The Warriors - Page 2

I only own the director's cut, so I watched the original cut again a few days ago after recording it from TCM.

This was one of the first movies I ever saw on video, probably in 1982 and it blew me away. I've loved Walter Hills stuff ever since.

I also remember seeing it late night on BBC2 [here in the UK] as part of MOVIEDROME hosted by Alex Cox.

It had an odd bit at the beginning where The Warriors were discussing the big gang meeting. They walk towards the subway station and Link Wrays "Rumble" starts playing on the soundtrack.

I did record this version on video, someone borrowed it and lost the tape - Man, I got JAPPED!

Anyone else seen this version?

I refuse to buy this DVD until the original cut is re-released.

I'm an activist. For DVDs.

Some of the local US cable stations play that version more than the theatrical, I think.

American Dad (Seth McFarlane's series) had an amusing nod to The Warriors last Sunday. The son and his geek friends had to escape the high school, travelling through the sectioons controlled by the various cliques - stoners, goths, etc. - while the principal gave updates over the PA system.

I noticed that too.

I actually just watched this for the first time on TCM On Demand. I wanted to see it for years and could never get my hands on a copy, and then forgot about it. Anyway, glad I caught up. I love the concept of old school gangs, even the fictionalization of them. These days a gang is more or less a collection of loosely associated drug dealers (at least in my neck of the woods), so it's interesting to see what the landscape of those organized groups resembled back in the day. Not that I think there were gangs like the baseball furies roaming new york back in the day, or even like the Warriors, but groups like the AC Turnbulls, Rogues, or even Gramercy Riffs seem a lot more believable. It was the groups like this that also caught my attention in Gangs of New York.

Anyway, I wished I could have seen Cleon mix it up more before he got wrecked.

Showed this clip of Cyrus when teaching my students about persuasive speeches. It felt good to introduce a hundred thirteen-year-olds to this greatness.

The bathroom fight scene at the end was great.

Please tell me you also showed Alec Baldwin's monologue during that class.

My brother raved about this movie when he came home for Thanksgiving, so I had to move it up from 95 to 1 on my Netflix queue. Just got done with it and it didn't disappoint. It was the director's cut and I've never seen the original, but I could tell that the Greek prologue was tacked on. I had no idea the panels were as well. Didn't bother me that much, but I suppose if I had been a fan from the beginning I'd be protesting.

Loved the Lizzies escape and the bathroom brawl. Just some incredibly cool, badass shit going on. Swan looked like a dangerous Woody Harrelson. Loved that stone-cold, chiseled stare.

Also, David Patrick Kelly has one of the greatest screams I've ever heard when the Riffs take him down at the end.

Having just watched the film again for the 1000th time, there's something that's fresh in my mind. I was always kind of curious about Rembrandt. Maybe it's just me reading sexuality into everything, but Rembrandt, young, pretty, sensitive artist type, was the only one of the Warriors that seemed to pick up on the fact that something was up with the Lizzies, I mean beyond the fact that they intended he and his friends harm. Cochise: "Where's the dudes? Chicks like you always got dudes around". No Cochise, chicks like these don't always have dudes around, they in fact never have dudes around if they can help it.

Yeah, I'd read about that, but I didn't know and I didn't want to assume that it was sexually transmitted, he could have just as easily been a drug user for all I knew of him. However, I'm thinking it was intentional, it almost meshes to well not to be.

I thought Rembrandt looked fruity from the beginning. His rejection of The Lizzies advances only solidified it for me.

 

My favorite Walter Hill films are the ones with casts filled with great actors just going wild (Southern Comfort, Extreme Prejudice), and I think my main problem with this one is that we don't spend enough time with the fun, interesting characters. I loved watching guys like Vermin and Cochise, but I felt they got sidelined by that terrible romance plot between Swan and the hooker. New York looks insane though, I've never seen it look so messed up. 

When I was in high school, I used to think it was fun to view the following as a pseudo-trilogy...........................Assault On Precinct 13, The Warriors, and Escape From New York.

 

Kinda crazy, but they do make for one badass triple feature.  Anyway, The Warriors is an absolute classic and it is a shame Hill never really made anything similar.  Streets of Fire attempted it, but didn't quite get there....though it is entertaining in its own way.

A brilliant triple feature there. Love that.

 

Nothing but love for Walter Hills The Warriors. The directors cut not so much.

Just got done watching this for the first time. It's on Netflix Instant, the original cut so there weren't any comic book panels or alternate opening. It's strange to experience an Ur-text like this, because the DNA of The Warriors is in nearly every action film of the last 30 years. Needless to say, I liked it quite a bit.

 

Swan and Ajax are the obvious standouts, and it was weird that Ajax gets removed from the board with so little fanfare, but the entire gang is a blast to watch. This is filmmaking 101 right here, as we only experience a night with them and see them meeting and indoctrinating a new member, Mercy, and yet the little quirks each character actor brings and the screenwriting shorthand is enough to convey a dense history. I can believe that these guys have bled together.

 

It borders on camp at times, but the surreal, magic-realism feel of the story makes it defy era. It could be the future, or it could be 1979. RoboCop is very similar in how for all intents and purposes it's 1987, but it's also "the not too distant future". This is much more satisfying, in my opinion, grounding the setting in the familiar while allowing for the believable injection of the fantastic.

 

It's also strange to see the epitome of apocalyptic New York. Growing up a child of the '80s, I was led to believe my entire life that NYC was some hellhole that I never wanted to go to, and then Giuliani has to go in and clean the place up. Having watched Death Wish recently for the first time it's hard to believe that Cyrus' rallying cry for revolution didn't come to pass. 

 

It's unfortunate that the hard boiled streets of The Warriors not only no longer exist but no one in cinema has been able to recreate and translate that feel in the modern day. A triple feature of Assault on Precinct 13, The Warriors, and Escape From New York is a great idea, but I'd also throw The Punisher: War Zone in there as a spiritual brother of those films. It's got the grime and the sleaze, but also that unbridled, wild west feel to it that has been lost in the absence of Peckinpahs and the scarcity of Hills. It's appropriate that Frank Castle was born in this time period...

 

...which brings me to my favorite part of this film: The Warriors are presented without apology. Much like the recent Attack the Block, although that film does grapple with social issues as an explanation for the protagonists' delinquency, The Warriors are thugs without explanation. Ajax is practically a rapist! Swan shows a bit of disgust, and Mercy obviously envies the prom students on the subway, but that scene in fact brings out a bit of pride from Swan. 

 

I love a movie that embraces all of the freedoms of fiction, and one of those is making criminals sympathetic by portraying them as human rather than noble but misunderstood (ie. the recent Simon Baz Green Lantern character). 

 

Best of all, the slo-mo shots are amazing.

 

 

I think your entire writeup was superb, Bartleby, but this reallly NAILED the appeal of The Warriors - as counter-intuitive as it seems, the movie is so "of its time"  it somehow manages to be timeless. (other examples, and I'm not kidding here, would be Saturday Night Fever and Casablanca). 

 

It's a movie that can easily be lumped into "dumb, obvious, expoitation" but while it may be the 3rd, it is, on closer inspection, neither of the first two. 

 

I don't necessarily think Walter Hill made quote-unquote "Great" art here, but I think he managed to make something damn good, given what COULD have come out of the source material in that era. 

 

Worst case scenario is that it's a damn interesting film to talk about....and that's pretty fucking cool for a mid-70s youthsploitation movie to be, 40 yrs down the road.*

 

 

* - and that's WORST case; BEST case is that it's a criminally underrated director's masterpiece. I tend to believe the latter. 

I saw the version with the comic book panels for the first time a few weeks ago. Every time I read about it I just thought "oh c'mon, it can't be that bad, just a few seconds out of the movie anyway, I'm sure it's not that annoying".

 

It totally is.

The only version I've seen is the Director's Cut, and it's still annoying. Never mind the fact that the use of comic panels give the film's pulpiness a self-consciousness that's grating, its modern-video resolution couldn't clash with the original film grain any more obnoxiously if it tried. It really put me off the film, though I'm thinking I should track down the original film and give it a shot. 

Maybe I've only ever seen the DC, but I never found the comic panels, and the prologue to detract very much from my enjoyment of this one.  I still consider this one to be a highly underrated masterpiece, and am looking forward to Hill's BULLET IN THE HEAD.