| Chris Polley |
The Warriors plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, January 31st, through Sunday, February 2nd. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information.
“The neighborhood hasn’t really changed that much,” NYPD Detective William McQueen said to The New York Times in 1979 for a story about record-breaking violent crime in the Big Apple. He added, “Homicides seem to be the thing we have the least control over. Burglaries and robberies are controllable, but most of the homicides take place behind closed doors, often in moments of passion and out of the view of police.”[1]
Earlier that same year, a box office hit about criminals on the fringes of society in NYC became a controversial litmus test of sorts. Either the gang member characters centered in Walter Hill’s 1979 pulpy action flick The Warriors were, like the aforementioned real-life murders, largely out of view of not only the authorities but middle America as a whole, or they were celebrated and empathized with by a seething underclass and its allies. The latter group arguably saw the broken promise of the American dream in the death and decay of its greatest city, and it’s inarguably cathartic to see that representation on screen in a manner that doesn’t paint them with a broad brush as throw-away thugs who lack interiority or moral code.
Based on a novel of the same name, which is itself very reminiscent of a mish-mash of Greek war stories and myths (a resemblance that drew Hill to the project in the first place after completing his existential crime thriller The Driver), The Warriors is one-of-a-kind, pure entertainment that doubles as a vital warning about choosing chaos over order, and how the two are sometimes mistaken for each other. In its first act, Hill introduces not just the titular gang but countless others who send representatives to a peaceful conclave in the Bronx led by an enigmatic but charismatic leader named Cyrus (Roger Hill) who is rallying all creeds, cliques, and turf guardians to agree to a truce in order to plan a coordinated rebellion against the NYPD. Here, a crazed face in the crowd (Luther, played with iconic intensity by David Patrick Kelly) suddenly assassinates Cyrus mid-speech. Quick to shift the blame to avoid repercussions, Luther identifies the Warriors as the culprits, sending our ensemble protagonists on the run. Sure that word will get out to every gang in every borough in no time, our de facto heroes must face an epic, unarmed journey back to their home of Coney Island.
Hill’s script, co-written with David Shaber, is a sly and energetic work that could have easily been a staid exercise resembling a picture book, wherein the leads meet and face off with a different colorful group and then move on, unfazed, until a logical conclusion. Instead, it careens so jaggedly and yet effortlessly from locale to locale with a pulsing sense of neon dread that it has become one of the most rewatchable camp classics of its decade. And yet, every frame also bristles with a tense uncertainty about how adjacent this fiction is to reality. Jason Bailey, author of Fun City Cinema: New York City and the Movies that Made It, describes Hill’s semi-dystopian vision for the film’s setting in an interview with the BBC: “It was five minutes into the future and showed what New York could become if it continued on its current path of high crime and social unrest.”[2] If The Warriors is dark fantasy, then perhaps especially in 2025, we can understand (and maybe appreciate?) how darkly fantastical the world can get.
Part of that simultaneous youthful adventure and unnerving bleakness comes in its casting of the eponymous gang: unforgettable character actor James Remar as homophobic weak link Ajax, Marcelino Sánchez as effete outsider Rembrandt, David Harris as the stern and inscrutable Cochise, the Pesci-esque Terry Michos as kind-eyed underling Vermin, and Michael Beck as the secretly tender-hearted gang leader Swan. Beck spoke to NME about the film’s cult status and everlasting appeal, saying, “We all have those dreams or nightmares where we are innocent, falsely accused, and there’s an unrelenting force out there trying to take us out, and all we’re trying to do is find a place that’s safe.”[3] Perhaps Beck could even be persuaded today, eight years after this interview, that this relatable feeling is no longer reserved for the unconscious dreamworld.
The grotesque and the absurd, The Warriors seems to remind, are pleasures just as much as they are frights, though—at least through the harmless veneer of celluloid. Charles Bramesco writes for The Guardian on the movie’s 40th anniversary, “Hill posited a fantasy of New York living far removed from the seductive grime of its contemporary Taxi Driver, and even farther from the Giuliani-era metropolitan escapism of Sex and the City. The film’s attitude places it somewhere between the two, aware of the filth and degradation and nevertheless infatuated with it.”[4] The film’s New York is a haunted fun house mirror, yes, but the fear one feels before the relief of laughter is still a genuine one. The murky back-and-forth of the roller coaster known as collective trauma, where community is the light in the darkness of society, is encapsulated by Hill and cinematographer Andrew Laszlo with every subway confrontation and talk of home while under the threat of death.
This cognitive dissonance was difficult for the powers that be to stand behind, as accusations of everything from jumping turnstiles to murderous insurrection were lobbied at the film after its release, leading to Paramount Pictures pulling print advertising for the film even as it made them money. Hill provides a realistic, even warm explanation to Esquire of what The Warriors stood for in the midst of this moral panic: “This was a movie that accepted their [the Warriors’] values and essentially understood that a street gang was a defensive organization rather than an offensive one. It didn’t preach to them about middle-class values.”[5] This is, for all of the film’s exuberant rowdiness, key to understanding not just its immediate and enduring qualities, but what New York faced in the era of Ed Koch and what America faced on the precipice of Reagan, and—even thornier—what again NYC faces under the Adams administration and what the U.S. is up against in the beginning days of a second Trump presidency.
The final act of The Warriors brings, predictably but necessarily, our heroes face-to-face with Luther on their home turf of Coney Island. He’s followed them there as chaos tends to follow survivors, and here he reveals he didn’t have a reason for killing Cyrus. He did it because he likes doing things like that. Book and Film Globe reporter Rebecca Kurson interviewed Kelly about his role as Luther in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Kurson is astounded to learn that the man who once long ago inhabited a landmark chaos agent on the silver screen, is actually hopeful in mid-2020. Kurson attempts to summarize the conversation, stating, “Shockingly, you are feeling that this is actually a moment of change, rather than sort of despair.”[6] “Yes,” Kelly responds. “That’s the way I feel about it.” Of course, looking back now, things did get better.
Unfortunately, so many things got worse too. The kind of order that was both built to counteract the chaos and the tyranny in 1970s New York and the quasi-fictional world of The Warriors, however, can do the same today: build solidarity among the underclasses. Can you dig it?
Resources
1 Tony Schwartz, “Year’s 1,700 Homicides Break a Record,” The New York Times. 26 December 1979.
2 Gregory Wakeman, “The Warriors: The 1979 cult hit that shows an ultra-violent NY,” BBC. 9 February 2024.
3 Leonie Cooper, “The Warriors star Michael Beck on the cult ’70s movie that keeps thrilling fans,” NME. 1 March 2017.
4 Charles Bramesco, “The Warriors at 40: the enduring appeal of a New York classic,” The Guardian. 8 February 2019.
5 Jennifer M. Wood, “’Can You Dig It?’ The Warriors, 35 Years Later,” Esquire. 19 February 2014.
6 Rebecca Kurson, “David Patrick Kelly: Making the Scene,” Book and Film Globe. 16 July 2020.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon