"I must have been away too long, because my feelings are dead. I feel no remorse. It's a terrible thing." —Christopher Walken, with an ironic smirk, in King Of New York
The money shot in Abel Ferrara's 1990 gangster film King Of New York finds Christopher Walken's Frank White, a drug kingpin freshly released from prison, assessing the state of his empire. As he looks out at the skyline from his suite at the Plaza Hotel, the city is superimposed on the window, reflecting the predatory ambitions of a man who believes he should be the de facto mayor. The image unmistakably recalls a similar shot in The Godfather, Part II, when young Vito Corleone, quarantined on Ellis Island after the long journey from Sicily, casts his eyes on the Statue Of Liberty and sees the promise of America from a more innocent vantage. We know from the first Godfather that Vito, like Frank, will aggressively seize on the opportunities laid out before him, and both men have a vision of power where machine guns and backroom politics are equally important weapons in the arsenal.
Calling King Of New York a street-level Godfather freights the film with a level of importance it can't possibly shoulder, but it's nonetheless impossible to separate the two films completely, because there are so many intersections and points of departure. The big difference between Frank White and the Corleone brass is that Frank isn't afraid to get his hands dirty; if an emissary can't iron out a deal with a bitter rival, he's right there on the front lines, guns a-blazin', leading by example. (If Ferrara remade The Godfather with Frank White, we'd no doubt witness Walken personally sawing the head off that prize thoroughbred.) Unlike the Corleones, who position themselves for long-term dominance, with power handed down from one generation to the next, White doesn't have a family and knows his time on earth is limited. Resigned to the fact that he could die at any moment, another man might retreat into his shell or seek out a less perilous occupation, but Frank does the opposite. He's so absurdly brazen that he pulls a drive-by on a cop in the middle of a police funeral.
Walken has always been difficult to read, and though flagrant weirdness (and a talent for dance) is his stock in trade, his face also carries a disturbing, almost alien opacity that makes him seem disconnected from us mere mortals. At times, his character pauses to enjoy the considerable fruits of his labor—he frequently travels with two female companions attached to his arms, and he'll break out a mischievous grin on occasion—but he could never be described as a pleasure-seeker. His lust is for power, but to what personal end isn't so clear. He surrounds himself with the decadence his lifestyle affords—nouveau-riche furnishings, lingerie-clad women in every corner, mountains of cocaine he sells but never touches—but unlike his top enforcer, played with a devilish cackle by Laurence Fishburne, he doesn't have much fun with it. At the same time, he isn't Michael Corleone: His sins never tug at his conscience, because the end somehow justifies them, and makes them seem pettier than they really are. He's an enigma.
For a ruthless drug kingpin, Frank has an uncanny ability to gobble up territory by bloody force while simultaneously granting himself moral absolution. During his time away, the city has fallen into rampant criminality; cruising through the streets in his limo, he assesses the drug and prostitute trade like an efficiency expert assesses a bloated, undisciplined company. With a small army and some key political connections in place, Frank sets about running the other gangsters out of town, including the Colombian cocaine merchants (who get a briefcase full of tampons in lieu of a cash payment), cigar-chomping Italian mobsters, and a vicious syndicate operating out of Chinatown. Frank pays lip service to the idea of doing business with the other crews, but he's really out to steamroll over them and become… well, the title says it all, doesn't it? Consolidating power takes force, but his charisma plays a part, too. In this remarkable scene, Frank's turns the tables on a trio of muggers, but not in an expected way:
Naturally, Frank's exploits frustrate the cops who have to jump through procedural hoops to get a bead on him, including Victor Argo, Wesley Snipes, and a pre-self-parody David Caruso. As their veteran leader, Argo's Roy Bishop has the patience to play by the rules and build a case against Frank, but his younger charges start getting other ideas. With the body count rising precipitously, Roy's cohorts decide to take the fight directly to Frank's crew, risking their jobs and lives in the process. Like a proto-Heat, King Of New York builds to a showdown between two grizzled professionals on opposite sides of the law, each operating on codes more rigorously defined than those of their underlings.