Fun City Cinema

Starred review from October 1, 2021

Film critic and historian Bailey spent three years researching and writing this visual history of films set and produced in New York City, and grateful readers will agree that this was time well spent. A perceptive guide and critic, Bailey anchors the book around a "representative" film of each decade from the 1920s to the 2010s--The Jazz Singer (1927), King Kong (1933), The Naked City (1948), Sweet Smell of Success (1957), MidnightCowboy (1969), Taxi Driver (1976), Wall Street (1987), Kids (1995), 25th Hour (2002), and Frances Ha (2012)--and he effectively demonstrates how these works have both documented and shaped public perception of life in the Big Apple. He interviews key personnel involved in the creation of many of the films, to set them in their historical, cultural, and political contexts. Readers will appreciate the book's many production photographs and reproductions of movie posters. Bailey covers well-known films as well as less-recognized New York pictures that were equally important. Readers will find themselves scurrying to visit (or revisit) these films. VERDICT A superb study of films set in and representative of the Big Apple. Anyone interested in the history of American film will find much to savor here.--Bill Baars, formerly at Lake Oswego P.L., OR

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 11, 2021
Film critic and historian Bailey (It’s Okay with Me) takes an exhilarating look at the history of New York City through films spanning the past 100 years that have become “valuable reminder of what once was.” Combining his impressive knowledge of cinema with fascinating historical context of the cultural moments that gave rise to each film, Bailey illuminates how movies functioned as an “act of preservation” and “a conversation of connections and reflections between the fictional lives in their foregrounds and the real lives happening behind them.” In the 1920s, as filmmakers relocated from Hollywood to the Big Apple, the lurid grit of the city became the ultimate backlot for “quick, dirty” 1940s film noirs, such as 1948’s The Naked City, which was filmed in 107 locations over one summer; 1950s riffs on the brutal postwar business world (Sweet Smell of Success); 1960s and ’70s views of the city’s urban decay (as an antidote to the “bloated, lumbering musical extravaganzas of mainstream studios” in the ’50s) in such seminal films as Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Taxi Driver (1976); and, later, trips beneath the “shiny, cleaned-up surface of the city” that explore the excesses of wealth, including the 2019 drama Uncut Gems. Cinephiles will relish every stop of this entertaining tour of the big city.