The “New York before Disney” film series at the Fairfield Theatre Company is continuing tonight at 7 p.m. with a free screening of the 1979 Walter Hill gang drama, “The Warriors.”
The movie had its original release curtailed after violence broke out in a few urban theaters, but over the years it has become a huge cult favorite, even inspiring an elaborate video game homage three years ago.
At last month’s “Martini and a Movie” night — which I have had the pleasure of hosting for the past two years — the audience seemed to relish looking back at Manhattan in the bad old days of the 1970s with a screening of the 1974 subway hostage film, “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.”
The irony of New York City’s situation in the 1970s was that the terrible financial crisis and a rapidly rising crime rate inspired some of the best movies of the modern era.
The great New York-based directors Martin Scorsese and Sidney Lumet made their names with gritty crime stories such as “Serpico” (1973) and “Taxi Driver” (1976).
“The Warriors” didn’t receive the same sort of unanimous critical acclaim as the Scorsese and Lumet classics — it was treated more like a B-picture than a prestige film in the winter of 1979 — but it did get a strong review from Pauline Kael in The New Yorker.
The movie’s premise is rather simple. A gang from Coney Island — The Warriors — attends a city-wide rally of youth gangs one night in the Bronx. Violence breaks out, a major gang figure is shot, and The Warriors are falsely accused of committing the crime. They spend the rest of the night — and the movie — making their way back to Coney while being chased by gangs from all over the city.
What makes the picture special is Hill’s stylized approach to the story. Each gang has its own signature costume — one group dresses like baseball players with Kiss-style face make-up — and the fights and chases are shot and cut almost like musical numbers.
Cinematographer Andrew Laszlo shot the entire film at night on very difficult locations — a good portion of the movie is set on subway trains and platforms — but he infuses the action with continuous beauty and visual excitement.
The storytelling is part Western, part comic-book, but it’s the premise and the look of the picture that make it special. And these days, it opens a window on a long-vanished New York City in which only brave locals rode the subways in the late night hours..
(The Fairfield Theatre Company is at 70 Sanford St. in Fairfield Center.)
