Born to Win (1971).
Movie-lovers!
Welcome back to The Deuce Notebook, a collaboration between MUBI Notebook and The Deuce Film Series, our monthly event at Nitehawk Williamsburg that excavates the facts and fantasies of cinema's most infamous block in the world: 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. For each screening, my co-hosts and I pick a flick that we think embodies the era of late-night moviegoing and present the theater at which it premiered.
Czech New Wave director Ivan Passer—who co-wrote, with Miloš Forman, the Oscar-nominated "Loves of a Blonde" (1965) and "The Firemen’s Ball" (1967)—released his first American film, "Born to Win," in 1971. Starring George Segal and Karen Black, this portrait of addiction went relatively unnoticed for the past 50 years until now: Fun City Editions has recently restored the film and released a gorgeous new Blu-ray. Below, we explore Duffy Square and a few of the locations that can be seen in the movie… Enjoy!
—The Deuce Jockeys
George Segal in the prologue of Born to Win. Segal was on a roll, starring in Loving, The Owl and the Pussycat, and Where's Poppa?—all released in 1970.
“I’d say I’m a charmer, that I charm my hustles," sneers George Segal's “JJ” (Jerome), slyly glancing off-camera. "I treat people the way most people don’t treat ’em and they give me a lot of respect—no matter if I have my hand in their pocket." Zoom into Times Square, aglow with the red and white neon blaze of its unmistakable Coca-Cola sign... JJ skitters around the Deuce, blithe and confident, as the opening credits of Ivan Passer's Born to Win splay across the screen. He meets his buddy Billy Dynamite (Jay Fletcher) at Playland arcade, and, as the music fades, the two saunter into a somewhat upscale restaurant and flirtatiously convince the doddering hostess to turn over the safe. It spills off its dolly onto the sidewalk, and they flee.
JJ's sparkling magnetism quickly nods off; he and Billy slump catatonic on the IRT. JJ exits the train and wanders down a side street, checking the doors of parked cars and slipping into the first one he can open. It belongs to Parm (Karen Black), who, approaching the driver's window, coquettishly asks, "Can I have a lift?" "Where you going?" inquires JJ. "Home," Parm smirks. "Where's home?”... JJ charms his way first into a ride to her place, then right into her pants. At Parm’s apartment, JJ reveals that he has an estranged wife, two children he barely knows, a tattoo that says “Born to Win,” and a drug habit ("Vitamin B52"). Parm's hooked—she’s turned on by his candor and acerbic wit. It's an endearing scene; their chemistry is puckish and sweet. JJ pulls the cover up over their heads and snuggles up with his newest conquest.
Filmed by Richard Kratina (Love Story) and Jack Priestly (Where's Poppa?), Born to Win portrays a wintry, bleak New York City—a merciless and unforgiving place for an amateur swindler.
Immediately, Passer cuts to JJ shivering on a park bench; his expression is one of terror—he needs a fix. The wide, aerial shot portrays him stranded within the sprawling center of a massive metropolis. He's waiting for his dealer Vivian (Héctor Elizondo), who proposes a two-bit job in exchange for some smack. JJ is hardly a winner: he’s middle-aged and addicted to horse, and his junkie spouse (Paula Prentiss) solicits for Vivian; he runs dope for dealers, informs for jerk-off cops, and grifts lowlifes with Billy. JJ roams the city—hands stuffed into his pockets and shoulders hunched—in and out of public places: clothing stores and hotels, locker rooms and apartment complexes, diners with no turnover, dark booths in the back of a bar where no one asks his name.
Ivan Passer filmed Born to Win in 1971, just two years after President Nixon reported to Congress on the tyranny of the burgeoning heroin crisis, the result of war-era grief and the economic disparities seizing urban centers. "New York City alone has records of some 40,000 heroin addicts, and the number rises between 7,000 and 9,000 a year," Nixon wrote on July 14, 1969. "These official statistics are only the tip of an iceberg whose dimensions we can only surmise." Epidemic drug abuse, crime, and poverty would force a political upheaval that would render New York City almost indistinguishable from its former self—a center for middle-class comfort. Inflation, government corruption, and "white flight" to the suburbs led to New York City’s dissolution into bankruptcy until three decades later, when Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg reshaped it into a haven for Wall Street yuppies and wealthy tourists.
JJ has no real home; rather, he inhabits Duffy Square—the northern tip of Times Square, the heart of Manhattan, the “Crossroads of the World.” The irony is that JJ is all alone in what might be the most densely populated intersection on the planet. He’s adrift amongst the history surrounding him—monuments to a Christian war hero and a beloved entertainer; palaces built by immigrants in which New Yorkers congregate to feast and frolic. Placing JJ in Midtown in 1971 was a prescient choice: nowhere better represented the vast degree to which all of American society would soon shift. The transformation of that area—from the glittering center of prosperity and culture, to a battleground of vice and crime, to a towering Babylon of corporate globalism—undeniably reflects the evolution of modern Western civilization. Thus, Passer creates a profound image of addiction. Rather than uptown at 72nd Street (The Panic in Needle Park [1971]), further north in Harlem (Super Fly [1972]), or downtown in the Lower East Side (Warhol's Trash [1970]), JJ is solitary in the center of Times Square, the most vital commercial district of the twentieth century. His impotence is all the more pathetic.
Forthwith, a brief tour of Duffy Square and the innovators, hustlers, charmers, and entrepreneurs who shaped JJ's immediate locale.
Duffy Square: Looking north from Times Tower in 1914.
DUFFY SQUARE
The term “Times Square” is a deceptive one: it describes a city center that isn’t a “square” at all, but rather a bow tie of two triangular traffic islands created by the intersection of Broadway and 45th Street, with the southern edge of the bow along 42nd Street and its northern boundary along 47th. In 1904, The New York Times built its headquarters, the Times Tower, at “1 Times Square” on 42nd Street between Broadway and 7th Avenue. At 363 feet, it was the second-tallest structure in the city after the Singer Building in the Financial District. On April 8, 1904, Mayor George McClellan officially baptized the surrounding neighborhood after its newest tenant.
Originally referred to as Longacre Square (since the 1870s), like the region in London known for its horse and carriage trade, the district then included Brewster & Co.’s Carriage Works (at 47th Street), Studebaker Factory (at 48th Street), and William K. Vanderbilt’s American Horse Exchange (at 50th Street, now the Winter Garden Theatre)—purveyors that supplied the city with the means to transport its people and goods. Longacre was the hub of the Tenderloin (or “Satan’s Circus”), extending from 37th to 47th Streets, 5th to 8th Avenues—which, by 1901, contained hundreds of brothels and saloons.
From The New York Times on July 10, 1904—just three months after the area was rebranded.
Visionary producer and theater owner Oscar Hammerstein I opened the Olympia, a glorious complex consisting of a theater, a roof garden, and music and concert halls, on the east side of Broadway between 44th and 45th Streets, on November 25, 1895. The Olympia lasted only three years (Hammerstein was forced to sell it in parcels to settle debts from its construction) but was the catalyst for other magnates to open their businesses along this swelling stretch of Broadway. Charles Rector debuted his eponymous “lobster palace” in 1899, a lavish haute cuisine restaurant directly across the street from the Olympia; in 1904, William Waldorf Astor premiered his Hotel Astor and its 500 rooms to the tune of $7 million, or $219 million today. The sector was swiftly becoming the “Entertainment Capital of the World”: the Olympia was the first Broadway theater between 42nd and 46th Streets, west of 6th Avenue; by 1910, those same blocks saw fourteen more.
From George W. and Walter S. Bromley's Atlas of the Borough of Manhattan City of New York, 1920.
On May 2, 1937, Charles Keck's bronze statue of Father Francis Patrick Duffy, standing before a granite Celtic cross, was unveiled in the middle of the esplanade between 46th and 47th Streets. The monument replaced Leo Lentelli's eight-ton, 50-foot tall behemoth Purity (Defeat of Slander), which stood for the previous 28 years. Canadian-born Duffy was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of New York in 1896, taught Philosophical Psychology at St. Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers, and edited the New York Review, the country's most progressive publication of Catholic theology. A chaplain in the National Guard's 69th New York Infantry Regiment (“The Fighting 69th”), Duffy served in the Spanish-American War and on the Western Front in France during World War I. He became the most highly decorated cleric in the history of the United States Army. After the war, Father Duffy continued his career as a clergyman: first as rector, then pastor of Holy Cross Church (at 329 West 42nd Street) from 1921 until his death on June 26, 1932.
Lee Friedlander's Father Duffy. Times Square, New York, New York, from his series The American Monument, 1974.
Mayor Fiorello La Guardia dedicated the plaza to the reverend on March 29, 1939, signing its new appellation “Duffy Square” into local law. Three months later, at noon on June 13, "illustrated song" extraordinaire Eddie Cantor ceremoniously swapped out the lamp post signage on 46th Street to confirm its updated moniker. Immediately after that, workmen began replacing all the street signs in Times Square with new ones: from 42nd to 47th Streets, 7th Avenue lost its identity to Broadway.
George M. Cohan statue, 2011.
About 100 steps south of the Father Duffy figure, the effigy of George M. Cohan gazes down on 46th Street. Cohan, known in the nineteen-teens as "the man who owned Broadway," had an astonishing career in entertainment, beginning in his infancy in 1878 (with his parents and sister, as "The Four Cohans"). Dominating vaudeville, American musical theater, playwriting, song composing, and film acting, Cohan's achievements can't be overstated. Cohan was a founding member of ASCAP, publishing over 300 songs (like "You're a Grand Old Flag" and "The Yankee Doodle Boy") and writing entirely or contributing to more than 50 shows.
"America's Song-and-Dance Man" died of cancer on November 5, 1942. An estimated 10,000 people attended his funeral at St. Patrick's Cathedral; pallbearers included Eugene O'Neill, Walter Huston, and Irving Berlin. Brooks Atkinson eulogized, 10 days later in the Times, that "a lovable period of life in America had come to a close … Although ‘Over There’ has the strangest and most unlikely tune, it is one of the songs almost any American can sing on the spur of the moment. It is a perfect expression of a popular emotion. Out of affection and understanding, Mr. Cohan gave something of priceless value to his country."
Seventeen years after Cohan's death, lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II paid $100,000 to erect a permanent tribute to his friend. The memorial remains the only edifice of an actor anywhere along the Great White Way. Etched into the monument's base are the titles of seven of Cohan's most enduring songs, including "Give My Regards to Broadway," the tune that another crowd of 10,000 revelers sang when the sculpture was revealed on September 11, 1959, just after midnight.
Born to Win (1971).
THE PALACE THEATRE
Behind JJ, we see the Palace Theatre at 1564 Broadway on the northeast corner of Duffy Square, its marquee emblazoned with the word “Applause.” Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s update of All About Eve starred Lauren Bacall as Margo Channing—her first Broadway musical and her first Tony win. Likely not something JJ would have even noticed, let alone attended (especially at $5-12 per ticket, or $36-$88 in today’s money), Applause opened on March 30, 1970, near the halfway point of the Palace’s sensational 109-year history.
“The Palace Theatre of New York,” as it was called in its debut program, opened its doors Monday, March 24, 1913. Despite their overall negative reviews of the venue’s initial talent roster, critics were unanimous in their praise of the edifice itself. Built by Kirchoff & Rose of Milwaukee for impresario Martin Beck, the Palace was, according to The New York Tribune, “not only the latest but also the most luxurious music hall” in the Big Apple. Although it suffered a lackluster opening season with an “outrageous $2.00 top,” according to Variety ($58 in 2022, or a third of the cost of the cheapest seat at a matinee of Hamilton), the Palace’s first two decades dazzled with a glittering array of A-list performers like Ethel Barrymore, Fanny Brice, Harry Houdini…even French mega-star Sarah Bernhardt, whose first-ever turn at voix de ville in May of 1913 ignited the “Valhalla of Vaudeville” and instantly made it the world’s hottest venue of the day.
The New York Times reported, "The proscenium arch, forty-four feet across the stage, is decorated with a laurel wreath column in bronze, with a plastic motive decorated in old ivory. The dome and ceiling are brightly decorated, and there is a chandelier fourteen feet across."
“Palace Theatre Changes Policy—Films to Be Added to Stage Show July 16—Last of Straight Vaudeville Houses to Pass,” announced The New York Times on July 9, 1932. The first film projected at the Palace was Frank Buck’s pre-code jungle adventure Bring ’Em Back Alive (four stars in the Daily News). The combination of “two-a-day” film and live-variety presentations cost “$1 top for the evening performances and 35 and 50 cents for the morning and afternoon showings,” with “midnight performances daily, at which only the picture will be shown.” Eliminating the costly live/film combo just three years later, the Palace screened films almost exclusively for the next fourteen years under RKO Pictures. Orson Welles held the world premiere of Citizen Kane at the Palace on May 1, 1941.
After an ill-fated, eight-month-long return to its vaudeville roots—crowned by Judy Garland's massively publicized show, cut short due to laryngitis and "nervous exhaustion”— the RKO Palace reverted to a straight picture house on August 13, 1957, beginning with Man of a Thousand Faces, with James Cagney portraying Lon Chaney. It was all celluloid for the next eight years, except for an acclaimed three-month residency by Harry Belafonte starting in December 1959. By 1965, the Palace was no longer profitable as a movie theater, so RKO sold the building to the Nederlander Group for $1.2 million (now, $10.9 mill), shuttering after a final run of Gordon Douglas’s Harlow.
Fosse rented the Palace's stage in 1979 to film the exceptionally fabulous opening cattle-call sequence of All That Jazz.
Having fallen into disrepair, the Palace needed its first significant face-lift. Nederlander hired scene designer Ralph Alswang, who renovated the building to its “original crimson and gold. Crystal chandeliers were removed from storage and rehung … stage boxes that had been concealed for decades by false fronts were restored, and the lobby was refurbished and embellished with portraits of Palace greats, loaned by the Museum of the City of New York,” according to Louis Botto in his indispensable history of Broadway, At This Theatre. On January 29, 1966, the venue opened its first production as a legit Broadway house: Sweet Charity with Gwen Verdon, based on Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria and featuring choreography by Verdon’s then-husband Bob Fosse.
Squeaky clean and boasting nearly 1,800 seats, the enormous Palace was primed for Broadway’s splashiest spectacles. Joel Grey originated the role of George Cohan in George M. (the real-life Cohan, although forever standing outside of the Palace in bronze, never did grace its stage). Diana Ross, Josephine Baker, and Shirley MacLaine had extended engagements in the ’70s. Ms. Bacall returned, eleven years after Applause, to headline in another film-to-musical adaptation, Woman of the Year. And George Hearn starred in Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein’s version of Jean Poiret’s drag comedy La Cage aux Folles, snatching Hearn his first Tony Award for belting out “I Am What I Am.”
La Cage would have continued beyond its four years and 1,761 performances, but it was time for the Palace to undergo its next restoration, and producer Allan Carr chose not to underwrite the $300k ($750k today) it would have cost to transfer the show to the Mark Hellinger Theatre.
The auditorium of the Palace, given landmark status by the City Landmarks Preservation Commission in the summer of 1987, was completely spared when, a year later, the “Palace Theater Building”—eleven stories of original office space facing Broadway, just west of the theater and above its entryway—was demolished to make way for a 43-floor hotel. Outfitted with seismographic monitors, the venue was “neither penetrated nor invaded in any way” during the construction. In fact, the Embassy Suites Hotel was built atop a platform above the theater’s roof, avoiding the structure entirely. The $150 million hotel project earmarked $1.5 million for the theater restoration (a third of what was eventually spent), and on April 1, 1991, the Palace debuted anew with Comden and Green’s The Will Rogers Follies, unveiling the vast cleanup of its interior.
"Interior Finishes—Changes Over Time." In 1991, a new system of flies and tackle, a 190-ton air conditioner, updated electrical installations, a refurbishing of the oldest surviving box office in Times Square, and, "above all else, gold—gold on every wreath, festoon, swag, putto, lyre, shell, guilloche, acanthus leaf, and oak branch. And there are a lot of them," sneered The New York Times.
The Embassy Suites was among several hotels built in the immediate Times Square area in a period beginning in 1985. That year, the Marriott Marquis (on the west side of Broadway, twixt 45th and 46th) “rapidly became the most hated building in Times Square, indeed, one of the most hated buildings in New York,” according to James Traub in The Devil’s Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square. Designed by architect Jon Portman, who seemed to loathe the area and everything it had become (“people are still hung up on the goddamn corny image of what’s in Times Square… there’s not one good thing about it”), the hotel’s design was meant to “keep the street at bay” with a lobby on the eighth floor.
The Marquis, which took 13 years of bitter wrangling to finally open on September 2, 1985, ended up—in one fell swoop, on March 23, 1982—obliterating the original Helen Hayes (built in 1911), the Morosco (1917), the Astor (1906) and the Victoria (formerly the Gaiety, 1909). As Traub puts it, “The fight over the Marriott Marquis implied a choice between a dreadful building that quickened the pulse of Times Square while laying siege to its traditions.”
A shot in Born to Win, looking south from Duffy Square, in which the distant marquees of the ill-fated Astor and Victoria can be seen. On March 23, 1982, those two venues were razed to build the Marriott Marquis.
After The Will Rogers Follies run, the Palace was chosen to host Broadway’s first “Disney Theatrical Production”: a stage version of Beauty and the Beast, the hitherto most expensive show in history, with a budget of $12 million—or almost twice that in 2022 (it costs a lot to magically conjure dancing spoons and singing teapots). The show mounted on April 18, 1994, while Disney was restoring the New Amsterdam on the southwest corner of 7th Ave and the Deuce; the company just signed a 99-year lease of the property.
While most New Yorkers think of the “The House Beautiful” takeover as the real estate coup d'état that permanently changed Times Square, it could be argued that the Beauty and the Beast run at the Palace was the first nail hammered into the coffin of the district’s golden age and that of the “legitimate” American musical. Kicking off the last decade of the twentieth century with a splashy Disney blockbuster ensured the Palace’s prominence and a level of commercial viability comparable to that of its first two decades: Liza Minnelli, taking a cue from mom, stormed the stage in 1999 with an homage to her father Vincente in Minnelli on Minnelli, and returned nine years later for a tribute to her godmother Kaye Thompson in Liza’s at the Palace; Disney dropped in Aida, penned by Elton John and Tim Rice, in 2000; revivals of West Side Story, An American in Paris, and Sunset Boulevard jump-started the Palace’s 21st-century charades.
From The New York Times, May 28, 2022.
The entire fourteen-million-pound Palace Theatre was recently lifted 30 feet, a project completed on April 5 of this year. Rising approximately six inches a day over eight weeks, the effort was part of the $2.5 billion atrocity known as “TSX Broadway.” A “mixed-use” renewal of the Embassy Suites Tower, TSX Broadway will create 40,000 square feet of new retail space underneath the Palace, an outdoor stage called I.C.O.N. that will hover over Duffy Square, and an LED billboard stretching almost the entire height of the building—about 550 feet from the base to the roof. The development's website calls it “An Ecosystem of Unique Destinations,” which, for a mere $15,000, will proffer a New Year’s Eve suite providing views from the corner that real estate developer David Levinson refers to as “the most valuable in North America.”
"I love this life," says Billy to JJ. "Love it. 'Cause when we get up in the morning, we know exactly what we're gonna do next—hustle for another bag. I wouldn't give it up for nothing. 'Cause we got a purpose in life."
FORUM 47th STREET
JJ was more likely to have visited the Forum 47th Street, located across the square from the Palace at 1567 Broadway. A single feature of Sudden Terror for $1.50 could have afforded him a few hours to hole up in a warm, dark corner of the balcony. The site’s original “Temple of Thespis,” the 1,100-seat Central Theatre, opened on September 9, 1918. The fifteenth NYC playhouse built by the Shubert Brothers, the Central was designed by their primary architect Herbert J. Krapp (who also built the Ed Sullivan Theatre, Hotel Edison, and Sardi’s Building, et al.). According to The New York Herald, the theater’s rococo decor “followed a style prevailing under Louis XVI.” Its curtain first rose on Alice Brady in a play by Owen Davis called Forever After, and the Shuberts immediately kicked off a Sunday concert series, the premiere of which starred Al Jolson.
A notice in The New York Sun on September 1, 1918 announcing the opening of the Central Theatre...alongside the Palace's lineup for that week.
The Central incorporated movies into its roster almost immediately. The first film listing dates back to June 28, 1919, when Open Your Eyes, a movie made by the “State Health Film Company” under the supervision of the U.S. Public Health Service, began running continuously from 1 to 11 p.m. daily for four smash weeks. The film “intended to show parents the necessity of acquainting children with various facts concerning life” (under 16 not admitted). Universal Pictures took over the Central for a year on September 4, 1921, as an exclusive showplace for its photoplays; the theater bounced back and forth from legit use to films over the next two decades.
From The New York Herald, July 6, 1919.
Billy Minsky (“the workingman’s Ziegfeld”) leased the hall beginning August 14, 1931, to expand his growing burlesque empire. His previous six months producing fleshy-fantasies at the Republic Theatre on 42nd Street (later, the Victory—the first on the Deuce to go all XXX) raked in $400,000 ($7.5 million in 2022!). James Traub makes it clear: “The depression had burst, and burst forever, the glittering bubble blown by Ziegfeld and Hammerstein and George Rector and the Castles…the arrival of burlesque on 42nd Street was as shocking a proof of decline as the conversion of the palace to a movie house.” The Minsky Brothers presented their stables of chorines—“the dirtiest coochers ever forced upon a stage or platform,” per Variety—through the decade, up until city licenses commissioner Paul Moss forbade stripping. Upon reelection, reformist Mayor La Guardia banned the word “burlesque,” leaving the Minsky enterprise defunct and destitute by 1937.
"Minsky's Burlesque" at the Republic on 42nd Street, circa 1931. Irving Zeidman, author of The American Burlesque Show, wrote: "While variety became vaudeville and aligned itself with talent, burlesque became itself and aligned itself with dirt."
The venue became the Gotham on March 25, 1944 (with Sekely’s anti-Nazi B-pic Women in Bondage), and, seven years later, the Holiday. On December 26, 1957, under the new ownership of Britain’s “Rank Organisation,” the Holiday became the Odeon—premiering Powell & Pressburger’s Pursuit of the Graf Spee (now known as The Battle of the River Plate) in VistaVision—and ran motion pictures once and for all until it closed in 1989.
The cinema would change owners—and names—three more times before closing. On June 15, 1959, its marquee was christened the Forum and advertised Middle of the Night, Delbert Mann’s Paddy Chayefsky stage play reboot; a decade later, it became Forum 47th Street. It’s at this point in the theater’s life that we encounter it in Born to Win, when JJ and Billy await a score on his bench across the street. Screening single features of horror and shlocksploitation like Sudden Terror, the Forum 47th was the place to see William Castle's 13 Ghosts or Jane Fonda as busty Barbarella.
Port of Wickedness, the 1935 Howard Hawks film originally released as Barbary Coast, screening at the Holiday in 1955.
Nine years later, the theater began its last chapter as a cinema under the name Movieland—it was one of three Manhattan screens projecting E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (eight times a day) on 70mm. Movieland closed on March 23, 1989, when the Shuberts sold the building. The lobby became the Roxy Deli (the storefront is currently empty), and the auditorium was leased in 1992 by the so-called “Donald Trump of the Night,” super-club owner Peter Gatien, whose $8 million transformation of the space into “Club USA” rounded out his quartet of mega-moneymakers, along with Limelight, the Palladium, and Tunnel. An obvious throwback to the Minsky era, Club USA’s decor, according to nightlife journalist Frank Owen, was “Blade Runner meets Pee-wee’s Playhouse reimagined by the Marquis de Sade.”
Club USA featured a "giant tubular slide and a peep-show hallway...a VIP room created by French fashion designer Thierry Mugler...and a giant neon sign depicting a hand flipping an ecstasy pill into a mouth that recalled Studio 54's infamous coke spoon over the dance floor."
After three years as the playground for the after-dark elite (like Michael Alig, Richie Rich, and Deee-Lite), raking in a total of around $20 million in mid-’90s dollars, Gatien was forced to shut down Club USA in 1995 when the building’s owners foreclosed. Years of legal battles over alleged drug trafficking (acquitted) and tax evasion (pleaded guilty) during the Giuliani era resulted in financial ruin and the deportation of the disco tycoon to his native Canada in 2003.
On November 20, 1996, the building that sat at 1567 Broadway for 78 years—along with its extremely valuable air rights—was sold for $31 million to the Banque Nationale de Paris in a court-ordered auction. Five years later, Intell Management began constructing the W Hotel chain’s 50-floor fifth NYC location, which opened on December 27, 2001. “Inside the entrance, a glass ceiling shields guests from a sheet of flowing water,” said Glenn Pushelberg, creative director of the firm that designed the 509-room hotel. “The idea was to create a sensual, cocoonlike, pared-down antidote to the frenetic pace of Times Square.” It was the first luxury tourist trap to blemish Duffy Square in the new millennium.
Héctor Elizondo in Born to Win (1971), with the Duffy Square Horn & Hardart behind him.
HORN & HARDART
Two doors south of the future Central Theatre at 1557 Broadway, a fast-food oddity opened on July 2, 1912: the Horn & Hardart “Automat.” This visionary, machine-age cafeteria, imagined by Philly-based Joseph Horn and German-born, New Orleans-raised Frank Hardart, featured vending machines that dispensed steaming-hot mac and cheese and whipped chocolate custard pies from small glass windows at the drop of a nickel. The Duffy Square location was the first branch of a company that nourished and delighted New Yorkers for the next 80 years.
The swivel of the nineteenth century into the twentieth brought “a wave of modernization that swept up Times Square, radically changing the technology of dining at lower-priced restaurants,” states William Grimes in his excellent overview Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York. "On the lower culinary slopes, the scientific spirit was transforming artisanal workshops into a streamlined industry dominated by three goals: better, cheaper, faster." Horn & Hardart was that eccentric amenity that alchemized affordable dining with a dash of street culture and a garnish of cosmopolitan cachet.
To embellish the frontage of their 70-foot-wide cafeteria, Horn & Hardart employed Nicola D'Ascenzo, Arts and Craft glass sculptor extraordinaire, to design the two-story façade, displaying the word "Automat" in an Art Nouveau fruit and flora motif.
Upon entry, and after getting change from a cashier known as a “nickel thrower,” guests were served by the waiterless (and therefore, tip-less) mechanisms that—with some Rube Goldbergian wizardry—served chicken pot pie, baked beans, and lemon meringue. And for just one of those nickels, you could enjoy Horn & Hardart’s famed New Orleans-style drip coffee, dispensed from a dolphin spout, precisely measured into a six-ounce cup, and finished with a splash of cream (in 1951, the price doubled, causing a slight uproar). When down on your luck, you could stir up a free bowl of “tomato soup” by mixing ketchup with hot water.
“As the Roaring Twenties gave way to the Depression,” explains David Freeland in his delectable book Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville: Excavating Manhattan’s Lost Places of Leisure, “scores of people who would never have dreamed of eating in an automat during the flush years became a steady presence at the little round tables, savoring pecan pie à la mode in fur coats and intermingling with the store clerks and dime-a-dance girls...” At a time when socioeconomic strata dissolved into ambiguity Horn & Hardart, with their welcoming, egalitarian embrace and lenient loitering policy, was a literal melting pot—and maintained its reputation as such for years. The Sun printed a satirical verse joshing as much in 1933 when the company numbered a total of 43 restaurants and commissaries:
Said the Technocrat To the Plutocrat To the Autocrat And the Democrat— Let’s all go eat at the Automat!
In a pivotal scene late in the film, George Segal and Robert De Niro meet Héctor Elizondo in the Horn & Hardart on 57th Street and attempt to set him up—to no avail.
It’s the Horn & Hardart at 104 West 57th Street that Passer uses for an instrumental scene in Born to Win. Just west of 5th Avenue, across from Steinway Hall and down the block from Carnegie Hall, this was a highly-trafficked, lucrative iteration of the chain; its pink granite, Arte Moderne structure was designed by architect Ralph Bowden Bencker. It was apropos to include the cafeteria in the film: on JJ’s budget, a meal at Horn & Hardart was perhaps the only one he’d be willing to pay for. Advertisements throughout 1970 boasted weekly specials like one-cent coffee with an order of “chopped beefsteak and 2 vegetables”; ten-cent discounts on cheese danish, apple pie, and raspberry fruit jello (“Buy 3 and get home free - splurge on a subway token with what your save”); and a Horn & Hardart “Lunch Date Special: order two meals the same, you pay only half price for your date.” (No doubt JJ would have persuaded Parm into picking up the tab.)
From Tom Miller, writing about the 104 West 57th Street Horn & Hardart in Daytonian in Manhattan: "Its squat, somewhat bulbous form was half motion picture theater, half army tank. Three rounded pavilions fronted the structure, flanked by geometric piers of stacked blocks. Above was a circular turret which sprouted a flagpole."
Horn & Hardart prospered until the late 1950s, when, as Freeland puts it, “television was keeping people at home and those old enough to remember the automat from younger days thought of it as a Depression-era relic.” The company hit truly tough times in the ’60s and ’70s: a New York Times article published its loss of $4 million in 1971 alone, attributed mostly to discontinued locations. Its new “autocratic CEO” Frederick H. Guterman, who ran the business from 1972 to 1977, decided to sublet most of the Horn & Hardart locations. In early 1976, the Duffy Square eatery became a Burger King—the company’s largest franchisee until 1991, when the Grand Slam tourist shop, its current tenant, moved in. Horn & Hardart’s final location, catty-corner to the Chrysler Building at 42nd Street and 3rd Ave, shuttered for good on April 8, 1991.
The horrendous vinyl siding of Burger King concealed the frontage of New York City's first Horn & Hardart. Two doors up, Movieland is screening E.T.
And JJ’s hangout on 57th? After closing in 1977, it converted to the New York Delicatessen, then a Motown Cafe in 1996, and, finally, Shelly’s New York until 2006. The Landmarks Preservation Commission refused to designate it a landmark due to alterations previously done to the facade, so the building was sold in 2006 for $63 million and razed to build…you guessed it—a Hilton hotel.
Born to Win poster.
Born to Win premiered at the Vivian Beaumont Theater on October 9, 1971 as part of the New York Film Festival, and opened theatrically on December 1 at the Lyric Theatre on 42nd Street. Reviews were mixed. Roger Greenspun of The New York Times panned the film, saying it was a "dreadful disappointment" although "not without some honor"—that the movie has "the understanding of a need for a sense of place." In The Daily News, Kathleen Carroll was kinder, calling George Segal's performance brilliant: "There is a city-bred awareness in him that makes him totally believable. Segal is the impish con merchant delighting in his daily struggle to ‘get another bag,’ for he knows only too well that this struggle is what keeps him going. But the marvel of his performance is that he lets us glimpse the character's inner pain. The age lines deepen, and his eyes have the scared-rabbit look of a man who knows there is no escape for him.”
JJ's only respite is an empty beach miles from Times Square on the Jersey Shore. Silhouetted against the ocean in a wide shot, Passer conveys the depth of his desperation. Parm gazes at him from a vast distance, his back turned to her—she knows he's not there. She asks him what he wants: "To go back and get my money," he snaps. Parm embraces him as he spirals into a harrowing withdrawal. An ominous car ride takes them through the Lincoln Tunnel, back to midtown; Parm gives him $25 and resolutely drops him off. "Come back home to me," she says as JJ descends into the basement of a burger joint, looking for salvation.
Earlier in the movie, JJ says to Parm, "We're gonna get out of here. We're gonna take a trip, and I'm gonna get clean. 'Cause, ya know—it's the environment that kills you. It's these greasy junkies I gotta hang out with. You can't trust any of them."
In April, Fun City Editions re-released Born to Win on Blu-ray in a gorgeous 2K restoration. Writer and curator Justin LaLiberty notes in his liner essay, "At one point, JJ says, 'I'm not addicted, I'm habituated,' downplaying the severity of his reliance on heroin, which informs his life of petty crime—a life that constantly has him running from the mob, from a pair of NYPD officers (one played by a young Robert De Niro), or to a source for a fix. Addiction (or habituation) in Born to Win is seen as motion." And by always trying to stay one step ahead, JJ continually submits to the ploys of the conspirators and opportunists that maneuver around him—he subscribes to no philosophy, has no moral code, lacks any integrity. He compromises everything. His selfishness ruins Billy and Parm: Billy dies, screaming for his mother in a bathroom stall; the double-crossing cops plant junk in Parm's car, and she is dragged away in handcuffs. Her only crime was falling for JJ.
We don't know what will happen to JJ: he'll get iced or take a bust, maybe sober up and settle down. But in the meantime, he’ll stay on the move, finding a backroom booth to squat in or a public park to claim as his own. He's no hustler, he's not a charmer—he can't play the game, let alone win. Even the great men whose monuments hover above him—the Minskys and Gatiens and Hardarts—eventually fold. In a city where everything's a commodity and everyone's for sale, you better have more than one trick up your sleeve—particularly if your only trick is getting high. You’re dispensable in a town that needs to perpetually reinvent and transform itself, always inflating its value, looking for the next big score.
He returns to the Open End Bar and asks Vivian for another fix. "What are my odds that's not a hotshot?" he asks. "So what if it is?" replies Vivian, "It'll be the best jolt you ever get… You're the winner, aren't ya?" Passer ends the film with one last shot of JJ on his Duffy Square bench, more alone than ever.
Segal in the final shot of Born to Win.
The Deuce Film Series is a monthly, 35mm presentation created by "Joe Zieg" Berger and co-hosted with "Tour Guide Andy" McCarthy and "Maestro Jeff" Cashvan. Produced by Max Cavanaugh for Nitehawk Cinema Williamsburg, The Deuce was founded in November 2012.