Something old, something new
“These are the armies of the night,” the ad warns ominously, looming over a photograph of hundreds of armed hooligans. “They are 100,000 strong. They outnumber the cops five to one. They could run New York City. Tonight they’re all out to get the Warriors.”
Now, admittedly, our local professional basketball team is not having the best of years but, you might well comment, surely some maladroit dribbling does not necessarily justify 100,000 street toughs belaboring with baseball bats a mere 11 elongated young men in short pants armed with nothing more threatening than an inflated spheroid.
Well, you would be right. For surprisingly enough, “The Warriors,” which is now at the Royal, is not a sports film at all, but a story of unsanctioned warfare on the streets of the Big Apple.
The thought of every street gang in New York City banding together into an organized antiEstablishment army is a theatrically intriguing one — and God only knows, they could probably run the town every bit as well as the current administration. But, unfortunately, despite the clear implication of the ads, that is not what “The Warriors” is about.
It opens with that premise — a mass meeting of gang leaders is invoked in the Bronx by a charismatic chieftain named Cyrus — but, even as he makes his presentation to the assembled rabble, he is gunned down by a rival who later claims he had nothing better to do at the time. Then, adding insult to extinction, the executioner fingers a Coney Island gang called the Warriors as perpetrators of the misdeed and said Warriors shortly find themselves in hasty retreat to their home turf with every punk in New York in pursuit.
The movie, then, is not about gangs taking over Rockefeller Center and Elaine’s but about the Warriors blood-bespattered flight by foot and subway to Coney Island.
Why they don’t simply hail a taxicab is never adequately explained.
“The Warriors” is a picture of no distinction and of little interest to anyone whose face has cleared up, but it has a visceral vigor and vitality that cannot be denied. The cast is composed of unknowns, but director and co-writer Walter Hill is a superb director and — judging by the howled obscenities and mobmentality cheers from a full house at the Royal on Saturday afternoon — has hit his audience right on the nose.
“Harold and Maude,” the semi-classic 1971 black comedy about the friendship of an eccentrically madcap 79-year-old woman (Ruth Gordon) and a painfully shy 20year-old boy (Bud Cort) who uses elaborately faked suicides in order to get this mother’s attention, has been rereleased and is now at the Regency II.
I didn’t see it during the original run and am delighted to have a second chance. I can’t think of another American film of recent years so fresh, shameless and giddily outrageous in its irreverence. Including “Animal House.”
The picture, directed by Hal Ashby, opens with a finely detailed self-hanging by Harold in the enormous mansion in which he and his insufferably fatuous mother live alone. Her only reaction upon seeing her son dangling from a noose is to wearily remonstrate: “Oh, Harold, stop fooling around.”
Then he meets Maude (they share the same hobby: attending the funerals of people they don’t know) and the rapport is immediate. Maude is the ultimate free spirit — the world is her oyster and its rules are pearls, to be worn when and if she pleases. Her prying open of Harold’s shell — and attendant classic comedy sequences — comprise the bulk of the picture. The lad’s various suicides are alone worth the price of admission.
“Harold and Maude” is a special film and so far off the beaten track that even when it takes an occasional wrong turn it simply presses on, forging its own trail. This column originally appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle on Feb. 12, 1979.