Friday, Aug 8, 2008
Marcelino Sanchez, David Harris, Michael Beck and Deborah Van Valkenburgh in "The Warriors."
Twenty-six years after being shunned by the mainstream, the cult classic rises again (and again, and again).
Nov 28, 2005 | It all started with the battle of Cunaxa near Babylon in 401 B.C. If Prince Cyrus hadn't challenged his brother, Artaxerxes II, for the Persian throne and hired 10,000 Greek mercenaries, the most intriguing new special edition DVD and the most hyped video game of 2005 and one of the most eagerly anticipated remakes of 2006 would never have happened.
"The Warriors," Walter Hill's 1979 fantasy about street gangs, has just been released on DVD with special commentary from Hill and the cast and crew. At the same time, Rockstar Games has issued "The Warriors" video game in PlayStation 2 and Xbox formats. And Grove Press is now shipping its reissue of Sol Yurick's 1965 novel, "The Warriors," which, as the cover says, is "The Basis of the Cult Classic Film."
Yurick's novel is the basis, but not the Ana-basis. Here's the short form: Cyrus got himself killed, and his Greek mercenaries -- the "Ten Thousand" of much classical lore -- fought through 1,000 miles of Persian soldiers and barbarian tribes, each with its own mode of dress and special weapons, to the sea and safety. One of their generals, Xenophon, went back to Athens and wrote a book about it, "The Anabasis," and from there it was pretty much a straight shot to pop culture immortality. Movies have often alluded to Xenophon, notably Sam Peckinpah's 1976 "Cross of Iron," with James Coburn, about a group of German soldiers trapped behind enemy lines on the Russian front.
"The Anabasis," usually translated as "The March Upcountry" but also titled by some as "The Persian Expedition," became an instant bestseller. In the early 1960s, a one-time employee of the New York Department of Welfare turned struggling novelist named Sol Yurick -- trust me, this is all going to come together -- submitted a manuscript to his publisher inspired by his firsthand experiences with what were then called juvenile delinquents. The book was about a single night in the life of a gang from Coney Island called the Dominators and its hair-raising adventure trying to return home on the subways after a gang meeting in the Bronx.
During breaks in the ordeal, one of Yurick's characters, a kid with a literary bent, reads from a Classics Illustrated comic (the original graphic novels) about Greek warriors fighting their way through enemy territory to safety and sees a heroic reflection of his own sordid life. The book depicted in the comic is never named, but it is, of course, "The Anabasis" -- a book that was never included in the Classics Illustrated series but which, as Yurick comments in the introduction for the current edition of his novel, "would have made a great comic book."
Yurick is right -- it would have made a great comic book, and finally it did. The comic book was Hill's movie, shot in about 60 days on various New York locations with virtually unknown actors and on a shoestring budget. (Only one scene, a spectacular fight in a subway station men's room, was shot on set.) The film follows the outline of the book, but quickly establishes its own identity. Andrew Laszlo's cinematography transforms New York into a nightmarish world of neon night-glo colors, reflected off shiny wet pavement in what looks like a demented neoimpressionist vision. Barry DeVorzon's synthesizer theme seems to throb to the beat the gang members move with -- literally, in the opening sequence, when we see the garishly clad gangs marching through the subways on the way to the meeting.
Like the ancient Persian tribes, the gangs -- black, white, Hispanic, Asian, and some, like the Warriors, racially mixed -- have their own signature outfits and weapons. The Boppers' nighttime outfits (some gangs dress up to go out for the evening) wear tan slacks, black shirts and metallic magenta vests with 1940s-style fedoras. The Savage Huns dress like Chinese prols; the Electric Illuminators wear bright yellow-gold silk jackets with their emblem emblazoned on the back. The Warriors (their name changed from the Dominators for the movie) are basic and stylish in their brown leather vests, colors on the back, no shirts. The Gramercy Riffs, a black gang, wear orange karate shirts. In one of the film's bizarre little jokes, their weapon of choice is the hockey stick, surely the first and only time that so many black men have been seen carrying that piece of sporting equipment.
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