Movies Can Take New Yorkers Back to the ’70s. But Why Go There?

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In “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three,” a film classic about a New York subway hijacking and hostage-taking — the 1974 version, not the pallid 2009 remake — an exasperated transit official only wants to get his train back. He couldn’t care less about the fate of the captive riders. “What the hell did they expect for their lousy 35 cents — to live forever?” he grumbles.

Given the decay that has lately seeped into the bones of the city’s mass-transit network, some New Yorkers understandably wonder if that sort of bureaucratic indifference is more than a screenwriter’s throwaway line. One week ago, a southbound A train derailed and filled with smoke, causing passengers to fear that they could indeed die on the tracks.

The agony of the subways also has more than a few New Yorkers worrying that they’ve begun an inexorable descent, maybe even back to the 1970s, when the city endured what could reasonably be described as a near-death experience. It might be useful, then, for everyone to take a deep breath and think about how far New York has come from those bad old days.

Evidence of that progress can be found in a three-week series that begins on Wednesday at the Film Forum on Houston Street and offers several dozen movies about New York that were made in the ’70s and consistently showed a city with a fading pulse. The series’ title borrows a 1975 headline in The Daily News that lodged forever in the civic consciousness. Often imitated, it summed up the president’s rejection of federal help for New York during its ruinous fiscal crisis: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” (The Times’s headline on that story was “Ford, Castigating City, Asserts He’d Veto Fund Guarantee; Offers Bankruptcy Bill.” Amazingly, it is never quoted.)

As the film selections suggest, New York did seem beyond redemption then. In addition to “Pelham One Two Three,” they include “The French Connection,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Taxi Driver,” “Mean Streets,” “Serpico,” “The Hospital,” “The Panic in Needle Park,” “The Warriors” and “Death Wish.” One way or another, they depict a city spinning toward a hell. That’s because, in many respects, it was.

The ’70s was the decade of the serial killer Son of Sam and of a nightmarish 1977 power blackout that led to widespread looting and vandalism. They were the “Bronx is burning” years. The municipal treasury was broke. City workers — garbage collectors, hospital doctors, police officers — went on strike, heedless that it made them lawbreakers. Systemic police corruption abounded: Think “Serpico.” Crime soared, with 62 percent more murders (1,814 in 1980) than there had been at the decade’s start (1,117 in 1970). Some Fortune 500 companies relocated to other parts of the country. Broadway theaters moved up the evening curtain by an hour so that playgoers could get out of Times Square before the muggers took over.

Bruce Goldstein, the Film Forum’s director of repertory programming, recalled being in London around the time of “Death Wish” (1974), which is about a New York where street punks reigned. He said a woman asked him, “Is it true that whenever you walk on the streets, you get stabbed?”

“No,” Mr. Goldstein said he replied sardonically, “only every other week.”

Plainly, New York today is light-years from that era — with a Bronx that is revived, a population that has since grown by more than 20 percent, a municipal balance sheet that is reasonably sound and a murder toll that keeps falling (335 in 2016 and on a path to even fewer this year).

The often criticized police are better behaved, despite dark episodes like the 2014 death of Eric Garner after being put in a chokehold on Staten Island. William Friedkin, the Oscar-winning director of “The French Connection” (1971), observed that the police in that film, based on a true story, took for granted that they could do what they wished with criminal suspects.

“If they were to operate like that today,” Mr. Friedkin said by phone from Los Angeles, “they’d be busted or kicked off the force.”

In short, despite the daily subway ordeal these days, there is no point succumbing to despair. Evidence that the city is greatly improved comes from a recent movie, “A Most Violent Year,” released in 2014. It is set in 1981 New York. To capture a stricken landscape, the filmmakers could not find all that they wanted in the city. They went instead to Detroit.