HBO recalls murder that rocked a city

“Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn” (9 p.m., HBO, TV-MA) offers a documentary look at a 1989 murder that convulsed New York City. The film offers a minute-by-minute account of the crime and interviews friends and associates of the victim and his killers, 30 years removed from the grim events.

On some levels, this murder was very much a tale of a young man in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hawkins, a Black man from the East New York section of Brooklyn, ventured into a largely white neighborhood in the Bensonhurst section to look at a used car on a night when that neighborhood was rife with rumors of outsiders arriving looking for a fight. In many ways, the attitudes echoed the tribal neighborhood mentality celebrated in the 1977 classic “Saturday Night Fever.”

“Storm” shows how this crime touched a nerve in a city that had seen too many race-related murders. It arrived at the end of the third term of a mayor, Ed Koch, who courted voters (and a tabloid media) with a pronounced indifference to civil rights activists (referring to them as “poverty pimps”) and minority residents, whom he occasionally called “animals.”

Many believe that Hawkins’ murder was responsible for the end of Koch’s career and the election of David Dinkins, New York’s first Black mayor. Of course, Dinkins’ election would result in a backlash, fueled again by tabloids, as well as police unions, and result in the election of Rudy Giuliani, whose contempt for the minority community made Koch’s seem subtle.

“Storm” touches many chords in 2020 and reminds us of William Falkner’s old line, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

› H-bombs aside, one of the most explosive events of the 1950s was the publication of Grace Metalious’ novel “Peyton Place” (8 p.m., TCM, TV-PG), adapted for the screen in 1957, starring Lana Turner and Hope Lange.

A tale of a seemingly perfect New England town beset with dark secrets, the book included insinuations of incest, unspeakable sex acts and abortion. It was the “dirty book” Americans couldn’t stop reading. Its author had no literary pedigree, but readers didn’t care.

While many, including Metalious, believed the Hollywood version sanitized the book, it was a hit with audiences and received nine Oscar nominations.

Scandal would plague “Peyton,” when a year later, star Lana Turner’s abusive mobster boyfriend was murdered by her own daughter. Metalious would write a sequel and a few other books before succumbing to excess and alcoholism in short order.

In the mid-1960s, ABC turned “Peyton Place” into a rare prime-time soap opera that ran five nights a week. It starred Dorothy Malone, who had won an Oscar for playing a tramp in the soapy 1956 melodrama “Written on the Wind,” and introduced America to young Mia Farrow and Ryan O’Neal.

In 1986, David Lynch cast Hope Lange to appear in “Blue Velvet,” his lurid meditation on films like “Peyton Place.”

It’s worth noting that “Peyton Place,” the most scandalous book of its time, produced a film that today, is rated PG.