Heavy Traffic


Heavy Traffic is a 1973 American live-action/adult animated drama film written and directed by Ralph Bakshi. The film, which begins, ends, and occasionally combines with live-action, explores the often surreal fantasies of a young New York City cartoonist named Michael Corleone, using pinball imagery as a metaphor for inner-city life. Heavy Traffic was Bakshi and producer Steve Krantz's follow-up to the film Fritz the Cat. Though producer Krantz made varied attempts to produce an R-rated film, Heavy Traffic was given an X rating by the MPAA. The film received largely positive reviews and is widely considered to be Bakshi's biggest critical success.

Plot

The film begins in live-action, introducing Michael Corleone, a twenty-two year-old virgin who plays pinball in New York City while asking himself philosophical questions before envisioning an animated and dangerous New York neighborhood. Michael's Italian father, Angelo "Angie" Corleone, is a sleazy, struggling mafioso who frequently cheats on Michael's Jewish mother, Ida, with his mistress, Molly. Angie and Ida constantly bicker and try to kill each other at every opportunity.
The unemployed Michael dabbles in cartoons and often wanders throughout the city to avoid family skirmishes and to artistically feed off the grubbiness of his environment. He regularly visits a local bar where he gets free drinks from his girlfriend and the black bartender, Carole, in exchange for sketches, which results in Shorty, Carole's violent, legless bouncer devotee, becoming jealous.
One of the regular customers at the bar, the cross-dressing Snowflake, gets beaten up by a tough drunk in a hard hat named Bongo after he discovers that Snowflake is a man and not a woman like he first thought. Snowflake loves the beating due to his masochism, but the drunk causes property damage. Shorty throws Bongo out and then brutally kills him soon after, while the bar's manager Mario abusively confronts Carole, provoking her into quitting.
Shorty offers to let Carole stay at his place, but not wanting to get involved with him, Carole tells Shorty that she's staying with Michael. Meanwhile, Angie manages a strike at a mob-controlled factory, but when he reveals his plan to replace the strikers with unemployed black workers, the Godfather abandons him in disapproval. Michael allows Carole to stay with him, but the Corleones' deteriorating domestic situation convinces Michael and Carole to move out of Michael's parents' house and try to earn enough money to move to California, in order to avoid Shorty, who's been stalking Carole ever since she quit the bar.
Michael gets a chance to pitch a comic strip idea to an elderly executive lying on his death bed, who seems enthusiastic enough to listen to the idea, but the abnormally dark tone of Michael's story overwhelmes the mogul, resulting in him dying during the pitch.
Meanwhile, Angie tries to use his Mafia connections to put a murder contract on Michael for "disgracing" the family by dating a black woman, but the Godfather refuses to do so because he feels he owes Angie nothing for his failures and because the hit he desires is "personal, not business". Angie realizes he is out of favor with the mob; drunk and depressed, he is seduced by Snowflake. However, Shorty eventually encounters Angie and agrees to fulfill the contract.
Meanwhile, Carole tries working as a taxi dancer, until she is fired when one of her customers she dances has a heart attack at the sight of her underwear.
Michael and Carole turn to crime as a means of getting by with Carole posing as a prostitute, flirting with a sleazy businessman and luring him into a hotel room where Michael beats him to death with a lead pipe so they can rob him. As the two walk out with the dead man's cash, Shorty arrives and shoots Michael in the head. In Michael's reality, following the conclusion of the animated story, he destroys a pinball machine in anger after it tilts and walks out onto the street. He then bumps into the real Carole and follows her into a park, confronting her. The two are seen briefly arguing before they finally take each other's hands and begin happily dancing in the park.

Cast

In 1969, Ralph's Spot was founded as a division of Bakshi Productions to produce commercials for Coca-Cola and Max, the 2000-Year-Old Mouse, a series of educational shorts paid for by Encyclopædia Britannica. However, Bakshi was uninterested in the kind of animation he was producing, and wanted to produce something personal. Bakshi soon developed Heavy Traffic, a tale of inner-city street life. Steve Krantz told Bakshi that studio executives would be unwilling to fund Heavy Traffic because of its content and Bakshi's lack of film experience. Bakshi directed Fritz the Cat, an adaptation of Robert Crumb's comic strip of the same name. The financial success of Fritz the Cat allowed Bakshi to produce the film he had always intended to produce, and to focus on human characters rather than anthropomorphic animals. Bakshi pitched Heavy Traffic to Samuel Z. Arkoff, who took an interest in Bakshi's take on the "tortured underground cartoonist", and agreed to fund the film.
Production began in 1972. However, Steve Krantz had not yet paid Bakshi for his work on Fritz the Cat. Halfway through the production of Heavy Traffic, Bakshi asked Krantz outright when he would be paid, and Krantz responded that "The picture didn't make any money, Ralph. It's just a lot of noise." Bakshi found Krantz's claims to be dubious, as the producer had recently purchased a new BMW and a mansion in Beverly Hills. Because Bakshi did not have a lawyer, he sought advice from directors he had become friends with, including Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Steven Spielberg, asking them how much they made on their films. Bakshi soon accused Krantz of ripping him off, which the producer denied. Bakshi began pitching his next project, Harlem Nights, a film loosely based on the Uncle Remus story books, which eventually became Coonskin. The idea interested producer Albert S. Ruddy during a screening of The Godfather.
While working on Heavy Traffic, Bakshi received a call from Krantz, who questioned him about Harlem Nights. Bakshi told Krantz: "I can't talk about that" and hung up. The next day, Krantz locked Bakshi out of the studio, reportedly tapping Bakshi's phone because he was wary of his loyalty as an employee. After Krantz fired Bakshi, he began to seek a replacement director for Heavy Traffic, calling several directors, including Chuck Jones. Arkoff threatened to pull the film's budget unless Krantz rehired Bakshi, who returned a week later. During the film's production, Krantz attempted to maintain some level of control by issuing memos to Bakshi and other artists requesting various changes. John Sparey remembers being issued a memo asking Sparey to stop posting caricatures of Krantz on the middle of his door.
Ed Bogas and Ray Shanklin returned to write and perform the film's score, as they had done for Bakshi's previous feature, Fritz the Cat. Other music featured in the film included the songs "Twist and Shout", performed by The Isley Brothers, "Take Five", as performed by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, and Chuck Berry's "Maybellene". "Scarborough Fair" is used as a recurring musical motif, first heard in the film's opening credits and later reappearing during the end of the film as performed by Sérgio Mendes and Brasil '66. Bogas also created several other arrangements of the song that appear throughout the film. A soundtrack album was released in 1973.
Joseph Kaufmann, who played Michael, was killed in a plane crash on September 4, 1973, less than a month after the film released. This would be his final film performance in his lifetime.

Directing

Inspiration for the film came from penny arcades, where Bakshi would often spend his time playing pinball, sometimes bringing his 12-year-old son Mark. Bakshi wanted to use pinball as a metaphor to examine the ways of the world. Heavy Traffic began a tradition in which Bakshi would write poems before beginning production on each of his films, starting with Street Arabs. According to Bakshi, "My background was in Brooklyn — my Jewishness, my family life, my father coming from Russia. All these things had to be somehow represented on film."
Because Bakshi wanted the voices to sound organic, he experimented with improvisation, allowing his actors to ad lib during the recording sessions. According to James Bates, the voice of Snowflake, "I said, 'How about a little Wolfman Jack, Charles Nelson Reilly, Pearl Bailey and a little Truman Capote?' Ralph couldn't believe it. We ad-libbed a lot, and he usually got what he wanted in three or four takes. We worked hard and not for much coin, but it was a blast."
As with Fritz the Cat, Bakshi and Johnnie Vita took location photographs for the film's backgrounds. Instead of tracing the photographs onto backgrounds, as they had done in Fritz the Cat, the film uses actual photographs and live-action stock footage as backgrounds for much of the film. Bakshi and Vita were also experimental in their photography: Bakshi requested that the lab technicians produce several prints for every photo, each print increasingly out of focus, giving the backgrounds a fuzzy quality. Bakshi states that "We didn't want to risk shooting on the spot. That could have meant making some expensive mistakes."