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Walter Hill’s The Warriors was immediately controversial. It was accused of glorifying gang violence and the gang lifestyle. Several theatres screening it reported copycat incidents of violence and religious and community leaders denounced it.

Its original poster was thought so incendiary an incitement to youth hostility that it was withdrawn by the studio. Some urban administrators called for the film to be banned from cinema screening in their communities. In the years since, the film’s stature amongst audiences and critics grew and the film gradually became a bona-fide cult movie, with many staunch defenders. The initial controversy over the film’s violence was telling but ultimately unfounded. Although violent, the film could not be considered realistic in its depiction of such violence, nor even in its depiction of New York City and its gangland subculture. Thus, the film became appreciated as a highly stylized, almost fantasy vision of the urban landscape and drew favorable comparisons to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, director Hill drawing inspiration from both comic books and myth, in this case that of Xenophon’s Anabasis. With The Warriors and such early works as Hard Times, The Driver, Southern Comfort and The Long Riders culminating in the enormous box-office hit of 48 Hrs. Hill emerged as a major figure in the Hollywood scene. Of these early works, it is perhaps The Warriors which most endures.

Hill takes the Anabasis myth, about a group of vastly outnumbered and under-supplied soldiers having to fight their way home through hostile Persia and relocates it to a fantasized New York City.

One night in New York City, nine delegates from the Coney Island gang the Warriors make their way to Central Park for a vast assembly of similar delegates, called by the city’s largest gang, The Riffs, to hear a proposition. The Riffs’ leader suggests a truce: that they should combine their forces and enable one gang to take over the city and run it accordingly. However, a weapon is smuggled into the gathering and the leader is shot dead by a punkish gang member (David Patrick Kelly). One of the Warriors witnesses the shooting and flees into the crowd before Kelly can shoot him too. Hence, Kelly quickly blames the Warriors for the murder. When word reaches the main underground headquarters of the Riffs, their leaders offer a bounty for the Warriors. Unaware that they are now being hunted by every gang in the city, the Warriors hope to make the subway and catch a train back to Coney Island. After an encounter with one gang, they successfully catch the train only to find that a fire has sabotaged their progress. Now on foot, they venture into enemy territory and must face not only the varied gangs who inhabit this nocturnal terrain but also the police and the constantly prowling Kelly and his associates.

Set almost entirely at night, The Warriors is visually a nearly abstract contemplation of everyday urban shapes, the interplay of neon lights and colors amidst darkness and shadow, and the dynamics of people’s movement through this film noir world.

Even the costumes are otherworldly and outlandish, as each gang has its distinctive, uniformed look – group identity is expressed in a person’s look and actions. New York City is thus imbued with a sense of strangeness and unpredictability. But Hill also individualizes the lead characters, charting their reaction to their threatening predicament, their group tensions and their leader’s growing recognition of the almost desperate and empty nature of the lifestyle they ironically treasure and which endangers them repeatedly. Hill’s previous works had essayed loners and it was with The Warriors that he began his studies of disintegration under pressure – continued in both Southern Comfort and The Long Riders. Underlying the stylized veneer is thus the bitter realization that these characters are driven by dissatisfaction and need. They all have coping strategies, reactions to their deprivation and the struggle to somehow transcend their lot, to rebel, in group definition. Thus, although a fantasy, the film cleverly juggles a note of urban determinism to counterbalance its stylized, reflective surfaces. In that aspect, Hill’s style can be compared to that of Michael Mann.

Hill has always been interested in urban mythification and finds in The Warriors a vision of both despairing and triumphant urban fantasy, echoing the abstraction he had essayed in The Driver and developing the narrative in terms of the analogy to a baseball game.

This pursuit of modern myth enhances the film’s self-conscious journey motif. Indeed, although the rather bleak sociological undercurrent linger in the background to this film, it is the process of myth and its transformation that Hill essays. With clever allusions – a female gang being a sly nod to the “sirens” of lore – The Warriors is a knowing pulp fantasy. Although Hill has repeatedly claimed that he gives his characters no back-story, he handles the action scenes in order to give a clear message: the battle against adversity of circumstance in order to be the masters of one’s own destiny. It is in The Warriors thus that the urban determinism underlying so much American cinema is transported into the terrain of legend: triumph in the incorporation into myth. No other film has so abstracted contemporary sociological alienation into a bleak, exciting and yet triumphant a vision as found here. The episodic journey here is the ritual of transcendence and those who survive finally disappear into a timeless realm – immortal in myth. The triumph of pulp myth here would infiltrate many Hill films, perhaps most obviously the similar urban fantasy of Streets of Fire.

Vision

The anamorphic widescreen transfer does full justice to a marvelous film in which bizarre characters just seem to appear, part of the world around them – a lurid nocturnal world of subways, graffiti strewn streets and near-deserted parks and with hostile gangs at every turn, all constantly saturated by neon lights.

The film’s garish colours and offbeat angles testify to director Hill’s once stated intention to be a comic-book illustrator. Hill stages and edits the violence as akin to sophisticated dance numbers. They are beautiful to watch, especially in the crisp, clear transfer available here and still stand as amongst the most impressive fight scenes put to film. In these scenes, director Hill shows the influence of both Stanley Kubrick and Sam Peckinpah (who helmed Hill’s script for The Getaway): the fight in a subway men’s restroom is a brilliant display of violent energies exploding in a confined space. Once again, the rhythms, colours and energies of these scenes are their point – the film is not intended to be realistic and is indeed nearly bloodless. As modern noir, it rests on the interplay of neon and darkness, there being no chalkiness or fading in the black levels. All colours are brightly crisp and well defined and there are no faults to distract from the experience of the film itself. The near fantasy sense of an urban landscape and its neon patterns are carried intact in this transfer. Visually, it is a superb film.

The sound transfer is available in Dolby Digital mono only. It is precise, with voices and sound effects (especially the trains) very well defined and with what indeed seem like some stereophonic traveling and separation effects.

It is surprisingly full for such an old film and the given limitations of the original source material. The bass on Barry DeVorzon’s invigorating electronic-rock score for example is aptly pristine and powerful and enhances the impact of the visuals. The digital sound at times makes the score seem far more than expected: it is unusually crisp. The sound of subway trains features prominently – as all progress seems linked to means of transportation – and the uses of police sirens and radio music punctuate the proceedings. The stop-start running is nicely captured and weather effects are nicely integrated into the selective background of urban noises – some traffic noise alternating with an eerily quiet and deserted cityscape. Pride, arrogance and desperation underlie the voices and a clever motif is made of the radio DJ (as voiced by a barely seen Lynne Thigpen) who provides coded updates for the street gangs, offering a running commentary on the hunted group’s progress in terms akin to a baseball game. Although those with expanded home theatre capabilities may wish for full remix and its immersive trappings, the full clarity of the transfer here is exceptional.

EXTRACTS FROM ROBERT CETTL'S DREAMLIFE TRILOGY

“Who are the Warriors? There must be some word! I want all the Warriors! I want them alive, if possible. If not, wasted! But I want them. Send the word!” (having to flee every gang in New York in The Warriors)

"Can you dig it?" (The Warriors - pictured left)

Putting the Gangs Back into Gang Violence

Walter Hill’s stylized fantasy The Warriors is credited as being the film which started the move towards gang violence in the movies. An extra-ordinary movie, it chronicled the efforts of a New York City street gang to fight their way home through hostile gang territory. It was agreed at the outset not to use actual gang-members in the cast, a decision that led gang members to harass the production. Within a few days of its release began reports of copycat violence with brawls breaking out at cinemas showing the film. A gang fight at a drive-in resulted in a shooting death. Demands heightened in Boston and Los Angeles for the film to be completely withdrawn from release. Likewise, within two weeks of release, the studio felt the original poster was a needlessly confrontational incitement to rebellion and so it was thus recalled. It was felt the original artwork, depicting a mass of youth as one gang threatening anyone looking at them, delivered the wrong message. However, others countered that this was merely a move that would allow further restrictions on the film distribution process. The new campaign merely featured a film title with screening information of the theatre – here, the studio desperately wanted to seem as non-exploitative as possible.