General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Across 110th Street

Across 110th Street is a 1972 American crime film directed by Barry Shear, written by Luther Davis from Wally Ferris's novel Across 110th, and released by United Artists. Set in Harlem, it follows three small-time criminals who rob a numbers bank (illegal lottery operation taking bets on numbers) controlled by the Mafia and are hunted by the police, the mob, and the gangsters they robbed.¹ The title refers to 110th Street on the northern edge of Central Park, the dividing line between Harlem and the wealthier, predominantly white neighborhoods of Manhattan.²

Key fact	Detail
Release	United Artists; world premiere at the Loew's Victoria Theater, Harlem, December 18, 1972¹
Credits	Directed by Barry Shear; screenplay by Luther Davis from Wally Ferris's novel Across 110th; produced by Ralph Serpe and Fouad Said¹
Stars	Anthony Quinn as Capt. Mattelli, Yaphet Kotto as Lt. Pope, Anthony Franciosa as Nick D'Salvio³
Plot	Three men steal $300,000 from a Harlem numbers bank, killing two cops, and are hunted by police, the Mafia, and the local mob¹
Music	Score by jazz trombonist J.J. Johnson; title song co-written and performed by Bobby Womack, a Billboard soul-chart hit²
Production	Shot on location in New York City, primarily in Harlem and Little Italy; 102 minutes, rated R⁴^•³
Standing	85% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (20 reviews) and 77% with audiences³

Spoilers

Plot and setting

The film opens with a robbery of an illegal Harlem numbers bank, run by black mobsters but ultimately controlled by Italian ones. Three low-level criminals, two of them disguised as police officers, make off with $300,000, and the holdup turns into a massacre: mobsters on both sides are killed, along with two policemen.²^•¹ The three fugitives, Jim Harris (Paul Benjamin), Joe Logart (Ed Bernard), and Henry J. Jackson (Antonio Fargas), are then marked men, hunted by the police, the Mafia, and the local mobsters they robbed.¹

The investigation pairs two New York City detectives: Captain Frank Mattelli (Anthony Quinn), a corrupt, openly racist veteran Italian-American cop, and Lieutenant William Pope (Yaphet Kotto), a young black officer who is actually in charge of the case. Their friction mirrors the racial divide in the criminal world, where the Italian gangster Nick D'Salvio (Anthony Franciosa) and the Harlem mob leader Doc Johnson (Richard Ward) pursue the stolen money on their own terms.³^•⁵ Critics have noted that the film treats its racial politics more directly than most of its genre peers: the racial anxiety is central to the narrative rather than background, and the criminals themselves are given motives and backstories rather than serving as disposable types.⁵

Production

The film rights to Ferris's novel were contested by United Artists and Columbia Pictures, and United Artists partnered with Film Guarantors, Inc., a company that had previously provided completion bonds rather than produced films; Across 110th Street was its first production.⁴ Anthony Quinn signed on as executive producer and did not intend to act. The role of Mattelli was offered to Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, and John Wayne, all of whom declined, so Quinn cast himself to keep the production moving. For Pope, the producers considered Lou Gossett Jr., Sammy Davis Jr., Sidney Poitier, and Harry Belafonte before casting Kotto.²

Location shooting and consultation. Shear, Quinn, and casting director Marion Dougherty reached out to New York African American organizations, including the Negro Ensemble Company, Afro-American Day, Inc., and the Congress of Racial Equality, to help cast black actors and to hear concerns about the script and its depiction of black characters. Dougherty recalled that many actors approached for auditions were reluctant because the film had a white director.² The film was shot on location in New York City, primarily in Harlem and Little Italy, with some additional scenes at the Warner Bros. Burbank lot after a laboratory accident spoiled part of the New York footage.⁴ The stunt coordinator Eddie Smith, hospitalized during production after a car-crash stunt, was the first African American to receive on-screen credit as a stunt coordinator and later helped found the Black Stuntmen's Association.⁴

Quinn's company held the world premiere in Harlem, at the Loew's Victoria Theater on 125th Street, as a benefit for the Manhood Foundation, a Harlem counseling and job-referral agency for ex-offenders.¹ The film critic J. Hoberman, curator of the Museum of the Moving Image, quotes the critic Stuart Byron's 1973 assessment that the picture was an audacious commercial experiment: the first film with white stars aimed at the black exploitation market.¹

Music

The film's lasting cultural footprint rests largely on its music. The score was composed and conducted by the jazz trombonist J.J. Johnson, and the title song was written and performed by the soul singer Bobby Womack. The song, whose first-person lyrics describe surviving in a Harlem rife with crime, drugs, and violence, spent several weeks on the Billboard chart for best-selling soul music.² Womack recorded it during his early-1970s creative peak; Time later ranked the track among his finest work.⁶ Quentin Tarantino used the song prominently in the opening sequences of Jackie Brown (1997), which brought the film back to wider attention.²

Reception and legacy

Contemporary reviews were largely negative. Reviewers attacked the film's graphic violence; the New York Daily News called it one of "the most violent pictures ever made," and Roger Greenspun of The New York Times wrote that it managed "at once to be unfair to blacks, vicious towards whites and insulting to anyone who feels that race relations might consist of something better than improvised genocide." Several critics, typified by Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times, dismissed it as "little more than a violence freak's special" while still praising Shear's direction as "otherwise finely crafted."⁴ Variety found it "a virtual blood bath" with no glamorous character for audiences to identify with.¹

Later assessments have been more favorable. The film now holds an 85% Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes, with recent critics praising its suspense and its unsparing sense that every character is under someone else's control.³ Jeremy Carr, a Faculty Associate at Arizona State University's Center for Film, Media and Popular Culture, describes it as an exceptional police procedural, an exemplary entry in the Blaxploitation cycle, and a reasonably sophisticated drama about racial identification, violent but not exploitative.⁵ Its use of real locations, street language, and contemporary fashion and music has given it an ethnographic appeal as a record of a specific New York moment.⁵

Kotto's performance helped him win the role of the villain Dr. Kananga in the James Bond film Live and Let Die (1973).² The film has been periodically available on streaming services and was released in a 4K restoration on Blu-ray and UHD in the United Kingdom.⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 1970s films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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