Across 110th Street

In New York, the demarcation line between squalor and style, war and peace, was always 110th Street. Below the line was Central Park, above it was Harlem and mayhem. Even if that isn't the case today, in this movie crooked cop Anthony Quinn has a lot of hardware to deal with Harlem's racketeers. Quinn wanted Sidney Poitier, Sammy Davis Jr and Harry Belafonte as his co-stars; he got Yaphet Kotto as his police partner, and Antonio Fargas, Ed Bernard and Paul Benjamin as bank robbers when the Black Panthers vetoed the others because they lacked street cred. Taking due account of The French Connection, director Barry Shear's picture tries to be hard-edged and aim for realism, but doesn't always succeed. Great title track, though, that Quentin Tarantino was to use during the credit sequence of Jackie Brown.