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This Sunday, as part of Film Geeks San Diego’s Neo-Noir festival for 2025, we watched the 1972 film Across 110th Street. Often considered a ‘blaxploitation’ feature, I think the film is more accurately part of the crime sub-genre than that one. While the movie has a large cast of Black actors and the setting is the gritty, grimy conditions of their lives in run-down Harlem of the early 70s, the novel was written by a white author, and the film was produced and directed by a white filmmaker, which I think takes it seriously away from the ‘own voices’ nature of most blaxploitation movies.

I watched this film on the Criterion Channel a few years ago, but it is a different experience watching it on the big screen, even if that screen is the 50-seat micro-theater of San Diego’s Digital Gym.

In the story, three Black men rob a ‘counting house’ where the Italian Mafia counts and acquires the funds from the Black Harlem gangsters that are their subjugated gang. The robbery goes awry with both Italian and Black gangsters being killed along with a pair of New York police patrolmen, sparking an intense hunt for the robbers by the police and the criminal gangs.

Thematically, Across 110th Street is very much about the old being supplanted by the new. Within the police, for purely political posturing, the investigation is given to a young and relatively inexperienced officer, Lieutenant Pope (Yaphet Kotto), solely because Pope is Black, infuriating Captain Matelli (Anthony Quinn), a racist cop but with decades of experience in Harlem. The Mafia Don sends a hotheaded and expendable nephew, Nick D’Salvio (Anthony Franciosa), to identify, find, and make an example of the three robbers. Nick’s interfacing with the local Black criminal organization, run by ‘Doc’ Johnson (Richard Ward), reveals serious friction between the gangs with the implication clear that the Italian Mafia’s days controlling Harlem are rapidly closing. In both cases—the criminals and the police—it is the younger, more vibrant actors that repeatedly succeed in uncovering information leading to the three doomed robbers while the tired and brutal methods of the older generation prove ineffective.

As was typical for films of the 70s, now released from the restrictive Motion Picture Production Code, Across 110th Streetis a violent, cynical affair populated with characters of whom none can truly be called heroes save for the still, in many ways naïve, Lt. Pope.

Directed by veteran television director Barry Shear and utilizing new lightweight cameras, Across 110th Street was filmed on location using location sound instead of the more conventional studio shoots and dubbing of location dialog, giving the film a realism that indicated the future of cinema. While the feature may not fit neatly into the genre of ‘blaxploitation,’ its treatment of its Harlem-based characters indicates a compassion and understanding that is often absent from films of the period. The characters, good and bad, have depth and characteristics beyond the needs of the plot. Even the racist and bigoted Captain Matelli has a compassion even for those for whom he normally harbors only resentment and hatred.

Across 110th Street has now been released in a newly restored 4K Blu-ray from Shout Factory. It was this release we watched, and the film looked fantastic.