A hostage crisis on the subway
In The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, released in 1974 and directed by Joseph Sargent, Walter Matthau plays Lieutenant Zachary Garber, a New York City transit police officer who finds himself negotiating with hijackers who have seized a subway train and are demanding a million dollars in ransom. The hijackers, led by the coldly polite Mr. Blue, played by Robert Shaw, have given the city one hour to pay, or they will start killing passengers. Garber, a rumpled, dryly funny detective in a raincoat, becomes the voice on the other end of the radio, trading quips and threats with the hijackers while trying to buy time, trace the money and work out who these men really are. Matthau plays him as an ordinary working cop, tired, sceptical and stubbornly competent, and the result is one of the great New York thrillers of the 1970s.
The film, adapted from John Godey’s novel, is famous for its premise, which was startlingly original in 1974: a subway train, Pelham 123, named for its departure point and time, taken hostage underground, where the police cannot simply storm in. Director Joseph Sargent shoots New York with documentary realism, in real subway tunnels, control rooms and city offices, and the film’s tension comes not from explosions but from procedure: counting money, loading it onto a train, trying to keep the hijackers talking. Matthau is the human centre of that procedure. He is not a superhero cop. He forgets things, he argues with his superiors, he makes jokes at inappropriate moments, and he keeps thinking when everyone around him is panicking.
Garber versus Mr. Blue
The heart of the film is the duel between Garber and Mr. Blue, conducted mostly over a crackling radio link. Robert Shaw’s Blue is icy, precise and terrifyingly calm, a former mercenary who treats murder as a business transaction. Matthau’s Garber is his opposite: warm, rambling, sarcastic, a man who cannot resist a wisecrack even when lives are at stake. Their exchanges are the film’s greatest pleasure, because they are also a clash of worldviews. Blue believes the world is run by ruthless men who take what they want. Garber believes the world is run by tired men in offices who muddle through, and that muddling through, done honestly, is enough. Matthau plays Garber’s humour not as comic relief but as a tactic, a way of keeping Blue talking, of getting under his skin, of buying minutes that might save lives.
That tactic is also Matthau’s acting method in miniature. He listens, he pauses, he lets a line land a beat late, and he uses his famous weariness as a weapon. When Garber finally works out the hijackers’ plan, it is not through a brilliant flash of inspiration but through patient observation: a detail about the train’s brakes, a memory about a colleague, a small inconsistency in what Blue has said. Matthau makes that detective work feel real, because he plays Garber as a man who has spent twenty years watching New York and learning how it works. He knows the subway system the way a cab driver knows streets, and that knowledge, not heroics, is what saves the day.
New York in all its noisy glory
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is also a wonderful portrait of 1970s New York, and Matthau is the perfect guide to it. The film is full of bickering officials, sweating engineers, cynical reporters and ordinary passengers, and Garber moves through them all with the same dry patience. He deals with a mayor who is more worried about politics than hostages, with a transit official who cares more about schedules than lives, and with his own colleagues, who range from competent to hopeless. Matthau never plays Garber as above this chaos. He is part of it, complaining about the coffee, about the bureaucracy, about the fact that he was supposed to be off duty, and that ordinariness makes him believable as a hero.
The supporting cast is superb, with Martin Balsam, Hector Elizondo and Earl Hindman as the other hijackers, each given a distinct personality, and Jerry Stiller as a harassed transit supervisor. But the film’s most famous sequence, the race to deliver the ransom money through Manhattan traffic, works because Matthau’s Garber is at the centre of it, watching the clock, watching the money, watching the city. Sargent’s direction is tight and unshowy, and David Shire’s propulsive, jazzy score drives the tension without overwhelming it. The result is a thriller that feels both exciting and plausible, a film in which procedure is drama.
Why Garber endures
Garber endures because he is a hero for grown-ups. He does not save the day by shooting the villain in a final showdown, although there is a confrontation at the end, and it is brilliantly underplayed. He saves the day by doing his job, carefully, under pressure, while making jokes that keep himself and everyone else sane. That is a very Matthau kind of heroism: not glamorous, not violent for its own sake, but intelligent, stubborn and humane. Audiences in 1974, living through a New York of budget crises, crime waves and civic exhaustion, recognised Garber immediately. He was the competent public servant who had not given up, even when the city around him seemed to have done so.
The film has been remade, but the original remains definitive, largely because of Matthau. His Garber is funny without ever breaking the tension, and serious without ever becoming solemn. He shows, once again, that Matthau’s comic timing was not a separate skill from his dramatic acting; it was the same skill, applied to a different situation. A man making a joke while negotiating for hostages is not being funny for the audience’s sake. He is being human under pressure, and Matthau understood that better than almost any actor of his generation.
For Past Tunes readers, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is the film that proves Walter Matthau could anchor a thriller without changing his persona. He did not need to become a tough guy. He was already tough, in the way that a veteran New York cop is tough: by experience, by humour, and by refusing to panic. Watch it for the ingenious plot and the superb ensemble, and stay for Matthau’s Garber, rumpled, wisecracking and utterly reliable, the man on the radio who will not hang up until everyone is safe.