1979, United States. Starring Michael Beck, James Remar, Dorsey Wright, Brian Tyler, David Harris, Tom McKitterick, Marcelino Sanchez, Terry Michos, Thomas G. Waites, Deborah Van Valkenburgh, Roger Hill, David Patrick Kelly, Lynne Thigpen, Ginny Ortiz, Mercedes Ruehl. Directed by Walter Hill. Available on DVD (Amazon).

As you know, I always try and set the stage for you. If you have been keeping up with our ongoing history lessons in the Italian cop film reviews (and you should), you know we've been concentrating a lot on edumacating the people about the social and political climate during the late 1960s and 1970s. We've been doing this partly to try and shed the light of reality on the shady misinformation that is 1970s nostalgia. But mostly, we've just been doing it because a lot of the movies we review are from that era. It was, after all, the Golden Age of exploitation film making.

So okay. 1979. New York is a mess. The United States is still trying desperately to pull itself out of the social nosedive that took place as a result of the Vietnam War. Crime is totally out of control in many of the nation's major urban areas. Jimmy Carter is proving to be one the most ineffectual presidents of all time. The gasoline and energy crisis serve to augment his failure to control exploding inflation, expanding poverty, and rampant crime. This is to say nothing of his horrible international policy.

No place in America embodies the madness quite like New York. The city was a wreck. A fire in the South Bronx burned for days because the fire department refused to go into the neighborhood to put it out. Those who could afford to lost themselves amid the mindless drug-enduced haze of the disco club scene, content to let society self-destruct around them as long as they could do a little dance, make a little love, and get down while wearing abysmal gold lame pantsuits and funky-ass medallions. Even punk rock was still in it's largely nihilistic, somewhat mindless phase, having not yet rooted itself in he more socially and politically active style of punk that would rise up during the 1980s, thanks in no small part to having targets as massive and glaring as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Ahh yes, where would punk rock be without them?

Everything was, in a word, insane.

So imagine, if you will, that you are walking home one night. It's late, and you are in a hurry. You know you shouldn't, but you decide to cut across the park to make your walk shorter. You slip from the safe orange glow of street lights into the enveloping shadows of the park. Trees and darkness. You quicken your pace a little, and suddenly realize someone is behind you. Your stomach turns; the bottom seems to drop out. You hurry, take a few turns here and there, and they are still there. Definitely following you. You try to cast a quick glance back without being too obvious.

There seem to be five of them. Maybe more hiding in the night. You try to shake them, try to find spots you think might have other people in them. No luck. Finally, you find yourself cornered. They are right behind you, and you must turn to face them.

They stand there, silently, clad entirely in baseball uniforms, wielding bats, faces painted up like multi-colored mimes. You realize with horror that you are not just in trouble, you are in The Warriors.

The Warriors is a difficult film to figure out. On the one hand, few films have plotted out New York's geography as well and as accurately as this. You have films like Ultimate Warrior starring Yul Brynner where he walks out of the New York Public Library and is down by the Canal Street subway station. I guess if you don't live in New York, it's no big deal, but for those of us who are here it's a source of annoyance and amusement. The Warriors understands New York geography in a way that could only be expressed by a native. No one else can understand how incredibly difficult it can be to get around in this city, how it can take an entire day of trains and walking to get from one end of town to the other, let alone from The Bronx to Coney Island. It's even more impressive when you learn that almost all the underground subway shots (they run above ground in Brooklyn and The Bronx) were done in one spot (72nd street on the West Side).

The Warriors turns New York's layout into a character. That's very clever. This movie could only happen in New York. It's similar to what was done in Across 110th Street where the film depicts how incredibly difficult, for both physical and sociological reasons, it can be to simply cross the street into another neighborhood. New York is full of invisible walls. Most of the time, there is no buffer zone. The ritzy upscale neighborhoods of 86th and Park are no more than a couple blocks, just a few minutes walking time, from the Harlem ghettos. Yet never the twain shall meet. The barriers are there, even if you can't see them.

In that sense, The Warriors is a work of absolute genius. No other film has so perfectly captured the feeling of frustration and helplessness that comes from something as simple as waiting for your train or getting dumped in a completely unfamiliar part of town. If you don't live here, you can't understand how huge the city is and how it can make what would be a simple, five minute drive anywhere else into a day long journey into the bizarre.

On the other hand, no film is as outlandishly unrealistic as The Warriors when it comes to depicting street gangs. I mean, the gang of purple pimps? The gang of mimes? The Gramercy Riffs all in their silk pajamas and kungfu shirts? The Baseball Furies? Granted, I wasn't living in New York in 1979, but I have a feeling some of these gangs might be just a little off the wall, even for New York.

Anyway, to really dig into this film, you can go way beyond New York and look at Ancient Greece. I know, I know. Right now, you're going "Watchoo tawkin' 'bout, Keith?" in your best Gary Coleman voice. But dig it, baby: this cat named Homer wrote himself a couple yarns called The Iliad and The Odyssey. Or so they say. Fact of the matter is that the two stories are so amazingly different from one another (one being a very straight-forward historical war story, the other being a wild hallucinogenic fantasy) that a lot of learned elders doubt they are both the work of Homer. It possible that Homer, blind epic poet that he was, was a master of multiple genres. It's possible that he wrote The Odyssey while suffering from a terrible fever or after licking toads or something. And it's possible that the stories were written by two completely different people. We may never know for sure.

As you should all know, no matter what country you are from, The Odyssey is the story of Ulysses, a soldier who is returning home with his crew from the Trojan War, where they did this really cool thing with a giant wooden badger. On the way back to his home turf, he gets sidetracked (the heroic way of saying "lost") and ends up going on an ... ummm ... well, an odyssey where he has to fight all sorts of fanciful creatures, flirt with harpies, you know -- Greek hero stuff. Eventually, he makes his way home with the survivors of his crew, only to find himself a changed man.

The Warriors is the story of Swan, a soldier who is returning home with his crew from a big gang meeting in The Bronx. On the way back to his home turf, he gets sidetracked and ends up going on an odyssey where he has to fight all kinds of fanciful gang members, avoid The Lizzies, you know -- New York gang guy stuff. Eventually he makes it back to his turf with the survivors of his crew only to find himself a changed man.

If it isn't a direct retelling of the classic tale,it's certainly inspired by it, and a testament to how ingrained Homer's epic has become in our society. The 1970s were full of "weird trip" movies like this and Apocalypse Now in which seemingly recognizable surroundings slowly melt away and become nightmarish alien landscapes, just familiar enough to us to be that much more unnerving. Of course, this could also be because the writers were dropping lots of acid, but I like to think it was Homer, who -- if you read The Odyssey -- may have dropped a little acid (or the ancient Greek equivalent) himself. And plus, by connecting The Warriors to The Odyssey, you can thus claim that in an indirect way, The Warriors is an adaptation of James Joyce's classic novel Ulysses, which was based abstractly on the journeys of Ulysses from The Odyssey. This can come in really handy if you have a serious literature paper to write but feel like writing about The Warriors instead.

But wait! There's more! The real source material for The Warriors is yet another ancient Greek story, The Anabasis by Xenophon. This one tells of a small platoon of Greek soldiers who are hired to fight in the Persian War. When their benefactor is murdered (his name, I do believe, was Cyrus), they must fight their way back to their territory against seemingly insurmountable odds. Between the two stories, you should have plenty of material for a paper.

Okay, so onto the next bit of back story. I love writing about this movie because there is so much going on with it. When it was finished in 1979, The Warriors was very nearly banned. There were reports of gang violence and bloodshed at screenings in New York. Turns out just about all these reports were fabrication on the part of a group of censorship nuts who simply didn't want the film to be released. Those of you who are my age will remember a similar brouhaha when Colors was released several years later, with the main difference being that then there really was gang violence. Plus, Colors sucked.

Other reports scolded the film for using real gangs in the shooting (the shooting of film, that is), thus perpetuating the feeling that it was cool to be in a gang. In fact, just about everyone in The Warriors was a Broadway/off Broadway dancer. Members of one real gang were included in the film because the film makers accidentally spray-painted a giant "Warriors" prop tag on the real gang's tag down at Coney. This pissed the gang off, and in order to keep them happy, they were given parts in the film. That's diplomacy!

So, onto the film! Michael Beck plays Swan, the "war chief" of a Coney Island gang called The Warriors. You may think that a gang whose home turf is an amusement park is sort of weak, but you probably haven't seen Coney Island. That place makes the worst parking lot carnival seem as clean and safe as Disneyworld. I mean, these days the freak show features Coco the Killer Clown, a midget in face paint who earned his stage name by actually doing time for murder.

Swan, along with eight other members of the gang, are heading up to Van Cortland Park in The Bronx for a big meeting of all the major and semi-major gangs in the city. For those of you unfamiliar with New York City, Coney Island to Van Cortland Park is a long-ass way, probably a few hours by train.

The meeting is being held at the bequest of Cyrus, the James Brown-esque leader of the city's most powerful and organized gang, the Gramercy Riffs. I'm not sure if the Riffs are actually from Gramercy. It's a small area, fairly upscale, and I don't think all the Riffs could fit there. Incidentally, this movie is a lot more fun if you get yourself a New York City subway map and play along! Anyway, if the Gramercy Riffs actually are from Gramercy, I wonder why the hell they would want to hike all the way up to Van Cortland Park for a meeting. It would have been closer to actually go down to Coney with The Warriors. Then, after the meeting, all the gang guys could ride the Wonder Wheel together. Oh, what fun they would have!

Cyrus' plan is to keep up a truce between all street gangs and unite them to take over the city. As he says, there are at least 60,000 assorted gang members and hangers-on, while there are only 20,000 cops. He also says "Can you dig it!?!?!" a lot in this weird sort of offkey way, sort of like the same weird offkey way Hacksaw Jim Duggan chants "USA!" Most of the gangs at the meeting are pretty into the plan, maybe because they see the Gramercy Riffs are powerful enough to have matching silk robes and slippers.

But all parties have a spoil sport. This time, it's David Patrick Kelly, starring as a greasy, wormy little guy. David Patrick Kelly would go on to appear in many roles as a greasy, wormy little guy, including the Arnold Swarzennegger film Commando ("remember when I said I would kill you last? I lied."), and the David Lynch projects Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks. On the flip side, Michael Beck, who plays Swan, was pegged as the break-out star of the film. People expected big things from him, and they might have gotten them had Beck not gone on to appear in the abysmal Olivia Newton John disco film Xanadu and the even more abysmal but infinitely more entertaining big-budget sci-flop Megaforce. After those two bombs, Beck's career was pretty much dead before it ever really began.

David Kelly is a member of a greaser gang called The Rogues. He decides, for no real reason, that he's going to shoot and kill Cyrus, which he does. In the ensuing madness (imagine stirring up shit on a playground full of 900 assorted gang members, some of them dressed up as mimes), Kelly manages to pin the blame for the shooting on Cleon, the leader of The Warriors. No one really knows what happened, but Kelly manages to start a fight that ends up with poor Cleon being pummeled by some Riffs as the cops descend on the place and 900 gang members scramble to get the hell out of there. We never do find out exactly what happens to Cleon, but we can safely bet that it wasn't too pretty.

Swan and the rest of the representatives from The Warriors high tail it through the scenic Woodlawn Cemetery to try and get back to their train without getting busted by the cops. At this point, they have no idea that Cyrus' death is being pinned on them. They also don't know if the truce is still on or not. When they find a gang of multi-racial skinheads standing between them and their train, they are able to figure out the thing about the truce.

Thus the premise for the film is established: The Warriors have to fight their back to Coney Island. Along the way, gang after freakish gang rumbles with them, all looking for the honor of being the gang that delivered The Warriors to the Riffs. The gangs start out pretty normal, but as the long night goes on, they get weirder and weirder. At first you have The Turnbull ACs (the skinhead guys). Then there's The Orphans, a no-name gang in The Bronx who are so low on the food chain that they didn't even get invited to the big meeting. And then, toward the end of the night, you start getting The Lizzies and The much-talked-about Baseball Furies, who of course, must be seen to be believed. They were actually played by the film's stunt crew.

Rumbles, track fires, and the insurmountable geography of New York City all add to the trouble. The Warriors also pick up an antagonistic tag-along woman after they take care of The Orphans. She is played by Deborah Van Valkenburgh, who would later appear in the decent Streets of Fire where Willem Dafoe wears garbage bag cover-alls, and the TV show Too Close For Comfort where Jim J. Bullock would act gay and Ted Knight would mumble and humph a lot and go "Munroe, have you been messing Cosmic Cow again?" Ummm, needless to say, The Warriors is her best work.

In fact, just about everyone is good. There are some wooden performances, but for the most part, this cast of unknowns and almost-were's delivers the goods in a believable way. Everyone from Swan down to the goofy looking leader of The Orphans is believable. The film also features James Remar as hot-headed Warrior Ajax. He's probably had the most consistent career, appearing in such films as Mortal Kombat II as Raydeen, the remake of Psycho, The Quest starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Band of the Hand (a personal favorite of mine, and one we should get to soon), and various other things. Look, I said he had a consistent career; I didn't say he was in good movies.

Director Walter Hill handles everything amazingly. The film is out-of-control enough to be exciting and fun, but it's restrained and subtle enough to make its point without being heavy-handed, and to be able to deliver some truly incredible scenes. He has exactly the right amount of violence, and he places it in exactly the right places. The fight with The Baseball Furies is great, and the fight in the Union Square subway station is even better. Hill would go on to make the excellent Southern Comfort a couple years later, and then hit the big time with 48 Hours. His career has sort of faltered in recent years, but making The Warriors is all he ever really had to do to win my admiration.

Michael Beck's acting is understated but powerful. It's a technique few people pull off well. Michael Beck and Clint Eastwood do it well. Chuck Norris does it poorly. I leave it up to you to determine the differences. Deborah Van Valkenburgh is also superb as the sassy trouble-maker who buries her pain and disappointment with life under a life of easy sex and violence. The supporting cast ranges from passable to excellent. Of course, I'm a big fan of The Lizzies, the all girl gang who tangle with some of The Warriors down in the East Village. And we all love The Baseball Furies. That's like liking Harpo Marx or Curly. It's simply a given, and you cannot fight it. I have to say, though, I'd be pretty happy get offed by The Lizzies. I'd feel like a real chump if the Baseball Furies kicked my ass, though.

One of the best scenes comes after a rumble in the Union Square subway station with a goofy gang of over-all wearing meatheads, not too far at all from where I used to live (to think I was probably just a few blocks down from The Lizzies ... sigh). Swan, Mercy (Deborah Van Valkenburgh), and the other Warriors who have survived the night, are on the train when a group of giggling kids on their way home from the prom stumble onto the train. At first, the kids don't notice The Warriors and Mercy. Eventually, they catch on that a bad-ass, beat-up, bloody and exhausted street gang is sitting with them. The kids suddenly get quiet, and one of the guys does that nervous "hey man, what's up" nod and raising of the eyebrows.

Mercy looks at the girls in their formal wear, then at herself, wearing a torn-up old skirt and covered in dirt and grime from fighting and hiking down dirty subway tunnels. She moves to fix her hair, ashamed suddenly of her appearance, but Swan stops her. She closes her eyes, as if trying awake from a nightmare. At the next stop, the kids decide to go ahead and get off the train. When Mercy opens her eyes, they are gone.

One of the girls, however, drops her corsage on the way out. As The Warriors, ragged and bruised, finally reach Coney Island, Swan picks up the corsage and gives it to Mercy. It's a single tender moment in an otherwise relentlessly downbeat and brutal film. That alone makes the moment all the more powerful. I don't why it's my favorite scene in the whole movie, but it is.

When Swan and The Warriors finally make it back to Coney, the sun is just beginning to come up. It's the first daylight scene in the entire movie. originally, director Walter Hill shot an additional opening scene that took place during the day, but later removed it so that the entire would be one long, harrowing night, with the only daylight coming at the very end. A perfect decision, a moment of brilliance. Unfortunately, in the broadcast television version of the film, the scene is stuck back in to fill in time lost by cutting out some suggestive lesbian dancing that The Lizzies do during their part of the film. The flow of the film is only slightly hurt, but it's definitely much better with no light until they, quite literally, finally reach the end of the tunnel.

Of course, waiting at Coney for them are The Rogues, anxious to make sure The Warriors are dead. There's never really any explanation as to why David Patrick Kelly and The Rogues have it in for The Warriors. They just do. Maybe for no reason other than Cleon happened to be one of the first men at Cyrus' side, and thus was an easy target to point at. Maybe, like Cyrus' killing, it was just random.

Anyway, it gives David Patrick Kelly a chance to do the movie's most famous bit, as he sits in his car with bottles stuck on his fingers, clinking them together and chanting "Warriors, come out to play-yay!" over and over as The Warriors grab bottles and pipes for their one, last rumble.

Even worse than The Rogues, though, are The Riffs, who have also made the long trip down to Coney to settle a score.

There's some really amazing stuff in the final scene. Swan and Mercy stand on the dirty Coney Island beach, surrounded by trash and staring off at the ocean as the sun rises. "We fought all night to get back to this?" Swan says. "Maybe I'll just take off."

When Mercy says she'd like to come with him since she loves traveling.

"Where have you ever been?" Swan asks.

"I never been anywhere," she replies. "I just know I would like it."

Swan smiles. It's the first and only time he does it. Another great moment. It perfectly sums up the plight of the people in the film. Trapped in a prison from which there is often no escape. If you live here, you know how it can be, how difficult it can be to simply leave. I know people who have lived here and never been outside the burroughs. I know some who have been here and never even seen the world very far beyond their own little neighborhood. Their own piece of turf. There in lies the message of The Warriors, as summed up by Warrior member as he and the rest of the survivors watch the sun come up: "Cyrus was right. It's all there." Only Cyrus was talking about more than turf; he was talking about life. It's all there for the taking; you just have to reach out and take it.

The Warriors, quite simply, is a classic of the action genre, and a film that anyone who wants to be well-schooled in bad-ass cinema should check out. Most people, including critics, sell these films incredibly short. More times than not, films like The Warriors are more moving, more intelligent, and more important than any Oscar winner could ever hope to be. There is a grimy reality to the film, even when it's at its most fantastical. It's tense, nerve-wracking, and thoroughly engrossing. It's a perfect example of everything that can be right with an action film, and conversely, everything that is wrong with action films today.

It's driven by characters. The plot is simple enough: get back to Coney Island when every gang in the city is gunning for you. There are no special effects, no spectacular stunts (though there is plenty of fighting). The film rests entirely upon the shoulders of its cast of unknown,s and they deliver wonderfully, and without resorting to contrived, so-called "clever" dialogue. Which is not to say the film is stupid; it's simply realistic in its portrayal of humans. Character-driven action is something, sadly, of the past in this day of brainless, formulaic blockbusters filled with computer effects. The Warriors is about people. It revolves around these people. It's their job to make the movie good, to make it meaningful. And they do it.

Labels: Action, Year: 1979