The Graduate, Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Little Big Man, and other American films of the late sixties and early seventies which rejected middle-class values had a special appeal for middle-class college students. The anti-draft, anti-Vietnam counterculture took up movies in such a big way that it was sometimes called the film generation. By now, it's the "Masterpiece Theatre" generation. Some of the biggest recent hits have once again expressed—as movies did up through the fifties—the needs and fantasies of the people at the bottom of society. Tony Manero and Stephanie, of Saturday Night Fever, wanted to escape the coarseness and limitations of working-class life; they hoped to achieve the middle-class prerogatives that the college-educated anti-war audience held in cynical contempt (while, of course, enjoying them). And now, in The Warriors, the heroes are so far down in the social scale they can't even aspire to middle-classness—they envy it and hate it. What Tony and Stephanie are leaving behind is luxury compared with these heroes' welfare-gutted lives. With Walter Hill's The Warriors, movies are back to their socially conscious role of expressing the anger of the dispossessed. But this picture isn't a melodrama; it's a fantasy spectacle that has found its style in the taste of the dispossessed—in neon signs, graffiti, and the thrill of gaudiness. The Warriors enters into the spirit of urban-male tribalism and the feelings of kids who believe that they own the streets, because they keep other kids out of them. In this vision, cops and kids are all there is, and the worst crime is to be chicken. Paramount opened the picture in six hundred and seventy theatres, without advance press screenings, promoting it as an exploitation film, via a thumping TV commercial. Probably the assumption was that the audience for this picture doesn't read reviews. But the literate shouldn't miss out on it. The Warriors is a real moviemaker's movie: it has in visual terms the kind of impact that "Rock Around the Clock" did behind the titles of Blackboard Jungle. The Warriors is like visual rock.
At the opening, a lighted subway train—a many-eyed monster— moves toward us out of the darkness. The Wonder Wheel—the complicated old Ferris wheel at Coney Island—forms a pink-and-white pattern against black skies. The subway system is the central nervous system of the movie. Deserted subway stations are mysterious, cavernous, terror-filled places, with graffiti-covered trains pounding in and out. The film's atmosphere suggests the decadent nighttown feeling of Vienna in The Third Man, but in purplish tones. The Warriors is mesmerizing in its intensity. It runs from night until dawn, and most of the action is in crisp, bright Day-Glo colors against the terrifying New York blackness; the figures stand out like a jukebox in a dark bar. There's a night-blooming, psychedelic shine to the whole baroque movie. The story, which has a classic shape and suggests the Odyssey, is actually Xenophon's Anabasis retold in modern urban terms, and compressed, so that, like rock, it never lets up. The heroes—nine members of a Coney Island youth gang called the Warriors, wearing red-brown leather vests over bare skin—journey by subway to a foreign terrain, the Bronx. There, in a park amphitheatre, nine delegates each from a hundred youth gangs converge—every group in its own colors. Cyrus (Roger Hill), the head of the biggest of the gangs, the close-cropped paramilitary Riffs, has declared a truce for the purposes of this assembly, and the Riffs, in their orange karate jackets, patrol the meeting. Cyrus, his gold-and-burgundy robe gleaming in the moonlight, tells the crowd of his plan: that the gangs should organize their full membership of sixty thousand into a single gang and take over one borough at a time until they run the city, which has a police force of only twenty thousand. (Actually, twenty-four thousand.) To the boys yelling and waving their arms in approval, Cyrus seems inspired. But a psychotic—the head of the Rogues—shoots him, and the Warriors are mistakenly thought to be responsible. Pursued by the other gangs and by the police, they fight their way home through the city, which is laid out in primitive tribal patterns. Encountering one gang after another, they dart in and out of subway trains and stations while a rock-music d.j. on an all-night show broadcasts the word that they should be stopped.
In Sol Yurick's 1965 novel, on which the movie is based, the youngest of the heroes carried a comic-book version of Xenophon's account of how the Greek warriors, whose leader was killed in Persia, had to make their own way home. The movie is that comic book seen through the young reader's eyes: it's a slum kid's vivid fantasy of the hardships and adventures of a group of boys who have to prove their courage, their discipline, and their fighting skill to survive the night. The Warriors' torments are modern, mythic, surreal. Running from the Turnbull A.C.s—skinheads in overalls—they make it to the elevated; when they get to the Ninety-sixth Street station, there's the horror of realising that the train is being held. Each timt they have outwitted or fought off one gang, another turns up, in its colors and with its favored weapons. When the Baseball Furies—who have harlequin-painted faces (like the rock group Kiss) and are wearing baseball uniforms and carrying bats—catch up with them, it's a paranoid nightmare. Three of the Warriors are invited to party with some girls, then discover that these girls—so sensuous, so enticing—are the Lizzies, who are out to get them, too. A Warrior alone in the Union Square station sees a boy on skates who whizzes around, watching him, and we hear synthesized, high-pitched music; these Carol Reed-like touches presage the arrival of a switchblade-wielding gang. The Warriors have their losses (they don't all make it back), but they're tough, quick, resourceful fighters, who look after each other. If at the start of the picture they look like punks, by the end they're heroes.
Their long trip home is, however, tinged with a pathos that isn't comic-strip classical—it's Sol Yuricky. The members of each gang may fight to defend their own turf, but on a deeper level they know they don't own it. They don't own anything. This is an Anabasis of the despised, the lumpen. Like the novel, the movie endows their fighting with an existential rationale. Fighting means more to them than if they were actually defending their own land or property: fighting is its own reward—it ennobles them, and this macho pride is all they've got. And so the movie expresses something that's international: why the poorest boys of so many countries form disciplined, loyal tribal units and attack other boys as poor and scared and powerless as themselves. When the Warriors are told that they will be allowed to pass through an area without being attacked if they take off the vests that identify them, they refuse. Without that token of membership, they would have no proof of their manhood.
The physical action is so stylized that it has a wild cartoon kick to it, like Yojimbo and the best kung-fu movies. The fighting is exhilaratingly visceral, and so contrapuntal in the Oriental-martial-arts-dancing manner that you have no thought of pain or gore. The director, Walter Hill, is a fantasist, of a peculiarly violent yet abstract kind; each battle is different— spatially and kinetically—and tops the one before. Lighted in a different style, this movie might have been merely romantic pulp: it's the color itself that's violent. The purplish cheap-thrill color is as deep and strong as what cinematographers used to get when Technicolor was still Technicolor, and it gives off a hot glow against the darkness. Working with a ritualistic story, and in collaboration with the cinematographer, Andrew Laszlo (who also did the highly stylized work on the TV mini-series The Dain Curse), Hill achieves poetic power for the whole length of the movie. The Warriors run through a park that is all blackness except for the green trees and grass. When they run into a subway station through the territory of a gang called the Orphans, the streets are like wet greenish-black velvet. (About five minutes into this movie, you realize that it has the folkloric quality that The Wiz was trying to get at: the sleazy city as magical city, urban fear mythologized.) Hill's gift is for translating spectacle into action. His staging of the park assembly and then its disintegration into a riot, with the gangs swarming in all directions, is reminiscent of the Babylonian scenes of D. W. Griffith's Intolerance; his calling the head of the Riffs Cyrus (which is not the name Yurick used in the book but goes back to Xenophon) may also be an homage to Griffith's Cyrus the Great, who conquered Babylon. Hill's choreographed fights are certainly indebted to Peckinpah, for whom he wrote The Getaway; some of the tumbling, crashing bodies suggest variations on the fast cuts of fighting aboard the phantom fleet in Peckinpah's The Killer Elite.
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Walter Hill is one of the rare American directors who function better in abstract, patterned scenes than they do in conversational ones; in The Warriors, there's almost a formal break between the two. The camera doesn't move around in the action scenes to include what the characters say; instead, there's a cut to someone speaking—the dialogue has the effect of inserts. Most of the film was shot on New York locations at night, but the performances seem to be taking place in the void of a studio (which may in fact be the case). We never feel that we're just overhearing the Warriors; they're not talking to each other—they're talking to us, and, at the opening, one at a time. There's another, bigger problem: While Hill's martial-arts Expressionism suggests something that has never been seen before—a blending of Fritz Lang and kung fu—the characters take us back to the Dead End Kids and all their brothers in the socially conscious movies of the thirties, and to The Wild One and the other delinquency movies of the fifties. Hill doesn't allow the actors to overdramatize themselves in fifties style—to clown or be too ingratiating. On the contrary, he cools them out—keeps them at a respectful distance. They're handled like dancers; their faces are slightly impassive, and when they talk it's a little impersonal, like dance recitation. But they seem almost redundant—it's as if Hill's vision were complete without them, and he put them in just so we'd have some people on the screen to identify with. Since the characters don't seem integral to the conception, we aren't particularly drawn to them. As Swan, the blond war chief for the Warriors who takes command when the group's leader is killed, Michael Beck leaves us unsure whether Swan is meant to be as stoic and tight-mouthed as he's played. Swan lacks spirituality, and it takes a while to respond to him. With his broad, muscular neck, he's like a Joe Dallesandro who keeps in lean, fighting shape—a mixture of turn-off and turn-on. The other Warriors- white, black, Hispanic—are less forbidding, and we come to accept them all. Marcelino Sanchez, who plays the youngest, Rembrandt—named for his dexterity with a spray can—has an easy, natural manner; at the other extreme, David Harris, who wears a headband and a turquoise necklace, is such a fine-boned camera subject that he functions almost purely in graphic terms.
Even in the scripts Walter Hill wrote before he turned director, he didn't think in terms of character, and in his two earlier movies as a writer-director (Hard Times and The Driver) the motivation was primarily visual. As a director, he's like an addict hooked on visual effects—not a bad addiction for a movie director, but it can alter a novelist's conception in surprising ways. Hill shows only a half-hearted interest in the psychology of youth-gang members and in the psychology of violence itself, which are Yurick's primary concerns. The novel is like a description of a movie, but not necessarily this movie. Yurick's gang members are just kids, full of fear. They strike out with their fists and weapons before they can be struck. In the book, it's not a single psychotic who shoots the Cyrus- gangster- messiah figure; psychotics abound, and the discipline of staying quiet for Cyrus's speech is too much for almost everyone. A boy slaps at a mosquito; a fight breaks out; it turns into a general brawl. And when the prowl cars come toward the field and the boys hear the sirens, they don't know the way out, and they blame the orating messiah for trapping them. "From all around the field they aimed their guns at the circle of light. They fired." And in the panic of the police-car headlights and spotlights pouring down on them, they "pounded at one another, not only at enemies, but at friends, as if only terrific motion could make them feel less frightened." What the movie does is to shape gang warfare into a fantasy fulfillment: the Warriors become true warriors. (The title of the book is ironic and full of pity: the novel is a study in volatility—a man on the street who happens to look at one of the gang members in a way the boy doesn't like is stabbed and slashed by all of them.) The book is about real violence; the movie is about dissociated, comic-book violence. That may be why the characters' emotions, which are integral to Yurick's vision, seem an excrescence here—as if they were stuck in for redeeming social value.
There are attempts at characterization: As the psychotic assassin, David Patrick Kelly, who has the pointed nose and jutting square chin of a Mephisto, suggests a degenerate, comic version of Vic Morrow's villain back in Blackboard Jungle; when he beats out a rhythm with three bottles on his fingers, like castanets, he's a real manic cuckoo. And as a girl who joins the gang, Deborah Van Valkenburgh seems at first no more than an affected actress with twisted, pouty-smudgy lips, but her performance grows in quality; she even survives a sentimentalized confrontation of the haves and the have-nots in the subway when she looks at some dressed-up kids returning from a prom, and is conscious of her own deprivation and trampiness. Walter Hill, who had been in New York only a couple of times for brief visits before coming to start work on The Warriors, has a goof in this scene: prom kids wouldn't make eye contact with street punks. But maybe it's partly because Hill isn't a New Yorker that he is able to sustain the jumping excitement of this vision: he's seeing the city in his head. And his editor (David Holden) and art directors (Don Swanagan and Bob
Wightman) seem to know exactly what he's after. Many objections could be raised to the script (by David Shaber and Hill)—to devices such as that of the witness who arrives to tell the Riffs who really killed Cyrus, to the way the role of a policewoman is written (she gives the false impression that she will turn out to be a man in disguise), and to many overexplicit lines of dialogue. But the acid-rock score, by Barry De Vorzon, with its electric, third-rail sound, seems perfectly rhythmed to the images. I have just one small complaint about the music: when the d.j. (we only see her great red-lipped mouth) puts on "Nowhere to Run," couldn't it have been the original, by Martha and the Vandellas?
If there's one immutable law about movies, it may be that middle-class people get hot and bothered whenever there's a movie that the underclass really responds to. And there's also a reason for them to get upset: as Yurick indicates, when the underclass gathers, there's so much restlessness and psychosis that a mosquito can cause a murder. There have been violent incidents in theatres showing The Warriors, as there were in the fifties at Blackboard Jungle, and as there frequently are at theatres that run action movies. I saw The Warriors at an 11:15 p.m. show in a Broadway theatre, and the audience was so attentive to the movie it was hushed; it may have been the quietest late-night Broadway audience of my experience in recent years. I'm told that at theatres where the audience is all teen-agers they participate happily and noisily. But there's bound to be trouble in some places when a movie comes along that's bursting with energy and is set in the imaginary kids-and-cops city of youth.
[March 5, 1979)
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