MOVIES

...This led Mayor Diane Feinstein of San Francisco, where several of the incidents took place, to ask the only theater owner in the city playing the film to cease and desist, and he did...

...Universal announced that Walk Proud's debut in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, and Denver — all cities with sizeable Chicano populations — would be indefinitely postponed...

...It may be tempting to say yes, but that decision can turn into the slipperiest of slopes and set a. terribly dangerous First Amendment precedent...

...If all this sounds like the plot of some 1 930s Jimmy Cagney melodrama, it probably is, right down to Chuco's fascination with pigeons and a long-suffering Mom who is in dire need of a back operation...

...The Warriors takes place in New York and begins with a charismatic gang leader's plan to unite the belligerent factions of the five boroughs into one giant force capable of ruling the city...

...Still, no one was prepared for the violence that occurred when the film opened...

...Emotions and tensions seem to be raw now...

...Then, as highly favorable reviews began appearing in such publications as The New Yorker and The New York Times, appropriate blurbs were added...

...The ultimate question, then, is whether films which have the potential of attracting disruptive elements to theaters should be banned from production...

...No, the hottest inside film of the first months of 1979 turned out to be, surprisingly enough, The Warriors...

...Coupling a surly mob of scowling teenagers obviously up to no good with the copy line, "These are the armies of the night," the campaign was a nasty, menacing tableau...

...Within a month, The Warriors had company...

...Unfortunately, all the filmmakers can manage to do with this potentially intriguing material is imprison it in the most woebegone of cliche film plots...

...There is violence here, but it is unreal and bloodless, choreographed to a fare-thee-well by Hill and so non-threatening that the British Board of Film Censors, usually so tough on film violence that it removed a sequence from one of the Pink Panther movies, passed The Warriors without a cut...

...Director Walter Hill, previously responsible for Hard Times and The Driver, obviously doesn't care about conventional exposition...

...The movie that has serious film people babbling like the Barry Manilow Fan Club is not a low-budget effort untainted by the boorishness of Hollywood...

...Gone were the scowling teens, replaced first by nothing more than a listing of participating theaters...

...Paramount, which could hardly have expected such a reaction, pulled Kenneth Turan reviews films regularly for The Progressive...

...At this point, and against all rationality except that of plot contrivance, good guy Raymond ignores his new bride's tearful pleas of "Can't we talk about this...

...A startling aesthetic triumph on one level, on another The Warriors set off a controversy that is still far from settled about responsibility and censorship within the industry...

...After initially treating The Warriors as some kind of obscene aberration, guardians of public morality decided that the fault was in the subject matter, not the film itself The Christian Science Monitor, for instance, ran an editorial imploring the motion picture industry to "display greater responsibility in this area...

...was he tough enough to leave them...

...One of the greater ironies in the gang film imbroglio is that the public outcry has caused two movies that couldn't be more disparate to be lumped together in a way that completely obscures the specific qualities, positive and negative, of each...

...Though innocent, the Warriors must now make their way back from the Bronx to their home turf in far away Coney Island with every gang in New York howling for revenge...

...Its plot is certainly no less banal, but here the plot's importance is no more than nominal, the merest excuse for some extraordinarily exciting, purely visual filmmaking...

...The film's strong points will be obvious to anyone with eyes to see...

...But since the films are so different, the appropriate conclusion is much simpler: Any theater which has gang members in its audience is likely to turn into a fight scene, whether the movie on the screen is The Warriors or Camille...

...Raymond, Mr...

...And Larry Tur-man, producer of Universal's Walk Proud, initially titled Gang, called it "a life-affirming, positive movie...

...Sylvia Plath's painful examination of madness becomes a muddled, aggressively sensitive mess...

...Apparently not positive enough, because scant days after an ad in Daily Variety ballyhooed the Los Angeles opening of Walk Proud with the line, "He was tough enough for the streets...

...If film is an art unto itself, involving us in ways no other medium can, then The Warriors, for all its dumbness, is part of the reason why...

...If this plot sounds childish, it is no match for the dialogue that goes with it, as vapid and empty as anything written on the backs of cereal boxes...

...The bad brother, Chuco, has no aspirations loftier than getting a nasty tattoo put on his arm...

...We are presented with the age-old story of the good brother and the bad brother...

...Added producer Turman, "You try to be a responsible, concerned human being first and a filmmaker second...

...That operation soon becomes moot when poor Mom steps in front of a bullet meant for guess who...

...Neither Universal nor I want a single incident on our conscience...

...Fedora — a hammy, anachronistic "inside Filmland" story from Billy Wilder, whose directorial cynicism is only a toothless remnant of what it once was...

...Responded an angry Tony Bill, the film's executive producer, "She might as well close down Candlestick Park because there are fights there, or the taco stands in the Mission District because there are fights there, too...

...Hits and misses Real Life — what happens when a documentary film crew tries to spend a year with a "normal American family...

...and decides to take the law into his own hands...

...The Warriors has more visual style, more inventive camera work, more sense of rhythm and pace, more sheer joy in the possibilities of cinematic movement, than words can express...

...Three deaths, numerous injuries, and heavy vandalism were reported in or near theaters where The Warriors was shown...

...Comedian Albert Brooks's film is wry and iconoclastic but unfortunately only funny in fits and starts...

...Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, just as the leader reveals his intentions at a gigantic open-air gang convention in the Bronx, he is assassinated by a psychotic rival who cannily pins the blame for the shooting on a gang called the Warriors...

...As Justice Potter Stewart learned when he made his famous remark about pornography, "I know it when I see it," there is nothing so mutable as standards of public morality...

...K.T...

...And it is far from easy to know exactly which films will be inflammatory...

...The Bell Jar — yet another fine novel trashed by Hollywood...

...Better he should have stood in bed...

...What he is interested in is the kinetic possibilities of film, and in that area his gifts are superb...

...In fact, the only good thing about the film is its choice of location, the barrio of East Los Angeles, home to a yeasty, troubling Chicano subculture that is almost totally self-contained...

...Another gang-oriented film, Boulevard Nights, was released, and on its first night was held responsible for five shootings and three stabbings, none of them fatal...

...Meanwhile, other studios had gang films in the works, and they began to make worried noises...

...In the case of Boulevard Nights, those qualities are perhaps best left obscured...

...The reason, said a studio spokesman, was a "very, very strong possibility" of violence...

...back with a vengeance, offering to pay for extra security guards at any theater which needed them and drastically revising the film's campaign...

...The first indication that The Warriors might be trouble came when its advertising campaign hit the streets...

...A spokesman for American International Pictures, scheduled to release Defiance in August, claimed, "Ours is not a gang film, it's a love story...

...If The Warriors and Boulevard Nights were more alike stylistically, it might be possible to postulate some grandiose aesthetic theories about why their screenings led to so much discord...

...The Warriors is something else again, totally different in style, in intent, and in execution from this nonsense...

...The film is just a pretext for violence, not its cause...

...Nice Guy, has a regular job, middle-class aspirations, and such lines as, "I'm going to open my own shop one of these days...

...Surprising because this is the same film that Senator Michael LoPresti of the Massachusetts State Legislature tried to get banned in Boston — the film that the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner said Paramount, the offending studio, had a moral obligation to pull from the screens of America...

...His idea of a good time is sniffing paint fumes, and he has a weakness for pulling out his switchblade if anyone looks at him without the proper respect...