Films Starring the Subway: The New Yorker "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three" came out in 1974, when New York was soon to risk bankruptcy and the homicide count was over four times that of 2012. Yet, for all the differences between then and now, the city in the film is delightfully recognizable. The film stars Walter Matthau and tells of a group of criminals who hijack a subway car, holding its passengers ransom for a million dollars. But the crime plot is essentially a way to revel in the trains, and the train system itself is a microcosm of New York's human and verbal comedy. This becomes apparent at the outset, as the hostages, even with machine guns at their noses, remain subway riders to the core - a woman raises her hand and pleads that she has an important appointment to make, slumping back in her seat and crying "Aw, shit!" when her request to be let off is denied. The deaths that occur feel less dramatic than the realization of a final commuter nightmare: that of hurtling along in a driverless train. It's perfect that when the train is stopped it's not by a hero jumping on board and taking control but, rather, due to a technical detail of the subway tracks. Compiling a list of essential subway-related film might seem an easy enough task for cinephiles, but how to define the contents? Are aesthetics a condition, or can good entries mingle with ones that are entertainingly bad? That's right, "Warriors," I'm talking about you. Must trains be integral to the story, or are a few memorable scenes sufficient? And what about genre - should there be documentaries, and if so, how about music videos, ads, found footage shot on cell phones? That moment in "Seinfeld" where Kramer tries to battle multiple resisting passengers for a seat - surely that must be included. Recently, the curators at Cinebeasts devised an answer to this quandary of selection: you lead with your shoulder, and jam it all in. "The Subway Series" began with a screening of "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three." It continued with a megamix of diverse footage largely lifted from the Web, followed by two documentaries about graffiti. The last installment, at Anthology Film Archives, featured experimental works, a portrait of the subway guru Paul Kronenberg, and highlights from an open call for short films. The shorts - which included Stan Brakhage's "The Wonder Ring" (1955), and Frank Kuenstler's "El Atlantis" (1973) - were wonderfully immediate reminders of the beauty the subway can afford, especially as it travels above ground: the street views, winding lines of track, ruin-worthy station structures, and plays of reflection and shadow. Being a helpless armchair theorizer of train life and someone who enjoys staring out the window as the Q crosses the Manhattan Bridge, I was going to be pleased with this series. The megamix idea in particular seemed foolproof. Running for ninety minutes, here was almost everything about the subway you could hope to see: historic footage, amateur short films, crazy incident and exceptional buskers, train surfing, mature-age ladies getting down very slowly before a funk band, a Dr. Zizmore ad, the intro to Michael Jackson's "Bad," a leashed ginger cat looking on, un-phased, at break-dancers. If you'd ever wondered whether it's you or if some subway steps are uneven, there was a video of people tripping like clockwork over an offending stair in Sunset Park. No vision of subway experience is complete without the individuals who drive the trains, clean them, and attend to construction and track work. To be sure, line closures and phantom out-of-service trains are a source of undeniable agony for many. But other related MTA occurrences - such as being at a station at a god-awful hour of night and encountering a surprising waterland platform, or workers emerging en masse from tunnels, joking and lugging equipment onto the train - can offer a touch of the everyday sublime. In Cinebeasts" mix, noble cleaning crews pushed mops between sleeping feet and took on recalcitrant gum with their special staffs. It makes sense that filmmakers would continually be drawn to the subway. To involve public transit in a movie is to access a whole world of detailed and widely shared experience, and one that has the benefit of being self-enclosed, of acting as a naturally occurring frame. For such reasons, Michel Gondry's recent "The We and the I," which takes place on an MTA bus, is practically a subway film. Reportedly, much of the forthcoming "Stand Clear of the Closing Doors" occurs underground. The inherent narrative potential in trains is clear enough: in the subways you have imprisonment and motion together. Diverse characters can mix, or follow one another between cars, or suddenly separate, as happens in Vincente Minnelli's "The Clock," from 1945. A film, incidentally, in which trains take part in a wedding. Through the windows of a subway car, life already looks a bit like an unfurling movie. That means anything shot in the subway feels somehow extra filmic. For the film writer or director, the subway also just arrives with useful metaphoric associations, invoking physiology (guts, arteries!), and underworlds both psychic and spiritual. These comparisons are inviting despite being so well worn; it's understood that the reality always outdoes them. Are the trains a proxy for the - by rights chaotic, despite-all-odds very functional - city, or do they enable a sort of suspension? On board, people continue their normal existences, busying themselves with every kind of task and exchange. At the same time, they observe, overhear, and wonder about their fellow-residents with rare leisure and proximity. More than any other place, this is where New Yorkers want to tell each other what to do - as in, get away from those doors - and it is where most see the wisdom of biting their tongues. Watch "A City Symphony Underground" by Catherine Stratton. Above: City Hall subway station, New York. Photograph courtesy of Library of Congress.