Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Conservatives -- though, surprisingly, not Ronald Reagan -- weren't the only ones up in arms. "The Warriors" was greeted by the critical establishment as if a cold, wet corpse had been dumped on its doorstep. The New York Times and the Village Voice, which supposedly represent both the establishment and alternative ends of the critical spectrum, were, on this occasion, in agreement: They hated it. A review from Desmond Ryan of the Philadelphia Inquirer was typical of responses from daily papers: "'The Warriors,' a sickening film that glorifies gang warfare and brutal violence ... has left a bloody trail of real-life mayhem and death in its wake ... In hundreds of cities across the U.S., the depraved violence shown in this movie has been blamed for inciting young people to fight, rampage and kill, in obvious imitation of the hoodlum gang members in 'The Warriors.'"
Ryan's near-hysteria wasn't entirely based on urban legend. There were numerous reports of violence around the country where the film was showing, though the most publicized incident was the murder of a 16-year-old boy in Dorchester, Mass.; the accused killer, a gang member, was later proved to have been drunk and asleep while the movie was showing. Paramount, perhaps in reaction to the negative publicity, quickly yanked the original posters, which featured a hoard of gang members from the movie with the legend, "These are the armies of the night" -- take that, Norman Mailer. "They are 100,000 strong. They outnumber the cops five to one. They could run New York City." Some theater owners refused to display the poster; the fantasy hit too close to home.
Kael's review in the March 5, 1979, New Yorker surprised serious moviegoers by turning the principal argument against the film on its head. Essentially she admitted that the primary criticism of the film was true: "The Warriors" does glorify violence, and aren't we lucky that it does? And isn't the glorification of ugly reality what movies are all about?
"The Warriors," she wrote, "is a real moviemaker's movie: it has in visual terms [emphasis Kael's] the kind of impact that 'Rock Around the Clock' did behind the titles of 'Blackboard Jungle.' 'The Warriors' is like visual rock ... 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 so exhilaratingly visceral, and so contrapuntal in the Oriental-martial-art-dancing manner that you have no thought of pain or gore."
Sparked by Kael's review, a fascinating small body of criticism has collected around "The Warriors." In his book "The Blood Poets: A Cinema of Savagery, 1958-1989," film critic Jake Horsley praised the film for being "one of the first American movies to come up with a genuine comic book nihilism, to sell us the sheer joy of destruction." Horsley gets to the heart of the film's appeal: "These Warriors aren't rebels, exactly, and if they're wild, it's not for any particular reason (they were simply born that way); they're not kicking against anything, they're just kicking."
For newcomers, the special edition DVD explains the near-fanaticism that "The Warriors" has inspired. Laszlo's color photography, drab in recent TV broadcasts (like the current TBS showings) is once again vivid and lurid, and the sound is so sharp you can hear a baseball bat slither through the palm of a Fury. Hill (who once told an interviewer he had aspirations of being a comic book illustrator) returns to the Classics Illustrated conceit, framing the opening scene in animated panels. He also freezes the final frame of some scenes and segues into the next, underlining the point that what follows is not to be mistaken for realism.
Despite the plethora of articles to the contrary, "The Warriors" doesn't have much to do with real street gangs, then or now. For that matter, despite its legendary status as the ultimate New York street gang movie, it really doesn't have that much to do with New York. Hill, a Californian, knew little about the city and thus was able to re-create it with a sense of fantasy where a New York filmmaker, say, the Martin Scorsese of "Mean Streets," would have gone for realism. Hill didn't see New York as New York but as a giant movie set. The Warriors go to a gang meeting supposedly in the North Bronx (actually shot in Riverside Park); the cops arrive, a riot ensues, and the Warriors flee to a nearby Bronx cemetery (actually Greenwood cemetery in Brooklyn); the nerve center station at Union Square was really the cavernous Hoyt and Schermerhorn Street station in downtown Brooklyn. "The Warriors" is a feast of visual guessing games for long-time New Yorkers.
For all its effective use of location shots, though, "The Warriors" seems to take place not in a real city but in some weird alternative universe populated almost entirely by street gangs and cops. There probably are no more than two dozen average citizens in the entire film, all of them glimpsed from a ghostly distance. The streets of this New York are not merely devoid of traffic, but of parked cars (except as needed to toss a Molotov cocktail at). In Yurick's novel a man yells at the gang, "You punks think you own the street!" In Hill's movie, the gangs own all the streets -- or at least they do at night.
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