Well, probably not every New Yorker. But there's no question that the narrative arc of the city was one of transformation under Mayor Koch, and that that arc is reflected in the cinema of his day. The great themes of movies about New York in the Koch era were power and the underground, art and finance, poverty and the new prosperity.

The New York of the 1970s that Koch sought to manage after his 1977 victory is the subject of some extraordinary and extraordinarily weird films, all gritty as the city itself in the era of bankruptcy, racial strife, and economic decline. If you want to know why he was hailed, you need to know what the city looked like before him. It is the subject and the backdrop of all these films -- fictions, to be sure, but not fantasies -- in which crime and corruption and the breakdown of the social order are all on display.

* 1972: Across 110th Street, a thriller about a corrupt cop and his honest deputy in drug-infested Harlem, starring a young Yaphet Kotto. Shocking to a contemporary viewer for its casual racism, the film is an of-its-era sketch of a neighborhood and its myths, which were revisited in 2008 in American Gangster.

* 1973: Serpico -- one of the great Al Pacino films, about whistle-blowing cop Frank Serpico.

* 1974: The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, about a hostage crisis aboard a New York City subway train hijacked by four madmen.

* 1975: Dog Day Afternoon, another Al Pacino classic, about a failed bank heist and how a stand-off between the would-be robber and the police turned into a media sensation.

* 1976: Taxi Driver, featuring Robert DeNiro as a vigilante cab driver disgusted by crime and sleaze and a star turn by a very young Jodie Foster.

New York being New York, its fictions took many forms, some of them more experimental and less commercial than others. The best recent film I saw on the city in this period was the documentary Blank City, about No Wave film and the Cinema of Transgression in the East Village and Tribeca in the late 1970s and early 1980s -- the front-end of the Koch era. The trailer gives you a sense of the urban backdrop of the day, as well as some marvelous images of Blondie before she was a singer. It's very much worth seeing:

Koch's first term also saw The Warriors (1979), a fantasia about a gang from Coney Island trying to make it home from the Bronx after a gangland convention went awry and the rest of the city's thugs -- and police -- went on a manhunt for them.

The famous "come out to play-aay" fight scene set-up gives perhaps a better sense of the film than its own historic trailer.

Uptown, the same year, we got Woody Allen's more genteel Manhattan, with Diane Keaton. From the voice-over in the trailer: "Chapter One: He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion. No, make that, he, he romanticized it all out of proportion. (Better.) ....Let me start this over. Chapter One: He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat. (I love this.) New York was his town, and it always would be."