If you aren’t reminded of Dog Day Afternoon when you start Hold Your Fire, you will be soon enough. Directed by Stefan Forbes, the documentary follows a real hostage situation that unfolded in Brooklyn in early 1973. To put this situation in context, one of the many talking heads pointed out that 1973 was after the Attica riots, the terrorist attack at the Munich Olympic Games, and finally, the events that inspired Sidney Lumet’s popular 1975 film. The purpose of said context is twofold: aside from putting us in the mindset of the police and hostage takers, it primes us to compare the film against gritty thrillers from the same period.
Forbes uses police photography and limited video footage to immerse us in its setting, a Brooklyn sporting goods store where four Black men want to steal some shotguns. The police arrived earlier than expected, which leads to a shootout that left one officer dead and one of the captors wounded. After retreating back into the store, there is a protracted stalemate between the police and the hostage takers. Both groups are leery of another, and through extensive interviews, we learn just how deep that bias goes. Fifty years later, and many of the white police officers on the scene openly discuss their racism (although they would never call it that).
After the initial shoot-out, the hostages and hostage takers survived the inevitable siege. It is a minor miracle, since the police were openly discussing how they wanted to kill the men who (they believe) killed one of their own. The high survival rate was made possible by Harvey Schlossberg, a traffic cop with a PhD in psychology who pioneered nonviolent negotiation techniques (the film declines to explain why a highly educated man was working a job that does not require much formal education). Either way, part of the fascination in Hold Your Fire is how Shlossberg’s techniques, which now seem so common, were borderline revolutionary back then. Who knew that talking to the hostage takers could establish common ground, and make it possible to de-escalate the tension? Certainly not the NYPD’s rank-and-file, one of whom called Schlossberg “a consummate Jew” as faint praise.
While the procedural details are the hook to Hold Your Fire, the real subject is the fraught relationship between New York’s Black population and the police. Two of the four hostage takers still survive, and they are quick to point out that police made several incorrect assumptions about them. They were not members of the Black Liberation Army, for one thing, and the film not-so-subtly suggests a stray bullet may have killed the police officer. Forbes lets both groups speak for themselves, a kind of deference that more documentaries should follow, as it gives the audience a great opportunity to decide for themselves what to make of everything. Still, there is a both sides-ism that can sometimes be frustrating, and Hold Your Fire unintentionally highlights the limits of letting bigots blather for too long.
On the margins of the hostage situation, Forbes also leaves room for human stories about everyone involved. The most memorable stories come from the store owner, now an old man who talks about his time as a hostage with a mix of resignation and anger. The daughter of another hostage speaks sadly about her mother, who never fully recovered from the trauma she endured. Hold Your Fire seems to understand that this fraught situation had consequences that no one could have anticipated, a point hammered home when a former hostage watches an interview with the hostage taker, and vice versa.
Amid all this pain and violence, it is strange how Shlossberg’s voice – mannered, patient, and quiet – is the only way to make sense of it. Talking to each other is not enough, but it’s all we got.
Photo courtesy of IFC Films
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