Count Five: Suzanne Vega's Top New York Films

Posted on Jun 13th 2007 5:00PM by Steve Baltin
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As depicted by movie directors from Billy Wilder to Woody Allen to Martin Scorsese, the city of New York is often as much the star of the film as any actor. And seeing as how proud New Yorker Suzanne Vega celebrates the city in song on the superb 'Beauty and Crime,' her first album in six years, we asked Vega -- a huge devotee of the cinema who says, "With this album, I was sort of imagining New York City as a kind of hard-boiled film star" -- for her top five New York films.

After much discussion, and some painful omissions (personally, we couldn't have left off 'Do The Right Thing,' 'Saturday Night Fever' or Allen's 'Manhattan), here's her list, starting with a 1961 Audrey Hepburn classic.

1. 'Breakfast at Tiffany's': The king of all New York movies. That has to be first.

2. 'Taxi Driver': That's got to be one of the quintessential New York films. It's got Travis Bickle, and it's got the immortal line, "Are you talking to me?" You still see the prototype of Bickle walking around New York. It's this apocalyptic vision of New York at its worst, and because of that it's cathartic.

3. 'Super Fly': I knew the guy who played Fat Freddy. He was an actor called Charles McGregor. His stepchildren went to my school, so I remember that being a big part of my '70s growing up.

4. 'Serpico': That was also kind of a very '70s movie. I remember being, as a kid, just fascinated by that movie, thinking of this world of the cops and the corruption and then the one good cop who was uncorrupted, but then he had to face his fellow cops. But there's something about the style of it that kind of stuck with me from the '70s.

5. 'The French Connection' and 'The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three': 'The French Connection' because of Gene Hackman -- first of all, Gene Hackman's character is just nuts, and [there's] the famous car chase. And 'The Taking of Pelham One Two Three' has the subway chase, so let's put 'The French Connection' and 'The Taking of Pelham One Two Three' as sort of linked.