“The Outsiders” – first the book and then the movie – made me and pretty much every other adolescent boy want to be in a gang. It just seemed so cool to be a member of a tight-knit group of hoods with hearts who always had each other’s back.
As you grow up it steadily gets drilled into your head that gangs are bad and any decent human being wants nothing to do with them – but still I think most guys, deep down, like the idea of being associated with a group of dangerous people who look out for each other.
The opening scenes of “The Warriors,” which was playing at the Bloor Cinema this week, evoked that same feeling. The Warriors, a gang of seven or eight guys from Coney Island, have travelled across the city to Prospect Park in the Bronx for a gathering of all the city’s syndicates.
Cyrus, the “one and only” leader of the Gramercy Riffs, the city’s largest and most powerful gang, wants to unite them all under one banner, saying they would outnumber the police three to one and could have the run of the city.
The first five minutes of the movie is a massive montage of gangs wearing their ‘colours’ and making their way to the meet. Some of them, like the Warriors, wear leather vests embossed with their emblem. Others are a little more creative, like the Furies, who paint their faces in garish colours, wear baseball uniforms and carry bats, and another group that wears hillbilly outfits.
Shortly after the gangs gather, the plot is laid out. A crazy gang member named Luther (David Patrick Kelly) shoots Cyrus in the middle of his speech, then blames the Warriors.
The Riffs – a scary gang of martial-arts trained black dudes (I kept waiting for Kareem Abdul Jabar to come out) -- put a bounty on the Warriors and the members spend the rest of the movie desperately trying to get home under the leadership of Swan (Michael Beck), their “war chief.”
One thing my friend Phil and I both said was that we expected to laugh more. Not that we thought it would be funny, but we did think it would be slightly ridiculous. But that wasn’t really the case. The director and the actors – none of whom I could name and only one or two I recognized – treated this film really seriously. Sometimes that can look really cheesy and dated 30 years on, but in this case it didn’t.
First of all, the suspense works. For about the first third of the film there’s a palpable sense of tension as the Warriors try to survive, deciding when to run and when to stay and fight, racing or “bopping” (fighting) through subway stations, on platforms and through tunnels.
Other times they’re roaming through eerily silent parks, cemeteries or empty, creepy strange neighbourhoods, always on the lookout for the next gang trying to take them out.
You get the feeling this is the New York that exists for strangers at night who have no place to go home to. It’s cold and harsh and you have to watch out.
I love this vision of the city. It’s so different from the usual images of New York – Times Square, Ground Zero, Central Park. This is the non-touristy NYC , and the camera’s explore gritty neighbourhoods and cityscapes in a really refreshing way.
Coney Island, with its ramshackle houses and broken down amusement park – with its awesome Wonder Wheel -- is one of the most compelling canvases in the film.
"Is this what we fought all night to get back to?” one of the Warriors asks as they ramble through their own turf at dawn, finally home, to safety – they think.
This film could have just petered out, but it ends strongly with the kind of justice you hope to see in a movie where the “good” guys have spent most of their screen time running away.
All in all, this movie works really well. The acting, by a huge cast of virtual nobodies, is strong, the dialogue is really interesting and almost poetic at times (these gang members are almost artsy) but not cheesy.
I just went to New York, but this movie makes me want to go back and see a little different side this time around. Maybe there’s a Warriors” subway tour I could take. Hmm, or maybe I could make one!
If you can find this film, it’s definitely worth watching. The print we saw was scratchy and the sound was a little fuzzy, and you could almost feel the ghosts of the thousands of people that have probably sat in theatres just like the Bloor and watched that very copy of the movie. That made the experience even cooler.
**A quick IMDB search seems to say there’s a remake of this in pre-production for 2010. That would be cool, or terrible, depending.
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