Spinell: King of Dirty New York

He had a face (pockmarked, craggy, and often greasy) and a voice (shrill and heavy on the New Yawkese) that you couldn't forget and which he lent to over 60 films and television programs.  He made films all over the country, probably most famously as Gazzo in the Philly-filmed Rocky and Rocky II and sometimes even trying on an accent (as in the Alabama-set Stay Hungry), but it's the gallery of New York sleazebags, cops, mafiosi, cabbies, and psychopaths that Joe Spinell so memorably essayed throughout the '70s and '80s that are his greatest legacy.  The man was prolific in his prime--aside from their Academy Award competition, Taxi Driver and Rocky don't share much...except for Joe Spinell.  All of this support work was leading to his pièce de résistance, Frank Zito, the title character in William Lustig's infamous Maniac, a labor of love co-written by Spinell, filmed on the pre-gentrified streets of Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan, and targeted (upon its release) as an object of everything wrong with cinema and current societal mores by media figures such as Siskel and Ebert.  (Of course, this now seems rather hyperbolic and humorous, especially when one views all of the related, vintage news reports collated on the Maniac special edition Blu-ray and DVD.)

But personal issues, health problems, and addiction slowed him down and eventually killed him at 52, when he tragically bled to death alone in his Sunnyside apartment due to his hemophilia.

This video is a short tribute to this fine character actor and uniquely New York personality.  It contains only scenes from his NYC movies and opens with part of Patrolman DiSimone's (Spinell) brilliant diatribe at the start of Cruising, which taken either within or outside of the film, functions as a fascinating statement on the ugly, decaying New York of the time (a place which many New Yorkers bemoaned then, and which, conversely, many now mourn the loss of). There are a few more relevant clips I plan to add when I have access to them on DVD.

Cruising's Original Color

Some captures from a DVD-R I made several years ago, pre-DVD release, of a cable broadcast of Cruising.  These stills more closely reflect the original theatrical look of the film before it was re-colored / re-tinted by director William Friedkin for the film's DVD release in 2007.  I earlier posted about this here.

Please forgive the sub-DVD quality of these clips--they come from a non-HD broadcast--but they are better than VHS, at least, and in the correct aspect ratio.  If you see one of the '90s-era 35mm prints struck by Warner Bros. you'll get a very good sense of how much the film was altered for its DVD release, with the color palette being the most striking difference, in addition to some new transition and slow-mo effects (I am not fond of those alterations, either); the club scenes, in particular, are stripped of much their original color in favor of a very pervasive blue hue, which covers everything.

I do hope that if Cruising is released on Blu-ray, Friedkin follows a similar course that he did with the re-released French Connection Blu-ray, wherein he and d.p. Owen Roizman restored the look of the original theatrical prints to Blu-ray.  Roizman was none too thrilled with the first French Connection Blu-ray, supervised by Friedkin, and which had a radically different color scheme.  I wonder how Cruising d.p. James A. Contner feels about the DVD of the film, which has undergone a similar transformation and which I don't think he had any part in.  The disclaimer pictured below was removed by Friedkin in the DVD version of Cruising.