Lieutenant William Pope, a straitlaced black police officer, is assigned to work on the case with Captain Frank Mattelli, a streetwise but aging Italian-American cop.
Anthony Quinn, who also served as executive producer, originally wanted John Wayne and then Kirk Douglas for the lead role of Captain Mattelli.
[3] Said had cut his teeth as a cameraman on the TV series I Spy, which broke new ground for American television by mixing studio work with location footage shot all over the world; a feat made possible by abandoning the ubiquitous but unwieldy Mitchell cameras of the day in favor of the lightweight Arriflex 35 IIC.
The low noise level of the Arriflex 35BL permits shooting sound sequences in confined quarters, thus eliminating the post-dubbing of dialogue that is usually necessary under such conditions.
"[3] A combination of Fouad Said's radical location skills and ARRI's groundbreaking technology allowed Shear's dream of a realistic backdrop for his story to be accomplished.
In the summer of 1964, a riot erupted in Harlem after a white off-duty police officer shot and killed an armed black teenager in Yorkville, Manhattan.
[4] The "hot summer" of 1967 saw riots rip through the country, in major cities throughout the West and the North, as black communities responded in anger to poverty and police brutality.
[5] In 1968, just three years before the release of Across 110th Street, numerous businesses and storefronts in Harlem were set on fire as residents reacted in frustration and grief after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.[6] The 1970s were also a time when feelings of black power were everywhere in African-American communities across the United States.
As a middle-aged black man, formerly incarcerated, with a health problem and no formal education or highly-paid skills, Harris' only options are to work a demeaning, low-paying job with no future or to turn to crime.
[11] Among contemporary reviews, Roger Greenspun of The New York Times wrote "It manages at once to be unfair to blacks, vicious towards whites and insulting to anyone who feels that race relations might consist of something better than improvised genocide ... By the time it is over virtually everybody has been killed—by various means, but mostly by a machine gun that makes lots of noise and splatters lots of blood and probably serves as the nearest substitute for an identifiable hero.
Those portions of it which aren't bloody violent are filled in by the squalid location sites in New York's Harlem or equally unappealing ghetto areas leaving no relief from depression and oppression.
"[14] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post slammed the film as "a crime melodrama at once so tacky and so brutal that one feels tempted to swear out a warrant for the arrest of the filmmakers.
He reflected that the film was particularly thoughtful and well-acted compared to many other low-budget blaxploitation pictures of the era and noted that "this flick ought to be carefully studied — again, for its images and messages.
Its lyrics reflect the broader themes of impoverishment and desperation in the film, where characters feel beaten down by poverty and must do whatever it takes to stay alive.