‘The Warriors’ (1979) Review — Your Unfriendly Neighborhood Punk Heroes

The midnight classic that audiences are still digging 47 years later.

Credit: Paramount Pictures

★★★★★

“CAN….YOU….DIG IT?”

Walter Hill once summed up The Warriors as being a rambunctious experience, and I couldn’t agree more. Sparking mayhem in theaters upon release and cult joy ever since, this film is a roughneck pleaser like no other. I remember falling in love with its Against the Man ethos, gritty to cruel demeanor and punk pulp goodies catching it on VHS as a kid (pairing it instantly with Escape from New York). Nothing prepared me for how fun this is with a packed audience though.

There were no switchblades or baseball bats in the crowd at my local **Loft Cinema* that night, thankfully. Only the corralled rowdiness and pleasure of shouting back at our favorite moments, laughing with the kool to ridiculous tough dude/broad lingo and cheering on our underdog boys from Coney Island. While this flick rocks any viewing in my opinion, the silver screen is undeniably its home — joining midnight greats like Rocky Horror and Eraserhead* as pure communal cinema.

Credit: Paramount Pictures

Following one frantic night in an alternate universe NYC where street gangs sport Batmanesque themes and awesome to doofy to awesomely doofy costumes, The Warriors pits its eponymous working class antiheroes against the world after taking the rap for would-be hooligan messiah Cyrus’s murder.

And what rivals they clash with. The Battle of Thermopylae ain’t got nothin’ on the pinstripes, glam rock warpaint and feathery tufts poking from caps of the Baseball Furies. The Sk8er Boi edginess in overalls of The Punks. The Welcome Back Kotter Cuts a Bitch lame greaser energy of The Orphans. The Switchblade Sisters-in-training Lizzies. The black power badassery of the Cyrus-avenging Gramercy Riffs. Or the clumsy, devilish Scorpio Rising’s Rejects chaos of the archnemesis Rogues.

Credit: Paramount Pictures

Michael Beck leads the pack marvelously as Warriors sergeant turned frontman Swan. Even by 70s standards his vibe is gruff and complex — Swan’s stoic demeanor and coolheadedness offset by various dick moves and occasional acts of compassion. We get where he’s coming from on keeping the group alive, but are repulsed often by the brute guard he hides behind till the final act. This is felt most in his scenes with Mercy, an ex-Orphan and wannabe Warrior who fights side by side with them. His bullshit misogyny is eventually dismantled by Mercy’s equal relentlessness, the two forming an excellent duo by movie’s end.

Mercy is hands-down my favorite character, Deborah Van Valkenburgh’s fiery gravitas and bouts of doubt maintaining the few notes this story has of realness. How she and Beck play that silent exchange on the subway, with a group of bougie wedding partiers judging them up and down — Swan and Mercy claiming their class with fuck you solidarity — is damn perfect. Still don’t like the romantic angle. They work so much better as comrades and double-barrel captains. Alas, it was that decade. I’ll never understand rapey abusive guy attraction though, no matter how hawt those sweat-glistening midsections are framed by leather vest curtains.

The rest of the W’s are rounded out with fine character actor performances by James “Dexter’s Dad” Remar, Dorsey Wright, David Harris, Thomas G. “Windows from The Thing” Waites, Marcelino Sánchez, Brian Tyler, Terry Michos and Tom McKitterick. Especially adore super young, 70s-mopped Remar as alpha asshole enforcer Ajax — the one Warrior whose hapless fate I’m a-okay with. Also, a resounding clap for Roger Hill and that fucking phenomenal opening speech as Cyrus. I can in fact dig it. Have to pause and swoon for a time when you could hear a grand workers of the world unite spiel at a grindhouse or drive-in.

Credit: Paramount Pictures

For me though the final chutzpah that pushes Warriors into the classic realm is David Patrick Kelly’s deliciously bonkers turn as Rogues skipper Luther. From his iconic bottle-clanking jingle to the Coen brothers directing Paradise Lost dumbass Satan shenanigans throughout, Luther steals every precious second he’s on screen. The 0 to Cage exuberance of Kelly in that climatic Coney Island throwdown got the biggest reaction from my audience, and is still my golden moment. I could ramble a whole other chunkpiece about Kelly and how he’s in my most endeared thespians club. The dude simply slays.

Meanwhile Hill and David Shaber’s script, adapted from the ’65 novel by Sol Yurick, is the kind of lean and mean beast I’ve always loved. Positively Carpenter in execution, we get just the right amount of archetype and shorthand for characterization while the plot cuts through runtime like a hot knife. Action sequence after action sequence in The Warriors’ vampire hour odyssey keeps us enthralled before locking in on that last rumble.

The coda that follows, surrounded by a hazy Brooklyn dawn, is absolutely earned — and surprisingly beautiful. Cinematographer Andrew Laszlo dips us into 70s NYC with a strong eye for its grungy loveliness, far more subtle and naturalistic here than his neon-splashed Hill companion piece Streets of Fire (which slaps almost as hard). Add Barry De Vorzon’s sharp synthy score to the mix and you have an invitation to genre filmmaking at its finest.

Credit: Paramount Pictures

Bonus points for the line “I’m gonna stick that bat up your ass and turn you into a popsicle.” And for Lynne Thigpen’s unsung role as our guiding DJ, spinning those banger tracks and commenting on the evening like Super Soul’s East Coast cousin.

Side note — A gang of mimes!? Can you shank them with your imagination? Are they susceptible to impromptu invisible wall building? So many questions!

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