Driving in New York City can be enraging — congestion, incessant horn honking, maniacally aggressive drivers. That said, New York has also been the scene of some of the greatest car chases in movie history. Thanks to movie magic, there never seems to be relentless gridlock or asshole pedicabs or hobos knife fighting in the middle of the street when a good guy is after a bad guy.
Is there a single greatest car chase in NYC history? The folks at the New York Daily News, who took the most memorable New York City movie car chases and placed them on a map of the city, didn’t rank them. Many people say The French Connection (video above) has the greatest car chase of all time. The far lesser-known The Seven-Ups (trivia: Roy Scheider co-starred in both movies) has an epic 10-minute car chase (video below) that actually ends in New Jersey.
But our favorite of the chases the Daily News featured has to be the 1927 silent-movie car-chase sequence (video below) that starred Harold Lloyd — he was basically like George Clooney and Evel Knievel wrapped up in one guy — as a cab driver taking Babe Ruth (like, the real Babe Ruth) to a Yankees game through New York streets that were so lousy with crazy drivers and pedestrians that they looked like a black-and-white video game.
