Fighting the killer mimes to get home
An unusual DJ night at a D.C. bar last night featured two large screens playing 1979's The Warriors, a movie about a street gang from Coney Island making their way back home via subway from an all-city gang meeting in the far north Bronx where they had been accused of killing a leader plotting to unite the city's gangs in a battle against the police.
It looks pretty post-apocalyptic and empty, but the trains run, the lights are on and the cops are around, even if they're inaffectual against ludicrously dressed street gangs roaming around as packs of psychotic baseball players, killer mimes or Indian warriors. It isn't the far future - it's 1979, and the subways actually did look like that.
Yours truly has seen bits and pieces of The Warriors more than a few times, and can't help but get agitated when the eponymous Brooklyn crew gets out of an LL train (now the L) at what's obviously a bi-level IND station, only to emerge from underground at 96th and Broadway on the IRT. But for everybody else, it's a fairly interesting flick to watch with no sound in a bar while trying to appear like a hipster who is so in tune with urban living that they don't flinch at the site of grime, afros and men in overalls wielding chains.
Of course, a lot has changed since 1979, and the possible remake seems strange, given that today's subway has no graffitti and too-bright cars that tell you what station comes back in the voice of a reassuring news radio announcer (WBBR's Charlie Pellett). While I marvel at how far MTA has come since the days of fiscal insolvency and Studio 54, DCist, also at the bar, sees a future for my current city of residence in the nastiness of The Warriors' transit nightmare.
Other 1970s subway films worth watching:
The Taking of Pehlam 1-2-3
Wild Style
There are more, but I can't find them at the moment.
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rj3 | 3:41 PM |
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