Tony Bill's ensemble piece, featuring an extraordinary cast (Jodie Foster, John Turturro, Tim Robbins), is an urban romance set against the youthful idealism and the matter-of-fact violence of a working-class Bronx neighborhood in the early ¹60s. With an original screenplay by John Patrick Shanley, Five Corners continues to grow in stature with the passing of time. Criterion presents Five Corners in a new, letterboxed transfer.

Five Corners is one of those magical New York movies that catches more working-class rightness in its stylizations than most naturalistic films. Partly it¹s because writer John Patrick Shanley comes to the movies from writing plays. The Bronx setting, circa 1964, is the real thing‹or close enough to it (actually, it's Astoria, in the shadow of the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge). But it's a Bronx of the heart and of the mind and memory, not of the camera eye. Except for the film's characters, the streets are empty, even of passing cars.

Those streets and underlit interiors, the neighborhood park and the boxy little prewar working-class houses, become a series of soundstages for pure streams of spoken street music. It¹s working-class lingo raised to lyric poetry every time one of the characters opens his or her mouth. When Todd Graff's limping bartender wants to brush off a romantic rival, Tim Robbins's brawler-turned-nonviolent, he says, "The whole world knows Harry's out to lunch on this Gandhi thing."

Five Corners is an ensemble piece. But not the kind of ensemble piece that rides the give-and-take of chamber music. Rather, it's film's equivalent of an opera company, spinning out note-perfect arias, duets, and choruses. The story is as simple as any opera's‹Jodie Foster¹s neighborhood belle, warily focused on survival, wants protection from the psychopath (John Turturro) just released from prison for trying to rape her. He's more obsessed with her than ever, but now Robbins, who saved her last time, has become a pacifist, emulating Martin Luther King, Jr. in Mississippi.

There's eccentricity to go with the emotional intensity, and Shanley has a flair for offbeat moves. A sadistic algebra teacher is killed with a bow and arrow that figures importantly in the violent ending. Foster, who works in her family¹s pet shop, is intimidated into accepting two penguins as a warped love offering. As counterpoint, a couple of glue-sniffing Laverne-and-Shirley types takes a surprisingly buoyant elevator ride. They ride on top of the car, not inside it, with a couple of boys, accompanied by an undulating chorus from Lakmé.

In Moonstruck, Shanley's accomplice was Puccini. Because he writes for the ear, he's able to get away with the episodic way his scenes pitch and sway. But Five Corners is more authentically rooted in its working-class sources than Moonstruck. It's franks-and-beans compared to the Dreamwhip cannoli of Cher's romantic comedy, but more rewarding in terms of sharing the adrenaline high of a cast playing off each other, nailing juicy characters.

Robbins impresses with the fierce intensity of his idealism and his need to test himself. Foster moves us as the savvy woman struggling to keep her poise under threat. Turturro is memorably scary, yet never a caricature. His loose cannon, who plans to kidnap Foster King Kong­style, is the most complex character. Bristling with anger, he's outstanding.

There isn't a single character who isn't tangy and worth watching‹and hearing. They're all beguiling in their heightened naturalism, from Elizabeth Berridge's glue-sniffer, to Rose Gregorio's willfully blind ex-con's mom, whose mind is even more cluttered than her kitsch-filled apartment, to Kathleen Chalfant¹s utterly convincing intonations as a murdered cop's widow trying to keep bitterness at bay. Their performances are from the heart and note-perfect.

--Jay Carr

Jay Carr is the film critic for the Boston Globe.

CAST

Linda Jodie Foster

Harry Tim Robbins

James Todd Graff

Heinz John Turturro

Melanie Elizabeth Berridge

Mrs. Sabantino Rose Gregorio

Mazola Gregory Rozakis

Sullivan John Seitz

Mrs. Fitzgerald Kathleen Chalfant

Castro Rodney Harvey

Willie Daniel Jenkins

Brita Cathryn de Prume

Credits

Directed by Tony Bill

Produced by Forrest Murray & Tony Bill

Written by John Patrick Shanley

Executive producers George Harrison & Denis O¹Brien

Associate producers Michael McDonnell & John Patrick Shanley

Director of photography Fred Murphy

Production designer Adrianne Lobel

Costume designer Peggy Farrell

Music by James Newton Howard

Edited by Andy Blumenthal

Casting by Doug Aibel

about the transfer

Five Corners is presented in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1. This new digital transfer was created from a 35mm low contrast print and the original 35mm magnetic audio tracks.

Transfer supervised by Maria Palazzola; telecine colorist: Katherine Grincell/The Machine Room, London.

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