Walter
Hill’s The Warriors, based on a 1965
dystopian novel by Sol Yurik, beams in from a pre gentrified, now vanished New
York City. The movie fairly accurately reflected the decaying state of the Big
Apple in the late 1970s - NYC was at the time fending off bankruptcy, suffering
from high unemployment and extended power black outs (prompting widespread
looting and crime) as well as playing host to pitched battles between warring ethnic
factions, making the clashes between the Sharks and the Jets in West Side Story look like a walk in
Central Park. The reflection of reality as a future urban nightmare is a key to
the movie’s genius.
Hill’s
Director’s cut of the movie (the version screened tonight) adds, among other
comic book inserts, an awkward short prologue not seen in the original film, which
explicitly cites the inspiration for the story as a page from Greek history: the
Battle of Cunaxa in 401 B.C. in which an army of soldiers, stranded in enemy
territory, attempted to evade the Persian Army and make it back to their
coastal home. The Warriors’ modern
day updating of the story has the eponymous gang attempting to flee the City
and return to their Coney Island base, after being set up to take the rap for
the assassination of a gang leader.
With an all
New York cast and crew, combining professional actors with kids recruited from
the City’s districts and supported by real gang advisors, Hill’s tense, action
packed movie uses the interconnecting lines of the New York subway map to track
The Warriors as they attempt to ‘escape from New York’. And yes the movie does anticipate John Carpenter’s film of
the same name from a couple of years later, but it also borrows from 1970s
conspiracy thrillers, Blaxploitation movies and, in the stylised battle scenes,
Kurosawa’s samurai films.
The use of a
largely black and Hispanic cast caused the movie’s funders to question the
film’s commerciality, leading to the production team re-editing the film,
adding extra soundtrack elements to create a less realistic, more upbeat feel to
the final movie. But there’s no doubting the realism of the environments in
which shooting took place, even accepting some of the more over the top
elements of the look of the factions, such as the Kiss style make up of the
‘Baseball Furies.’ One story goes that while filming on location in Coney
Island the actors playing The Warriors had to remove any trace of their gang
identities (achieved through some great embroidery by Brit Rose Clements, who
also designed stage outfits for Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton) while at lunch so
as not to draw undue attention from the real gangs in the area.
The film’s cinema
release proved popular, but a series of tragic gang related shooting and
stabbing incidents at screenings in the US nearly saw an end to The Warriors’ distribution life. As a
result, Paramount allowed cinema chains the option to cancel future screenings:
many took up the offer, and the film lay dormant until its second wind saw the movie
released to the (then new) home viewing market, subsequently spawning a comic
strip and video game spinoffs.
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