The Talkies/Movie Gangs
Podhoretz, John
THE TALKIES MOVIE GANGS by John Podhoretz The Wanderers is a good-natured and sweet-tempered reverie about the South Bronx of the early 1960s. The South Bronx, the movie informs us, was a pretty...
...And in the end, The Wanderers turns out to be a great deal less inane than the people who would attack it for its inanity...
...Movies, television, popular novels, all must teach something, else they be trash-mindless, dismissible, and dangerous for children...
...The other two movies, Walk Proud and Boulevard Nights, are set in Los Angeles and have as their subject Chicano gangs...
...He has promised his mother and his girlfriend that he will quit the gang, you see...
...It is the only cornedy of the four-indeed, it is the only on in which any kind of affectionate sport is made of its subject...
...The South Bronx, the movie informs us, was a pretty terrific place to spend your adolescence: You could fall in with a swell bunch of guys like the Wanderers, a gang of teenage Italians...
...And though The Warriors is very heavy going at times, its rumble scenes are directed in such a flamboyant style that you cannot help looking on like a balletomane: My, they're good, look at how close he swings that baseball bat into that other guy's face, it looks real, doesn't it...
...The irony is that these people also protested against Boulevard Nights and Walk Proud, which are clearly the products of their own ideology...
...In fact, the only people who do get seriously injured during the course of the movie are those few who truly deserve it: A turncoat member of the Wanderers gets killed for making a homosexual advance, and a couple of guys with whom the Wanderers bowled for money turn out to be hustlers and have bowling balls dropped on their fingers by a likeable Mafioso...
...All of this followed from the dictum that entertainment must deliver a meaningful, uplifting message, must end with the black hand gfasping the white, must show the conflicting factions coming to an understanding...
...The first and most commercially successful of John Podhoretz, a student at the University of Chicago, is the editor of Midway...
...The Wanderers is the fourth movie about teenage gangs to be released so far this year...
...you could get drunk with your buddies, go bowling, and listen to some great rock 'n' roll...
...No one, however, could accuse either The Wanderers or The Warriors of lifelessness...
...The former has strong characters and strong acting, and is, finally, that rarest of commodities: a fun movie...
...And while the movie ends with two of the Wanderers saying goodbye to all that and departing for sunny California, one leaves the theatre with a pleasant sense of the recent past and a surprising wistfulness.I wish I could have been a Wanderer...
...There is some violence, naturally, but the Wanderers don't fight and nothing really bad happens to them...
...As for Boulevard Nights, it is a straightforward retelling of the old Two Brothers, One's Good and One's Bad story, played almost as humorlessly and earnestly as Walk Proud...
...But gangs are an iffy subject, and in The Warriors, at least, the gang is viewed with respect, so the crusading middlebrow anti-violence people came out in their finest philistine regalia to protest The Warriors when it was first released...
...The truth is that in their view showing any sort of gang creates a "negative role model...
...or give them books by Judy Blume, the novelist for kids who writes about masturbation, incest, and intercourse in highly approving tones...
...sweetness and nobility are the two traits most conspicuously absent from the characters of the youths who prowl the streets of Chicago, New York, and other American cities, mugging and pulverizing old ladies...
...you could wear a neat leather jacket blazoned with their insignia...
...Still, the real outrage in the gang movie controversy is the assertion made by those demonstrating against these films that every piece of entertainment should be imbued with a fashionably serious message and, most significantly, that mindlessness and unseriousness are corrupting and evil forces...
...the gang movies was The Warriorsy a cold, humorless, and abstract vision of a tough New York gang unjustly accused of murdering the leader of a rival gang and forced to fight its way through the streets and the subways back to its home turf in Coney Island...
...In Walk Proud, a young Jewish actor named Robby Benson puts on some dark makeup, affects a Mexican accent that sounds vaguely Scandinavian, and yells things like "When will it all end, Cesar...
...better to show children the highly-praised TV-movie "A Question of Love," in which the "positive role models" are practicing lesbians who want, and get, custody of their children...
...There never have been gangs like these...
...Admittedly, if one must speak about morality at all, there is a certain irresponsibility in The Wanderers and The Warriors...
...They are also as dull a bunch of toughs as any who have ever graced the screen, as mean as Clint Eastwood but as noble as Billy Jack...
...The Warriors are warriors: strong, silent, cool above all else, and they will do battle only when provoked or faced with actual danger...
...After all, mindlessness and unseriousness are two of the qualities that make movies so important to us: Popcorn and James Bond are very comforting to the American moviegoer...
...Romanticizing them implies a willing blindness or even a sociological smugness on the part of the moviemakers...
...It mostly makes sport of the violence it displays...
...Both movies are thus peculiarly bloodless and their violence is not in the least disturbing: One admires the fights in them the way one admires a particularly well-staged display on "Championship Wrestling...
...What is fascinating about these two movies is their old-fashioned liberalism: be integrated, don't hang out only with people of your own race, go to college, and get a good job...
...at hispachucos, who don't t even have the sense to kick him out for being such a bore...
...The purity of the aspirations of these two oddly dated films makes them deadly to watch, and they died at the box office as well...
...They seem to be telling us that we are intolerant and obtuse because we feel fear in our hearts when the actual Warriors pass us on the streets...
...They demanded that it be withdrawn from general circulation by Paramount Pictures, demonstrated outside the movie theatres showing it, and even blamed it for inter-gang violence at certain theatres (as if gangs needed any excuse for attacking one another...
Vol. 12 • September 1979 • No. 9
