Escape from New York

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK              A                 

USA   Great Britain  (99 mi)  1981  ‘Scope  d:  John Carpenter

“I don’t give a fuck about your war… or your president.”  —Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell)

All you have to do is hear that familiar synthesizer intro, a slow moving dirge that feels like a funeral procession, Escape From New York Theme (BEST QUALITY) YouTube (3:55), and you’re taken back to the decade of the 80’s, where this is one of the better musical scores, written by Carpenter and Alan Horvath, a perfect fit for the nightmarish dread that is this movie, where a futuristic apocalypse is upon us in the form of a rising crime rate increased by 400%.  Crime is so out of contral that security forces have turned the island of Manhattan (think of Woody Allen’s romanticized movie released in 1979, just two years prior to this one) in New York City into a maximum security prison with guards placed only on the outside, building walls completely around it and mining all bridges, making it completely impossible to escape, like Alcatraz, a prison for over 3 million criminals who are expected to savagely survive on their own, receiving only monthly food drops in Central Park, turning this into an exiled land of undesirables.  Looking for the worst city in America to shoot the film, they discovered a recent fire destroyed nearly 20% of the downtown area of St. Louis, leaving it a ravaged no man’s land of burned out rubble, where the remaining piles of garbage strewn along the street give this a beautifully desolate landscape of ruin and emptiness, exactly the mood needed for this film, which is intoxicatingly rich in atmosphere.  This film has a swagger all it’s own, inventing a unique conception of über cool in the form of the lead character, Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken, easily his greatest role, an inmate himself wearing an eye patch over one eye and a sleeveless shirt under a worn leather jacket, a shaggy-haired former war hero who has the uncanny ability to make things happen.  The beauty of his character (besides the name) is the explosively charged, badass attitude mixed with his sneering nonchalance, where his defiant bravado makes the film, as he doesn’t trust a single thing about the government, adding a kind of macho anarchistic rebellion the moment he is dropped into the middle of the war zone. 

On his way to a world summit conference, Air Force One carrying the President (Donald Pleasance) is hijacked and crashes into the heart of Manhattan (a decade before 9/11), where he quickly disappears into the ruins and is held hostage.  Plissken is injected with a deadly chemical designed to kill him instantly after 24 hours if he doesn’t return with the President and the important documents he’s carrying, a little incentive provided by the police commissioner Lee Van Cleef, along with a watch that counts down his remaining time.  Plissken is a perfect choice, as he’s a lone warrior trained to fend for himself under the worst circumstances, which is exactly where he soon finds himself.  Shot entirely at night, the cover of darkness provides a creepy environment where things have a way of jumping out of unseen cracks and corners, where a one-eyed guy hauling around a giant-sized gun is bound to attract attention.  Ernest Borgnine, of all people, whose presence recalls the fatalism of The Wild Bunch (1969), picks him up in his yellow cab, heaving a molotov cocktail to cover his tracks from marauding hooligans chasing after Snake, where the pleasant sounds of the theme song from American Bandstand Les Elgart - Bandstand Boogie YouTube (2:04) can be heard blaring over his stereo.  The cabbie takes him to Brain (Harry Dean Stanton) and his girl Maggie (Adrienne Barbeau, aka cleavage), as both work for The Duke (Isaac Hayes), the ganglord who controls the streets and is holding the President.  Amusingly, each of the characters, once learning of Plissken’s presence inside the prison, has the exact same reaction:  “I heard you were dead.”  Part of the fun of this film is the slow introduction of so many familiar faces that the audience quickly identifies with along with the incessant stream of weird characters, especially the kind that work for the Duke, who is seen driving a pimp-mobile with four chandeliers for head and tail lights and a disco ball hanging from the rearview mirror.  Hayes relaxed and ultra cool demeanor matches that of Snake, though he cracks him over the head with a tire iron first chance he gets as a kind of welcoming into the hood. 

As soon as Snake comes to, just an hour or so before his deadline, he’s forced to fight in front of disapproving fans in a Roman Colosseum style gladiator match, pitted against a much larger human specimen, Ox Baker, a professional wrestler in real life, set in the dilapidated remains of Madison Square Garden.  In front of the Duke and a teeming throng of bloodthirsty psychopaths, both are given baseball bats to smash each other to bits in a small enclosed ring, followed by the next round where the bats have nail spikes sticking out the end, a hint of escalating brutality.  Somehow, Snake is able to empty the arena in utter chaos and pandemonium, making a quick escape where he improvises a spectacular last minute rescue of the President, against all odds and some unexpected circumstances, eventually high tailing it in the cab across the George Washington Bridge with the Duke on his heels.  Defying death at every turn, with landmines and demolished cars and all kinds of debris left as barricades blocking their path, the route appears doomed, but this is their only path left to escape.  The filth and grime of the streets are like a silent character, beautifully captured by cinematographer Dean Cundey who is in perfect synch with the director, revealing a sprawling wasteland in every direction, where fires always seem to be burning off in the distance.  Certainly this is an abominable and nightmarish pit of miserable existence, where Carpenter has outdone himself in creating such an extraordinarily bleak vision of Hell on earth.  The hypnotic synth theme becomes an anthem by the end that is played like a requiem over the living and the dead, as this jailbreak leaves plenty of bodies left behind, all sacrificed for the noble cause of the President, but otherwise quickly forgotten by the government that simply left them there to die.  Written by Carpenter and Nick Castle, who played Michael Myers in HALLOWEEN (1978), this kind of post-Watergate cynicism and post-Vietnam anger and disgust with government for all the lies, cover ups, and dead bodies in its wake has never been so poetically rendered as the contemptuous and distrustful nihilism expressed in this film.