10 Globe-Trotting Movies About The Illegal Drugs Trade

4. King Of New York

About as far from the nuance and subtlety of Traffic as you can get, Abel Ferrara's King of New York is a heavily stylised tale of New York drug lord Frank White, played with impeccably steely menace. This isn't so much as insightful filmmaking as it is deliberately provocative (something Ferrara was well known for with movies like Driller Killer). There's something strangely operatic about King of New York, as if it's a modern day variation on a Shakespearean play. Walken's portrayal of Frank White puts the character in the company of some of the greatest anti-heroes of all time - despite all his good will in trying to do something good in a community so rotten, his cunning and ruthlessness remain. New York itself is turned into an equally sinister and foreboding presence, the towering skyscrapers concealing looming over a land in which lawlessness seems to prevail. Ferrara's own wife walked out of a screening of King of New York and Walken's co-stars - including Laurence Fishburne - were booed off stage at another. Neither reactions are at all warranted, and while it doesn't match up to his following film, Bad Lieutenant, Ferrara's lean mean gangster thriller deserves more recognition than it generally gets.