Manhattan's Lower Depths

Strangers in the City. The camera noses its way along the city streets like an alley cat. It sniffs at battered ashcans spilling over with decaying garbage, a cornucopia of filth. It paws dirty shreds of newspapers that flutter along the sooty pavements like bedraggled kites. It blinks up at row on row of crumbling brownstones, their grimy windows staring back emptily at the street like sightless eyes. The sound track tingles with cool jazz, the dry atonal music of the asphalt jungle, and keens a somber threnody on Spanish guitar strings. The cross-cultural music is apt, for this is Spanish Harlem, known in Manhattan as "El Barrio," home to the huddled masses of the postwar wave of Puerto Rican immigration. The ingredients of this melting pot are concrete, corruption, and the vast hurrying indifference of the megalopolis. This is where the new American is made the hard way--out of pain, dirt, disease, violence and death.

Strangers in the City is a brilliantly abrasive film that takes moviegoers where many Manhattanites themselves fear to go, into the rat-infested tenement hovels of the bruisingly poor, the lower depths of the richest city on earth. The film piles melodrama too heavily on its plot, but the harsh-grained honesty of its photography and the improvisational candor of its script make every tabloid cliche about the soulless city bristle with fresh life.

The story revolves around a hapless family that has recently come to New York. The father (Camilo Delgado) is a guitarist who refuses to wash dishes for a living for fear of ruining his musician's fingers. The mother (Rosita de Triana) simmers in sad-eyed frustration. The son (Robert Gentile) tries to do an honest job as a grocery boy, but street gang punks torment and entangle him. The daughter (Greta Margos), a lissome, raven-haired beauty, gets work in a garment-factory loft, but the piggish foreman makes her earn her overtime pay with bodily favors. Her "promotion" is to become a call girl for out-of-town buyers. As the shady manufacturer who employs her, Kenny Delmar is uproariously funny with his seduction pad and patter.

All this leads to events that would be incredibly lurid if they were not enacted at a perfect pitch of passion and despair. Writer-Producer-Director-Photographer Rick Carrier gets a compelling spontaneity that suspends disbelief.

Shot after shot in Strangers defies mental erasure: grey, panoramic views of Manhattan steaming like a witch's cauldron; two boys slugging it out in a hysteria of violence in one of those brick-strewn empty lots that pockmark the city like bomb craters; a woman's clothed and rigid body floating just below the surface in a bathtub, her open eyes transfixed in a death agony. Strangers dishonestly suggests that it is reporting the plight of a typical Puerto Rican family; in fact, few households would witness such a concoction of swirling agonies in a lifetime in Manhattan's uptown slum. But as fiction, Strangers is a gripping shocker.

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