The Warriors (

1979

) ½

In 401 B.C., Cyrus the Younger, the son of the deceased Darius II of Persia, was waging war against his brother Artaxerxes II for control of the Persian empire. Among Cyrus’ forces were a band of Greek mercenaries called The Ten Thousand. There was nothing unusual about this in-and-of-itself as power struggles in the interim between powerful monarchs were more the rule than the exception during the Achaemenid Empire. Greek mercenary bands were also a common enough sight in Asian wars at the time, as Persian Emperors and Satraps were keenly aware of Greek martial prowess after their encounters with hoplites at Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea. The Ten Thousand acquitted themselves well in the coming battle (as was common at the time, Greek heavy infantry were the premier fighting force in the ancient world until Roman legionaries turned up), but unfortunately for them, Cyrus was killed in the fighting and they were left stranded in the middle of hostile territory with a very long and dangerous march back to the sea. To make matters worse, their leader was quickly killed and it was left the young Xenophon to take command of the band and lead them home. That same Xenophon would record the story in his book The Anabasis (the march up country), a book mostly famous for its role as an introductory text for burgeoning classicists to cut their Greek teeth on before moving onto Homer and Plato.

I say all this because, in the mid-1960s, Xenophon’s history would provide the inspiration for the first novel by Sol Yurick. Yurick, who had been working as a social working in NYC up to this point, retold the story of The Anabasis with wayward youth gangs standing in for the Greek mercenaries. The story would follow a marathon journey from the Bronx to Coney Island over the course of one rough night. Yurick’s novel is utterly mediocre (which is hardly surprising given Yurick’s own background as a communist agitator and social worker, two professions that almost never attract great minds or great men) and would have been relegated to the dust-bin of history (like the rest of Yurick’s oeuvre) were it not for a curious quirk of fate. The novel was discovered by Walter Hill, then a young filmmaker, eager to make a name for himself with a striking genre film. Hill recognized that most of Yurick’s novel was garbage, but through the midst of this crap, Hill saw the bones of an interesting story, one that he would fashion into a pulp classic.

Our story opens with a bit of narration delivered in the form of short fragmentary conversations between members of the Coney Island street gang, The Warriors. This has the dual purpose of introducing us to the premise of our story while simultaneously giving us a quick sketch of the characters we’ll be following. Obviously not much can be relayed to the audience in such a fashion but we understand, for instance, that Cleon is the leader of the bunch, Swan is his faithful number two, Ajax is handy in a fight but also a real asshole the rest of the time, and that Rembrandt is a graffiti artist and also the rookie of the bunch. The group is all abuzz with excitement and dread about the upcoming city-wide gang meet-up in Van Cortlandt Park. Cyrus, the famed leader of the Riffs, the most powerful gang in NYC (who incidentally dress like extras in a Jim Kelly movie), has called a summit of all the gangs in the city. Each gang worth their salt will send nine delegates, unarmed, to discuss terms on the formation of a citywide super gang. It’s a crazy idea, given the fact that the gangs can barely stop fighting each other long enough to organize such an event, but one that is potentially very fruitful if it could be pulled off. There are 60,000 hoods in NYC and only 20,000 cops. Uniting them would be nearly impossible, but everyone agrees, there is something about Cyrus, a certain magic quality, that means if anyone is gonna pull it off it will be him.

The only problem is that among the gangs assembled in good faith, there are also a few crazy motherfuckers called the Rogues, led by Luther the craziest motherfucker of them all. For this film to work, the audience has to hate Luther, while also buying that he is so unhinged that he would go around murdering people simply because he gets bored. Fortunately, Hill placed the best damn actor in the whole film, David Patrick Kelly, in the role of Luther and told him to go nuts. Kelly delivers a role that is both unflinchingly bonkers and unflinchingly grating. I don’t think I have ever heard a more obnoxious voice that still managed to be sinister (excepting, of course, the guy doing Luther’s voice in the excellent video game adaptation). Luther is on reasonably good behavior for most of the meeting, but at the culmination of Cyrus’s speech, he gets bored, pulls a gun, and blasts Cyrus. At the same moment, the cops descend on the assembly and throw everything into confusion. Luther blames The Warriors for killing Cyrus, mostly because they’re the first gang he sees after the shot is fired. The Riffs pounce on Cleon, and either kill or beat him to a pulp while the other Warriors make their escape to a nearby cemetery.

Geography is working against the Warriors, as they are a Coney Island gang, and the Riffs chose Van Cortlandt Park as the meeting place for the citywide assembly, which is just about as far from their turf as possible while still being in NYC. Getting back home on the subways would take nearly two hours under the best conditions, and between the fact that it’s night (and the subways run less frequently), the cops swarming the streets, and the fact that every gang in NYC is looking to waste the guys who killed Cyrus, means that it will be one difficult journey. Add to that the fact that the Warriors have lost their leader, Cleon, and his second-in-command is untested and immediately in conflict with Ajax (who resents taking orders from anyone). Fortunately for the warriors, Swan is more than up to the task and quickly leads them to the nearest subway station, evading the Turnbull ACs (a skinhead gang in a modified school bus that looks like it was borrowed from Lord Humongous) in the process.

It’s not going to be smooth sailing all the way back to Coney though, at the next train station, they find the line closed down by a fire on the tracks. So, the Warriors have to march through the turf of a low-rent organization called The Orphans. These guys are so far down the totem pole of NYC gangs that not only were they not invited to Cyrus’ meetup, they didn’t even know it was going on. Normally, The Warriors would mop the floor with a gang as pitiful as these clowns, but they only have eight soldiers in total, and none of them are armed. Twenty or Thirty Orphans with a couple of guns and knives between them pose a serious threat, even if they are, as Ajax puts it, “A bunch of wimps.” Fortunately for the Warriors, Sully, the leader of the Orphans, is a pretty reasonable guy. He understands that The Warriors aren’t armying, they’re just passing through his turf on the way to the next subway station. Even better, Sully has no idea that The Riffs want the Warriors captured dead or alive. A little bit of flattery from Swan is enough to convince him to let them pass unmolested, at least until his girlfriend Mercy turns up and starts trouble. It becomes obvious that Mercy is the one who wears the pants in the relationship, a fact which bores the girl to no end. She questions Sully’ manhood (what sort of man lets another gang just stroll through his turf?), and then in the exact opposite of what she probably wants from him, he reverses course and gets tough with The Warriors. In the ensuing battle, Ajax is proved right, The Orphans are just a bunch of wimps who scatter at the first sign of trouble, even though they have the advantage in numbers and armaments. Mercy, who watches the whole thing, is intrigued as decides to ditch these losers and roll with The Warriors instead.

Coney Island is still a long way off, and things only look worse for The Warriors when they’re ambushed by police at the next station and have to scatter into three groups to avoid capture. Nor are their troubles over after that, before long they’ll run up against more bizarre street gangs, including an all-lesbian gang called The Lizzies, a bunch of Charlie Brown knock-offs known as The Punks and a swarm of baseball-bat carrying psychos in greasepaint: The Baseball Furies. The action is, admittedly, a bit on the weak side, especially one used to contemporary Hong Kong action movies. Still, for an American film of this vintage, it is far from the worst you’re likely to find. The weakness of the fight choreography is made up for, somewhat, by the number of participants. The camera can easily jump from one punch to another, making it at times difficult to tell which side is winning the fight, but seldom boring.

One could criticize the Warriors for the fact that its gangs, like most Hollywood gangs, are interracial organizations, something which is almost totally unheard of in the real world. Hell, even the skinhead gang (The Turnbull ACs) has black and Hispanic members! Yeah, it’s not realistic, but neither are gangs in greasepaint and baseball uniforms. Besides, unlike the novel which it is nominally based on, Walter Hill’s Warriors is not meant to depict a realistic vision of New York City. Indeed, the streets of NYC here have more in common with Escape from New York (1981) than they do with the real New York of 1979. However, there are times when realism is grossly overrated and I believe that this was one of them. Your average audience member in 1979 was not well-versed in the life of gangsters and thugs, this being before rap brought street knowledge into the home of every suburban teenager and The Wire schooled a few million bougie HBO subscribers on how real criminal organizations operated. What the non-criminal members of the audience knew about gangs in the 70s were things they had glimpsed through encounters on public transit or seedy streets. The only ones who would have been intimately familiar with criminals would have been their victims, and such status brings with it its own set of biases and distortions. To them, the freakshow world of The Warriors might well have been 100% genuine. They had no knowledge to contradict it, and what’s more the vision is compellingly and thoughtfully rendered. It may not be realistic, but the world of The Warriors is fully fleshed out and internally consistent. From the language (the nonsense slang used by the gangs is unusually convincing), to the codes of conduct, to the uniforms of the gangs themselves, everything evokes this strange parallel society that might exist on rough city streets after dusk and before dawn.

Yet the appeal of The Warriors was not just limited to squares. Gangs across the country flocked to the cinemas playing The Warriors and, predictably, had punch-ups in the cinema lobbies. Just as predictably, the violence was blamed on the film, but in truth, the problem had nothing to do with the violence on screen and more to do with the violent hoods in the lobby. Gangsters are, by definition, violent people and when you get enough of them interested in a film some are going to start fights in the cinema. As the recent spree of machete battles in UK cinemas screening the gang film Blue Story (2019) shows, somethings never change.