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NEW YORK, NEW YORK:
FILMS SELECTED BY THE NEW YORK FILM CRITICS CIRCLE
February 23-March 31, 2002

Saturday, March 23, 2002

2:00 p.m. - THE WARRIORS, Introduced by Jonathan Foreman
(Paramount,1979, 93 mins. Directed by Walter Hill. With Michael Beck, James Remar.)

I haven't seen Walter Hill's The Warriors in many years, but the impression it made on me as a teenager was so vivid I feel I hardly need to: Who could forget the confrontations in abandoned, grafitti-covered subway stations, the flight through an endless Central Park, the baseball bat gang with their dual-color face paint? Then there was the controversy the film provoked at the time-and which contributed to its cult status: like Clockwork Orange, The Warriors was said to have inspired copycat gang violence, and there was a move to ban it in the UK.

Since then the film's gangland motifs have been borrowed again and again-whether by the makers of the Michael Jackson's Bad or Walter Hill himself in Streets of Fire. But the original is a uniquely frightening and thrilling fantasy of youthful violence and urban malaise that is all the more remarkable for its classical inspiration. The plot is loosely based on Xenephon's Anabasis-the true story of 10,000 Greek mercenaries fighting their way back to the sea through hostile Persia nearly two and a half thousand years ago. To be sure the dialogue and the acting in The Warriors can be cheesy, But the wonderful cinematography by Andrew Laszlo makes the most of the real New York locations and natural light favored by Hill. And in the end The Warriors manages to capture something real and harrowing about New York at the depth of its late seventies decline while depicting it in a willfully distorted, exaggerated way. Set in a bleak near future it combines late 70s myths about the city and its gangs with similar myths from the nineteenth century. The result is a dream of New York that tells you more about how it felt than how it really was.
-Jonathan Foreman, The New York Post