THE WARRIORS (1979)

In the extras for this director Walter Hill describes this as essentially a comic book in live action form, which it is, and a good one too. He also says that it’s based on an incident from ancient Greek history. * I have some doubts that even now they’d be trotting this one out to show high school classes to help bring the subject of history to life, but Walter’s apparently right on the money there too.

Comic books, like myths and legends, tend to be about archetypes, and work on a broad brush-stroke kind of level. The concept of hero and villain, and the basics of the story are more vital to the enterprise than finer shadings, painstakingly detailed plot development and a lot of furrowed-brow committee meetings on the subject of plausibility. In other words, the combination of the two areas is a natural, in the unlikely motion picture event that you’ve got someone in charge of the project who knows what they’re doing, and the even more unlikely event that they are surrounded by people who are sympathetic to their goal.

Anyway, that’s what happens in The Warriors. The dialogue is craptastic throughout, the acting mostly comes in various flavours of balsa wood, and, in combination they routinely hit notes that sound like a xylophone with various keys replaced at random by old steel beer cans. None of this matters. All that’s allowed to matter is The Story, The Form, and The Pacing. The Form is epic, man. The Form is a real city shot and lit to look like a parody of a real city constructed out of the wilder samples in a paint company’s brochure. The Form is your classic case of a group of outnumbered heroes beset by absolutely everything else in the picture that isn’t bathroom fittings or asphalt.

The Pacing has one gear, which is non-stop.

The Story is that there are a number of highly unlikely costumed and themed gangs in New York City, all constantly at each others’ throats over turf wars, and possibly the constant arguments over where to buy the best pizza. A kind of council meeting is called by the largest and best organised of the gangs, The Riffs. (I guess Jimmy Page and Ritchie Blackmore are associate members.) The leader of the Riffs is shot, and the blame is put on our hee-roes, The Warriors. They then have to make their way back to their own Coney Island turf, not only pursued by The Riffs, and the police, but by every other gang in the city.

That’s the whole deal, and it’s all you need. The thing just goes, and the thing just works and that’s all there is to it. A whole movie of pure surface tension.

Just as well too, because so much of The Warriors is pure cheese, which is another of its considerable pleasures. Those gangs. Those outfits. At the big council of war deal near the start, there are some real pearlers for the speedy of eye. There’s apparently a gang who dress up as Marcel Marceau. I guess they’re the Walking Into Imaginary Wind gang, or maybe the Men Trapped Inside Invisible Telephone Booths. There’s the frightening mob who all wear bright yellow matching silk-look baseball jackets – presumably the Closet Gay Gang Who Doesn’t Know It Yet. In the body of the picture, the most unforgettable are the guys in full baseball outfits with mis-applied KISS make-up, or as I prefer to think of them, the “I Want to Home Run All Nite (and Bunt Every Day)” Gang. But not to be underrated are the guys in roller skates who wear overalls and have British soccer player 70s hair. You can imagine how much of an advantage roller skates would give you in a street fight. Who wears overalls as leisure-wear anyway? Well, yeah, I know, but what GUYS wear overalls as leisure-wear?

The dialogue appears to veer in and out of the 1950s and 1960s, give or take some swearing and kneecap-obvious sexual references. This is even strangely appropriate, in a cloth-eared variant on genre (and era)-hopping synchronicity. In a lot of ways, in tone, The Warriors is a juvenile delinquent picture from the 50s, and a lot of the rest of it is West Side Story minus the music. Actually it’s probably at least as much a musical without people singing and dancing on screen as it is Greek tragedy-gone-gang movie. The singing stays on the soundtrack and off the screen, and the dancing is enacted by way of modified movie kung fu involving bats, knives, and metal pipes, but the smell of Broadway pervades the nostrils nonetheless.

I don’t know what to say about the acting in this, at least when any can be detected. By conventional standards a lot of it reeks of stinkitude, but the dialogue would have stymied an Olivier, and given that conventional standards of dialogue and acting have nothing whatsoever to do with what makes this movie work, it’s not anything worth losing sleep over. More importantly it’s nothing you’ll gain sleep over.

Deborah Van Valkenburgh, as the love interest who blows in for no apparent reason about 20 minutes into the picture, does some major eye and lip work in putting a little flesh on the bones of her character against all likely odds. David Patrick Kelly steals any acting side of the movie as the degenerate, insane leader of the main heel group, The Rogues. You haven’t seen a winningly demented performance like this since Sam Neill starred in that famous advertising campaign for red meat, including him peering through suburban lounge-room windows and manifesting himself up a tree. Mercedes Ruehl has a small bit in there, and is effective as usual. James Remar plays the malcontent in The Warriors gang like a somewhat surlier version of Reggie from The Archies. Some of you folks also may have seen him do some acting in the TV show Dexter, where he plays Dexter’s adoptive dad. Actually he’s less cardboard-flavoured than most of The Warriors troupe.

Of the latter it must be said that a girlier group of street fightin’ cummerbunds would be difficult to imagine. Between the fluting voices, the general knees-a-knockin’ attitude to any threat of violent activity and the whining and moping they get up to throughout, you’d figure that most under-age netball teams could give them a fair run for their money in a knockdown, drag-out brawl. It’s a considerable tribute to Walter Hill’s skill as director that we continue to care about The Warriors as a gang. Particularly because, on a character by character basis, they give up personality points to the anonymous kids who used to sit up the back in Welcome Back, Kotter. In fact they could have had the Sweathogs from that show play The Warriors, and the only difference anyone would have noticed was the improvement, and Freddie “Boom Boom” Washington saying “Hi there” a lot, out of context.

In some ways, it’s a cheesy action-movie of the period, with more than accidental similarities to the general feel and iconography of the kung fu movies of the 70s. (Have a gander at the wide shots of The Riffs in their home cavern/basement thingo, and also what the more senior Riffs guys are wearing – it’s multi-coloured Dimmey’s silk dressing downs for everybody. Not to mention the fairly hilariously cack-handed fighting styles on display in the action scenes. This is not so much kung fu, as it is what Benny Hill so frequently summarised as: “It’s not egg, it’s not young, it’s just foo.”)

What makes it transcend generic limitations is that, in spite of the story’s origins in Greek history/legend, and the avowed comic book sensibility, it’s one of the moviest movies that ever movied. It really couldn’t have worked in any other medium anywhere near as well. By an effort of will, and single-minded belief in his concept (well, and talent to execute it as conceived) Hill transforms drek into myth, and a cheese-platter into pure movie. The result isn’t a great picture, but it’s a one-off, and distinctive and memorable, and it’s kind of a great achievement anyway.

Just one other little sourball to break up the general love-in here. For some reason – certainly not readily apparent to the viewer of the finished product – the sequences are framed by a visual device which literally uses comic book imagery as transitions. That is, panels, borders, narrative and dialogue balloons, and images kind of stationary-rotoscoped which transform live-action to drawings and back again. It’s kind of neat looking, and completely intrusive. It knocks the viewer out of the movie time and again, and as it isn’t really intended as ironic commentary – at least it doesn’t work that way – it’s difficult to work out what it was intended to achieve. Basically, if the viewer gets it’s kind of comic-booky, they already know that, and if they don’t, why dwell on it? As the great popular culture analyst Daffy Duck once so eloquently put it: “Don’t be so danged literal.” **

However, The Warriors sucks you in all the way (maybe a slight slackening of the girdle of tension during the last ten minutes or so, but still), and between the howlingly empty streetscape, only populated by colour-coordinated gang members, and the intermittently annoying and thoroughly dated synthesiser score that nonetheless, still keeps the tension itching away at the skull, it has a breathless, airless, eerie feel that will stay with you. It’s dated but timeless, it’s trash but great trash, and it took me nearly thirty years to see it, but I’m telling you not to wait so long.

(9 out of 11 Margaret Pomerantz Heads on a Hubcap)

* (The version I’m talking about is a 2005 “Director’s Cut” reissue.)

** (I have no idea where the comic book style visual insertions were in the originally-released version, or whether it’s something Hill always intended that were inserted into his “Ultimate Director’s Cut” version at a later date. Other than the introductory illustration and narration (Hill’s voice if I’m not mistaken), as far as Unca Leapster is concerned, they could have left the lot out and only improved the picture.)

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