The pale, anaemic skin tone of Walken’s Frank White bleeds through the chiaroscuro urban nightscapes of New York. We first see Frank, a capitalist vampire, in prison which acts as his tomb, and in exile from a kingdom from which he has become disconnected. Frank’s return to a city which he calls home is undermined by a sensibility brought on by institutionalisation, suggesting he is no longer part of the living. ‘Back from the dead’ he remarks to his friends. This is one of the many lies Frank is beholden to, perpetuating an illusion of insanity that terrifies those around him. The gangster figure draped in black, a conventional iconographic idiom clashes with the jaunt paleness of Frank’s face, projecting a vampirish image that becomes immortalised in a sordid milieu of hypocritical middle class parasites. Frank’s world is populated by an individualism typifying the American crime film and its propensity to insidiously forge a twisted sympathy for the devil. Conflated with the image of dread is the fatalism of noir, mapping out a trajectory of doom that is debilitating for Frank. Although in the words of Warshow, Frank is a man of the city, he also drifts through spaces and places leaving a ghostly residue, positing an asynchronous attitude that he masks with a terrifying pathos. Frank White may in fact be the only socialist gangster in the American crime film yet this is strictly not a crime film, it is Ferrara’s uniquely capitalist vampire fable. If the vampire is immortal then it is not surprising Frank envisions he will be remembered for a late socialist cause to save the local hospital from closing. The desire to be seen legitimately in the eyes of society is recognisably connected to the gangster’s image in the genre. King of New York is a signature film for Ferrara and the fusion of crime with horror produces a singularly unique genre film that is more vampire than gangster, perhaps finding an iconographic connection with films like The Addiction.
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