In the 1970s, Walter Hill established himself as a skilled writer (“The Getaway”) and the director (“Hard Times”, “Driver”) of Smart, tight, character -controlled action films that pulled on work with FordHawks and Kurosawa but had a twist, literary voice completely their own. It was often said – including by Hill Self – that the urban crime films where Hill specialized were Westerners in disguise.
Still, there is another genre that Hill was and continued to be like to see, and that is the Hollywood musical. Comparisons with Vincente Minnelli and Jacques Demy may not be as obvious as those for Sam Peckinpah and Budd Beticher, but Hill’s best work shares these directors careful attention to the rhythm (both in terms of stimulation within scenes and in terms of the total structure), color and the dynamic movement in space.
Hill would make one film (“Streets of Fire”) with enough song and dance numbers to qualify as a kind of musical, and some of the most happy scenes in other films (“48 hours.” The first time he deliberately approached the genre came in 1979, and it resulted in his first big hit: The Deliriously raised Chase Film “Warrior. ”
“I used to say to myself, every day at Set,” I’m doing a musical, “Hill told IndieWire. While” The Warriors “have no musical numbers in the traditional sense, that structure for a musical, with stylized fighting scenes where the character is expressed and plot is moved forward and replaces songs and role. disc jockey that dives in and out to tell the story.)
The prerequisite for Sol Yurick’s novel, on which the film is based, lent to such a strategy. “Larry Gordon had during his AIP days chosen the novel, and when he became an independent producer he took the book with him,” Hill said. “He showed it to me when we made” hard times “and I said it was really fantastic and could make a good movie, but I thought they would never let us do it because there were no roles for movie stars and time was so compressed.”
The compression of time and space – the whole story takes place on a night in New York, as the title group is struggling home after mistakenly accused of the murder of a massive street gang cone – was exactly what appealing Hill. “I was a big fan of series when I was a kid, and I’ve always been impressed with their ability to tell complicated stories in a compressed style,” he said. “So many movies are padded and very long, and then they say the same thing five fucking times.”
Nothing about “The Warriors” is padded – clocking of just over an hour and a half, it is one of the lutteest and most prominent films ever made. It is also one of the last fantastic Audacious Studio editions in the 1970s, an idiosyncratic and personal piece of Hollywood entertainment that does not look or sound like any other movie. “I told (costume designer) Bobbie Mannix and (Kinematographer) Andy Laszlo, we will go for it, not reintroduced,” Hill said. “And they answered in kind.”
Mannix’s suits are especially a reason for “Warriors” became a classic, as each gang has its own distinct look. “Furies” is a baseball team with kiss-makeup whose tendency to exercise baseball bats have the litter motivation for arranging a Kurosawa-Esque Samurai scene with bats instead of swords. Other gangs are dressed like hillbillies, mimes or in more conventional street gang clothes, but each is completely distinct and adds to the feeling that “The Warriors” is as accurate in their color coding as “The Red Shoes” or an MGM musical from the 1950s.
But what gives the “warriors” is its vibrant energy composition of Hill’s exact design with a more choir-and-gun that he arrived at through the necessity shooting on the streets of New York. “There were daily challenges,” Hill said. “We constantly lost places. The city of New York and the subway system were large, but the neighborhoods turned out to be very difficult.” Adding the challenge was the fact that the studio never really stood behind the film and struggled with Hill regularly.
“I was grateful to make the movie, because I knew it was an odd choice,” Hill said, “but the studio was hesitant about it all.” The only reason Paramount Green-lit the movie was because they had a big hit with another New York movie, “Saturday Night Fever.” “The studio thought this was somehow related to that world, but they thought of a much more realistic movie than I wanted to do. When they saw the movie, they didn’t know what the hell to do with it.”
Paramount considered not even releasing “Warriors” theater. “It is the irony for us who discuss the film over 40 years later,” Hill said. He credited an editor who cut together a strong trailer for Paramount by saving the film. “The marketing department said:” Yes, this would make a good TV place and we could open this thing. “But the studio was full of doubt.
Despite the studio’s lack of faith, “The Warriors” was an instant hit and took the place at the checkout on its opening weekend and in the end gathered positive reviews from influential critics like Pauline Kael, even though Hill says the first messages were not as friendly. “The idea that we were a critical success is partly true,” he said. “The newspapers were pretty much quite negative. But the other wave of reviews, in the newspapers, was largely very revisionist and very positive. So we had eaten on it.”
Not long after the film’s release, there were violent incidents in some places, simply caused by the fact that the film’s subject attracted gang members who were often in theaters along with their sworn enemies. “Paramount, in a typical act of studio fever, drew all advertising and suddenly you couldn’t even find the damn thing,” Hill said. “But even then we continued to do well with the audience, and we did well foreign.”
Another Battle Hill had with the studio was over a framing device that he wanted to use where a narrator would contextualize the story, which was loosely based on Greek history and Xenophon’s “Anabasis.” Eventually, Hill would add the story himself to a “director’s edition” of the film on DVD, but in 1979 he had another plan. “Neil (Canton, then Hill’s Assistant) and Frank (Marshall, an executive producer on the film) knew Orson Welles,” Hill said. “They contacted him and asked if he would make the story if we paid him. He sent back that he would be happy to do so, but the studio said they didn’t want him.”
Even without Orson Welles, “The Warriors” continued to become one of Hill’s most often revived films, and its entertainment feels even more valuable today when the tradition where Hill operated mainly has ceased to exist. In July, Hill traveled to Rome for an outdoor show of the film where he was enjoying the various interpretations that his peeled action image had inspired.
“Some people see it as a neo-Marxist exercise, with Cyrus as a defect figure that requires immediate revolution, Luther is anarcho-fascist and the warriors the proletarian survivors through their width, their innate courage and their human spirit. Others are more interested in the classic Xenophon story.
And what does Hill say when he is asked what interpretation he agrees or disagrees? “If you ask me what I think – I think it’s true.”
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