Hold Your Fire Review: A Riveting, If Incomplete, Account of a Hostage Siege

One insightful lesson imparted by Hold Your Fire is that the real-life iteration of the hostage negotiator, one of the more resilient character tropes in action cinema, needed to be invented. The documentary is structured around a botched robbery turned multi-day siege, almost-riot, and racially charged media spectacle. On top of everything else, that robbery may have been the moment that police departments belatedly realized that storming in guns blazing was not always the best solution to such matters.

That was not, though, what most rank-and-file New York police officers wanted to hear in January 1973, according to the interviewees in Stefan Forbes’s film. Four young Black Muslim men held up the John and Al’s Sporting Goods store in Bushwick, trying to steal shotguns. But after police appeared, the robbers hunkered down with a dozen hostages and an arsenal of weapons. A fusillade of bullets crisscrossed the street, patrolman Stephen Gilroy was killed, one robber was critically wounded, and both sides settled into a 47-hour siege.

Possibly the only thing keeping the siege from disaster was the unlikely intercession of Harvey Schlossberg. A nerdy, elfin traffic cop with a psychology PhD and a belief that talking resolved more problems than cops’ “macho” tactics, Schlossberg got the ear of similarly bookish police commissioner Pat Murphy. Schlossberg’s patient, wait-it-out approach appears logical in retrospect. But with a short montage, Forbes grimly illustrates how even though early-1970s hostage scenarios like the Attica Prison Uprising, the robbery of a Chase Manhattan Bank branch in Gravesend, Brooklyn (the basis for Dog Day Afternoon), and the Munich Olympics all ended in bloodshed, nobody seemed to think a different method was called for.

With little preamble, Hold Your Fire drops us into the heat of the robbery, then flicks through the resulting drama. Talking-head interviews with Schlossberg, police officers, and some of the robbers and their hostages are interspersed with archival images and video footage captured by news outlets. The footage—of the rattling volleys of gunfire, the rumbling arrival of a police armored personnel carrier, and crowds pressing against barricades and cheering for the robbers—lends a wartime aesthetic of sorts to an urban crime narrative. Through it all, Jonathan Sanford’s squealing jazz-inflected score underlines the chaos of the situation.

The documentary’s aesthetic approach is purposeful, echoing the us-or-them sentiment held by the groups aiming guns at each other. Though the robbers’ ringleader, Shu’aib Raheem, insists that they were more “squares” than revolutionaries, they seemed panicky and apocalyptic to the hostages. Outside the sporting goods store, the nearly all-white police force, mistakenly thinking that it was dealing with the Black Liberation Army (a militant group known for assassinating police officers), geared up for a frontal assault.

Forbes structures the interviews so that his subjects seem to be talking past each other, just as they were during the siege. Raheem seems to soft-pedal his involvement like a spectator more than instigator. Despite the blisteringly clear racial tensions simmering in the besieged neighborhood, Captain Al Baker blithely dismisses the possibility any officers were racist. But some people open up. Al Sheppard, an officer on the scene and a crusty figure with a “Not a Liberal” sticker displayed behind him, acknowledges that the police were an “army of occupation” in Black neighborhoods. No liberal either, Baker talks approvingly about how Schlossberg’s tactics allowed the NYPD to “transcend street justice.”

Early on, one of the hostages, Jerry Riccio, the store owner whose casually heroic demeanor is one of Hold Your Fire’s highlights, remembers thinking at the time about one of the robbers who had just fired a warning shot: “If I get a chance to kill ya, I’m gonna kill ya.” Later in the film, he shows a genuinely impressive generosity about the men who held him at gunpoint. Though coming decades later, the willingness of these hard-liners (two of whose lives were at risk throughout) to express a broader view of humanity that transcends race and conflict creates a thoughtful counterpoint to the adrenaline-fueled siege footage.

Hold Your Fire is less insightful in its portrayal of the robbers. Raheem’s tendency to speak in bromides ensures that he remains at a remove from us. Relatively little is provided about his three accomplices’ backgrounds. Forbes opens up a fascinating side narrative with Raheem’s reference to increasingly violent sectarian conflict with the Nation of Islam (ostensibly the reason they wanted the shotguns for protection), but the film doesn’t follow through on it.

It’s understandable that Forbes got lost in the thrill of recounting the events of the hostage incident. It’s certainly a riveting slice of history, and it’s astutely harnessed by Hold Your Fire’s ticking-clock urgency to communicate the reality that the real catastrophe of the situation wasn’t inside the store but in the restive city outside. But given the focus on a little-known figure like Schlossberg, who used his fascination with human nature to defuse a potential disaster and transform the nature of modern policing, a greater curiosity on Forbes’s part about how why the siege began could have made for a more complete portrait.