Assault On Precinct 13
IT’S LIEUTENANT ETHAN Bishop’s first day on the job. he’s been reassigned to supervise the Anderson precinct, even though they’re closing it down and there’s nothing left to do there but stare at the packing crates. his superior Captain Collins asks him, “You want to be a hero your first night out?” Bishop does. Collins counters: “There are no heroes anymore, just men who follow orders.” During one night of ultraviolence, Bishop proves him wrong.
Assault On Precinct 13 is John Carpenter’s second feature-length film, which he wrote, directed, scored, and edited himself. It’s a claustrophobic pulp thriller and modern Western that blends Rio Bravo, Night Of The Living Dead and exploitation films with hints of home-invasion horror and a heavy dose of paranoia. For the film’s doomy, catchy score, Carpenter riffed on Led Zeppelin’s ‘The Immigrant Song’ and Lalo Schifrin’s Dirty Harry
theme, composing and recording it in just three days. College friends and unknowns comprised most of the cast and crew, who made the film in under 20 days and for only $100,000. Despite its low budget and a gruelling shoot, Carpenter had complete creative control and cites Assault’s
production as his most fun ever making a movie.
The film wasn’t without controversy. It depicted a gang member murdering a little girl named Kathy (Kim Richards) in cold blood, which almost garnered the film an X rating. In hindsight, Carpenter regrets the scene, but it’s essential to the story and its stakes, showing the amorality of the antagonists. The MPAA insisted he cut it, so Carpenter excised the scene
— but only in the print he sent to the MPAA. In prints sent to distributors, however, the scene remained. It was treated as a bloody exploitation film in America where it “wasn’t particularly well-received”, according to Carpenter, but when he showed it at the British Film Institute, “It got rather good reviews, and luckily for me began my career.”
In the opening scene, the police unleash a hail of bullets on unsuspecting members of a gang called Street Thunder. This single act of violence incites Street Thunder’s retaliatory sadism and sets off a terrible chain reaction. The LAPD deceives the press, falsely describing the event that killed these six gang members as a “shootout” and the remaining members swear a blood oath of vengeance. Little Kathy becomes a casualty of this war between cop and criminal, and her father guns down the delinquent who killed her. Now hunted by Street Thunder, the father flees to the nearest police station for sanctuary: the Anderson precinct.
For Bishop (Austin Stoker), what should be a boring job goes awry right away. Phones and electricity are cut off. A bus full of dangerous convicts makes a pit stop at the station, including Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston) and Wells
(Tony Burton). South Central Los Angeles has been transformed into a ghost town, isolating them further. These characters have nothing in common except that they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. Wilson, Bishop and secretary Leigh (Laurie Zimmer) form an unlikely team defending their Alamo against a faceless, shadowy evil. Napoleon Wilson is Carpenter’s classic leading man: a proto-snake Plissken, an archetype inspired by Carpenter’s best friend growing up and Carpenter’s alter ego, giving voice to the filmmaker’s own issues with authority and the status quo. Wilson’s dialogue is terse, pulp poetry, and he delivers some of the film’s best lines, like, “First time I ever saw a preacher, he said to me, ‘Son, there’s something strange about you. You got something to do with death,’” and, “In my situation, days are like women — each one’s so damn precious, but they all end up leaving you.”
Wilson’s persistent request for a smoke — a nod to the cigarette gags of Howard Hawks’ movies — becomes a litmus test of the kindness of those around him. He’s denied cruelly every time — until he meets Lieutenant Bishop and Leigh. Bishop saves Wilson’s life twice, and for all his toughness and bravado, Wilson is touched and saves Bishop’s life in turn. The friendship forged between these two men is the heart of the story. Once they’ve survived the siege, Bishop does not allow Wilson to be shackled by another officer, insisting that the men walk out of the station together, as heroes and as equals.
And there’s chemistry between Wilson and Leigh, a character modelled after the Hawksian woman: resilient, tough-talking, cool under pressure, more than just a prop or a plot point in a man’s story. She’s a B-movie Lauren Bacall. If Carpenter’s admiration for Howard Hawks was unclear, in one scene he illuminates Leigh with light slanting in through venetian blinds, an homage to Hawks’ To Have And Have Not.
Carpenter established himself as a subversive filmmaker with Assault On Precinct 13, depicting a city suffering the consequences of police brutality, with most of the film’s cops as ruthless and menacing as its criminals. Violence here feels senseless, the product of a chaotic, hostile universe. The protagonists stand against it, and their shared crisis serves as a crucible: it reveals their decency and honour, uniting them against a common enemy, joined by their courage and mutual admiration. They protect the little girl’s father without knowing who he is or what he’s done, no matter the cost. It’s the tension at the heart of so many Westerns: an attempt to maintain civilisation in a figurative or literal wilderness. In the face of savagery, they hold on to their humanity.
The Anderson Alamo’s last stand against an onslaught offers a glimmer of hope in what might otherwise feel like a nihilistic film. Bishop, Leigh and Wilson navigate this nightmare in the dark, outgunned and outmanned, and they prevail. Carpenter once explained his career-long attraction to siege stories: “… maybe it has some life truths for us all, that we’re all under siege in our own way, and it’s our job to survive the night.”