[In 1972], Ferrara directed an ambitious short entitled The Hold Up (19), the screenplay of which is attributed to Ferrara and Nicodemo Oliverio (the only time the latter would use his real name on a film). The central character is Johnny (Ken Fowler), a blue collar worker married to a woman (Mary Kane (20)) whose father owns the factory where Johnny is employed. Johnny's coworkers Bob (Robert Denson) and Joe (Joe Guida) are laid off, but Johnny, presumably thanks to his father-in-law, keeps his job. Desperate for money, Bob and Joe decide to hold up a gas station, and Johnny joins them out of friendship. The robbery goes disastrously wrong, and the three friends are arrested. An epilogue set three months later shows Johnny returning to the factory while two men discuss how Johnny's father-in-law used his influence to keep Johnny out of jail: Bob and Joe both received prison sentences.

Although Ferrara now regards The Hold Up as little more than a technical exercise ("We were still trying to figure out how to move people in and out of rooms" (21)), that Renoirian generosity which would become one of his distinguishing features is already evident. Though clearly motivated by a passionate political commitment, Ferrara refuses to present class struggle in terms of heroes and villains (that division between saintly workers and evil capitalists we find, for example, in Eisenstein). The experience described here is one of powerlessness in the face of injustices not attributable to individual corruption, and the film traces an intricate network of guilt and responsibility. The factory's owner, far from being unsympathetic, is genuinely concerned about his employees (as he tells Johnny, "these decisions come from God knows where. I don't even know who works at the front office anymore"), and while Ferrara makes it abundantly clear that the hold up would not have occurred had the workers been treated fairly, violence is neither excused nor glamorized: the robbery's pathetic nature is revealed when we see Joe and Johnny assaulting a terrified night worker while Bob picks the man's loose change up off the floor. Corruption may be all-pervasive, but individuals in supposedly privileged positions are as much victims as those on the bottom rungs of the ladder. The climax - in which images showing Bob and Joe posing for police photos (while a voice reads out their sentences) are followed by a shot of Johnny returning to work, then a brief exterior view of the factory - makes the point with remarkable precision: on one level, Johnny has escaped incarceration due to his family ties; on another, he is simply in a different kind of prison.

The influence of John Cassavetes is very apparent (especially when Joe shows Johnny and Bob a nude photospread and claims to have slept with the model), but so is that of Cassavetes' aesthetic opposite, Robert Bresson. Consider the sequence depicting a day at the factory: a close-up of a timeclock being punched three times in succession is followed by a slow pan (lasting 32 seconds) over the factory's exterior, then another shot of the timeclock. Ferrara reduces everything to essentials, using three simple images to tell us all we need know about the mindless repetition of these characters' working lives (22). For him, the factory (and its domestic equivalent the family home, portrayed as another 'prison') is capitalism incarnate, the heartless emblem of a system which may be inescapable, but is nonetheless susceptible to criticism and analysis.

WATCH Abel Ferrara's commentary on THE HOLD UP

Footnotes

19- Francis Delia, recalls that "Abel 'borrowed' the equipment to film The Hold Up from Purchase College" (e-mail to the author, January 4th 2003).

20- According to Mary Kane, "The Hold Up was a long time ago, needless to say. I certainly had no aspirations about acting, but I guess at the time I had the right look" (e-mail to the author, January 31st 2003).

21- Abel Ferrara, conversation with the author.

22- Several touches, notably the use of rock music emanating from an on-screen source to accompany a scene of violence, suggest the influence of Martin Scorsese: perhaps Ferrara had already seen Who's That Knocking at My Door (1968).


NOTE: This is an excerpt from the book ABEL FERRARA: THE MORAL VISION by Brad Stevens available at FAB Press.