as one of White’s henchmen, 15 years before he would take his place as the great baddie of “Breaking Bad,” but Fishburne practically tramples him at every turn. Jimmy Jump’s death scene (spoiler!) contains more gyrations and vocalizations than a jazzercise video.
And yet, Fishburne’s isn’t even the most unhinged performance, a distinction which goes to David Caruso as an embittered cop determined to do whatever it takes to bring down White and his crew. Blustering, screaming, practically levitating with rage, he plays the part like it’s the only role he’s ever going to get. (He went on to play tamer versions of this character in “NYPD Blue” and “CSI: Miami.”) What these outsized performances bring to the film is a sense of Shakespearian sweep, all the drama and fury erupting off the screen to land in the viewer’s lap.
Ferrara’s direction takes full advantage of on-location filming around Manhattan to cultivate the sense of a city crumbling under the neglect and weak-mindedness of politicians, where delusional warlords and crooked cops are the only ones with the guts to save the place from ruin. The sense of texture and grit is unmistakable; you can practically smell the place. Several set pieces–a car chase over the Queensboro Bridge and a shoot-out under the highway–start out kinetic and then become monotonous in their punishing noise and protracted edits. The pacing in particular belies the age of the film, and might account for its being overshadowed by Goodfellas, which managed to tell a similar story of gang warfare with a more nuanced screenplay that didn’t drag its characters (and viewers) through quite as much blood and scum.
Still, King of New York rewards a critical reappraisal for the way it grounds its outlandish characters in a city that feels fully realized as a malevolent force all its own. Two subway scenes bookend the story, and provide windows into the fascinating central character. In the first, Walken plays it cool while a roving gang mugs everyone on the train as he watches calmly from the end with his girlfriend. He opens his coat to show the gun in his waistband, then offers the hoodlums a job and a wad of cash (“Ask for me at the Plaza”). It’s a telling glimpse into White’s preternatural charisma. Much later, he doesn’t fare so well on the subway, but his face betrays no pain or fear, and he taps into that same Zen-like calm to walk away, shooting his cuffs like a gutter-level James Bond, venturing back into the city that he considers his kingdom.
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