Screen:
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Even without the effort of the Longest Walk, however, it here and there in The Warriors' opening scenes are almost the seems highly unlikely that any of these bills will ever come to a...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...The reason is that Schrader doesn't know how each other...
...But then a teenage prostitute he meets tion in the Bronx...
...allusion to the fifties film of that title about a world slowly When Van Dorn does find his daughter, it turns out that she being depopulated by fall-out is intentional I'm sure...
...At a midnight convention of all the gangs that has is all disaffected youth together...
...Twenty street gangs are banding together to take over the whole years ago your "kind" was your own ethnic group, but now it city...
...But he's the only rotten apple in the proverb- guesses at once that his wife ran off because he has sexual ial barrel...
...and they are always loyal to come we can't...
...John a gang spills onto a D train...
...office in Washington, and the now-an area abandoned to the gangs, a ghost town where siege at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, there are no serious there's nobody left except them...
...Even if their presence does empty the city of its only inadequacy we see is when Van Dorn tries to explain his other inhabitants, we can take solace in the fact that civiliza- Reform Dutch faith to this girl...
...While we may find unnerving what we PUNK CROCKS read in the papers about the effect The Warriors is having, the 'THE WARRIORS' & 'HARDCORE' movie really does its best to allay our fears about these kids...
...This is the sort of thing First Northeast Conference on Rural Ministry that city dwellers all over America have been dreading since August 5-10 the fifties-a final, cataclysmic eruption of delinquency into open warfare, a night of the long switchblades when the young The Conference, will seek to identify issues specific to rural muggers, junkies, rapists and thrill-killers would just gang up areas and how the Church might respond and develop on the rest of us once and for all...
...If the film really is vote, much less pass...
...The whole movie is preoccupied with SHOW AND TELL getting us into the dens of iniquity, showing us how the porn business works, giving us glimpses of dirty movies, etc...
...She ran away because this man who has not only we thought that these kids were supposed to be the fall-out humbled but humiliated himself to find her was in fact a itself, the Bomb that was ticking and ready to explode...
...afraid of the Mafia...
...If he wants to contention that a man is no more than the product of his find his daughter, the detective says, he's got to see what kind society's expectations...
...At one point the detective brings Van Dorn an 8mm liberties taken), he retained those metamorphoses that proporn film starring his daughter and forces him to watch it...
...The nameless breaks up in anarchy doesn't do much to ease the tension central character in The Warriors (Tom Waits) has some of the either...
...The other gang members we see here are sometimes problems...
...This film doesn't terrify us with the presence of street him in the wind," has become a sophisticated and successful gangs in our midst any more than a gangster movie makes us practitioner of the art of survival in the modern world...
...solidly established than ever, Indian self-esteem is on the rise, And even then, the stylized, kung-fu fighting, often in slow and the Indian world is in ferment...
...When knowing how rotten it is-someone who's self-appointed mis- Pomerance turned to a different kind of elephant man-John sion is to make the rest of us face it...
...The trouble with Hardcore is that Schrader is so anxious to prove he can imagine, he doesn't really take the time to do anything else...
...He's bragging about how vivid his cynicism is, how tough he is I N 1975 Bernard Pomerance did an adaptation of Bertolt because he knows all this stuff...
...another play of metamorphoses...
...The stray subway riders found Winooski, Vermont 05404 30 March 1979: 179 same qualities...
...This vision of the city may be threats to Indian self-determination appearing at this time...
...in recent years, such as the occupation of Alcatraz, the storm- It's as if the whole city had become what the South Bronx is ing and pillaging of the B.I.A...
...This conclusion to the film suggests that, for all his the undergrounds and underworlds there are in America...
...The Schrader, not a person...
...Yet when Van Dorn blubbers a few pieties to her about Hardcore is a quickie about runaways and the sub-culture of having been unable to express his love and being sorry, she pornography...
...Even without the effort of the Longest Walk, however, it here and there in The Warriors' opening scenes are almost the seems highly unlikely that any of these bills will ever come to a only civilians we see in the whole movie...
...Collar, about working-class life and union racketeering...
...momentarily and menacing her...
...But the was not kidnapped and addicted to drugs as we have been led to reference is a bit confusing...
...produces-a man she claims loves her where her father never did...
...whose untutor'd mind/Sees God in clouds, or hears another...
...but in this film, of all places, the rough edges ever much he may know about pornography...
...Van Dorn finally finds his daughter modified Brechtian play (twenty-one scenes, each bearing its on his own, but it's the detective who kills the pimp that has identifying label), but he created, in The Elephant Man, been exploiting her...
...As in West Side in his own war colors, and intones, "There are only 20,000 Story, so here, we get good vibes from the delinquents...
...It was written and directed by Paul Schrader, accepts his apology and immediately goess back to Minnesota who seems to be dedicating himself to taking us on tour of all with him...
...Middle-aged people look around in silent dread as those active in ministry in rural areas, such as Rev...
...The cops in this city...
...I assume, too, that he kept the scene in of world we're living in...
...Now he's filling in yet another of the blind spots in our perception of our society, showing us some more of those modem casbahs where we shudder to think, and can scarcely imagine, what Stage goes on...
...After awhile The Warriors is like a gangster movie, bright, certainly seems brightening...
...Reservation home rule is more only run into members of other street gangs on their way home...
...Now all these gangs go on a city-wide rampage as each scrambles to get back to its home turf...
...If a girl like this can see through him so easily, how wild, but more often just stupid...
...Even before the movie be- For more information please write to: gins, we are already waiting for this sort of familiar, low-grade The Director of Summer Session terrorism to flare up into a total, inescapable violence...
...The movie ends back at message, as if Van Dorn were only an ideological position to Coney Island on the Warriors' home turf-on the beach...
...film's director, Walter Hill, likes ultra-cool detached heroes, The fact that spmeone blows this dude away and the meeting as his last film, The Driver, demonstrated...
...Where this will lead is motion, makes urban violence seem a very remote, abstract anybody's guess, but at this writing the Indian's future, if not danger...
...frightening, too, but it takes the scare out of the gangs themThe "vanishing Indian," the stereotype of the late 19th selves...
...Why this movie has caused so much trouble is hard to understand...
...Aside from an occasional keystone cop, the Warriors century, is far from vanishing...
...Van Dorn is an are taken off...
...and at ease than his friends, the kind of man who makes a There is that one punk who shoots the speaker at the conven- loving, trusting parent...
...Yet St...
...Philip Anglim is a slight, conventionhis characters...
...This AN ELEPHANT FOR ALL SEASONS 'is all just a way of showing off on Schrader's part...
...She has become so depraved that she now lives turns out that they are Armageddon's last and noblest survivors with a man who commits his own murders in the snuff films he instead...
...I have not had a chance to see or to read the beginning of Hardcore to find the runaway daughter of a Pomerance version, but I assume that whatever liberties he God-fearing man from Minnesota named Van Dorn (George took with the Brecht play (it is a script that is used to having C. Scott...
...A little high-toned sentiment is allowed to creep especially confusing character...
...It's no wonder the Merrick, whose freakish deformation earned him that detective turns out to be, despite all his sins and weaknesses, nickname late in the nineteenth century-he not only wrote a the real hero of Hardcore...
...The gangs in this film each been called at a park in the Bronx, the leader of New York's have a careful-too careful-racial balance, as if the ideal of largest gang looks out over the sea of delegates, each dressed the Melting Pot had finally been realized...
...More than that, they are all basically fair-minded to depict Van Dorn's weaknesses, his human complexity...
...He supposed toughness, Schrader is really as naive about human began when he wrote the screenplay for Martin Scorsese's beings as the most frightened, unstable teenage hooker he can Taxi Driver, then continued with his own first film, Blue imagine...
...In an underpass somewhere else in McRaith, Rev...
...In the one or two scenes of his into the character, particularly in his relationship with his moll life back in Minnesota, he comes off as more liberal-minded (Dorsey Wright...
...James Dunning, U.S...
...Indian reservations, with all their unique war of attrition in the city we see here...
...Charles Fortier, special consultant Stephen to get a few jollies by backing a woman up against a wall Bossi and many others...
...Now it horrible parent...
...The Conference will feature govIn the opening passages, as gangs from all over come up to ernment policy makers, local community organizers, rural the Bronx on the subway, The Warriors plays upon our expec- sociologists, theologians, educators, church leaders and tations of it...
...It has produced rumbles in a number of cities, Screen including New York, and at least one killing is attributed to it in Los Angeles...
...Brecht's A Man's Man for the Hampstead Theatre in There's a slimy detective (Peter Boyle) who's hired near the London...
...Despite some anti- get back to its home turf of Coney Island, the city streets and Indian "backlash" against some of the violent Indian actions subway stations they travel through are completely deserted...
...ministries for rural life...
...The and moral...
...Senator Patrick the subway system, a street soldier peels off from another gang Leahy, Rev...
...For the most part, though, these disturbances have at least begun in a spirit true to the movie itself: as a battle between rival gangs...
...characteristics, with their good things and their bad, will As the Brooklyn gang referred to in the film's title tries to continue on into the indefinite future...
...I suspect Schrader fancies himself as which two men and an army blanket become an elephant being rather like this detective, someone able to face the world because there is an immediate market for such a beast...
...It sounds like a recorded tion itself will survive among them...
...Michael's College this, strangely, never happens...
...What Schrader does not do a good expose of is the lives of First metamorphosis...
...The vided its structure and fed its theme, that illustrated Brecht's detective also scolds Van Dom self-righteously...
...There are 60,000 of us, if we join forces...
...Alexander Pope's "poor where hoodlums usually spend all their energy killing one Indian...
...Not only do they "stick to their own kind," as the song says in THE WARRIORS begins with the scary premise that the West Side Story, but their kind is a pretty decent lot...
...Congress,like the courts and states, is scary, it is not because it previews some apocalypse yet to wary of arousing the Indian world and the non-Indian sup- come, but because the street gangs already seem to have won a porters of that world...
...At the beginning of The Warriors suspect...
...He seems to know nothing about them, how- ally good-looking actor who in no way resembles the unfortuCommonweal: 180...
Vol. 106 • March 1979 • No. 6
