Tighten Your Belts, Bite the Bullet

My review was written in September 1981 after a New York Film Festival screening:

"Tighten Your Belts, Bite the Bullet" is an extremely one-sided docu made over a five-year period dealing with big city fiscal problems in the late '70s and the aftermath of temporary solutions offered by the banking community. Pic's timeliness is the unabashed radical reaction to the current cutbacks in social programs noted in the title, but biased presentation provokes turnoff.

Using selective interviews, tv news coverage and spoonfed narration, picture centers on the New York City model, wherein banker Felix Rohatyn devised financial solutions to the city's 1975 near-default status, such as the Municipal Assistance Corp. (Big Mac). Pic alleges a direct shift in political power from the administration to the banking interests by the setting up of the Emergency Financial Control Board.

Much of the NYC footage is devoted to interviews with "vox populi" representatives of closed daycare centers, firehouses and hospitals plus economist from New School, David Gordon. Protests by residents of Brooklyn's Riverside area are emphasized, with a local Allen Goorwitz lookalike Adam Veneski lashing out against the so-called "planned shrinkage" which is claimed to be burning people out of their neighborhoods to be replaced by industry. Polemical final comment from the narrator is: "Whose choice is it anyway?".

More interesting, but presenting an even greater bias, is the troika of directors' examination of the default by Cleveland at the end of 1978. Then-mayor Dennis Kucinich (a media favorite who has since fallen into obscurity) is presented as a knight in shining armor spearheading a people's crusade to maintain control of an ailing city and its assets (principally the Muny light plant), under siege of the banking community and the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co.

Besides Kucinich's amusing firebrand pronouncements, the viewer is presented with the same point of view from Jack Nichol, local chairman of development. Non non-banker community leaders (such as city council president George Forbes) opposed to Kucinich are interviewed, a clear indication of the filmmakers' strategy. Kucinich's defeat by George Voinovich in the next election is sloughed off as a trivial point by the narrator.

Aside from the nostalgia value of seeing Kucinich in his prime and watching the cute WNYC-TV coverage of the events, this half of the film is preposterous and hardly constitutes the heroic example of resisting shift of power to "the banks" that is intended.