Synopsis
"The debut film for director-writer
James Toback features Keitel as Jimmy 'Fingers' Angelli, a low-level gangster who collects debts for his bookmaker father but who dreams of being a classical concert pianist. The bipolar tensions he embodies as he wavers between a life of brutal extortion and auditions at Carnegie Hall provide Keitel with a range of unusual and edgy emotional territory to explore. Balancing a portable cassette player in one hand and a gun in the other, Jimmy lives in a world of contradictions in which his artistic frustrations fuel the violence needed for his professional obligations. This cult classic provides spare compositions against gritty New York locations and is an exemplar of the kind of urban psychological drama that underpinned the independent film movement of the 1970s." – Harvard Film Archive
