— RANKING: 73 —
ENTER JOHN CARPENTER: The writer-director, who had previously reinvented urban action (Assault on Precinct 13, 1976) and slasher cinema (Halloween, 1978), turned his attention to the action-oriented dystopian subgenre with Escape from New York, starring Kurt Russell. Courtesy: AVCO Embassy.
CREDITS
AVCO Embassy Pictures; John Carpenter, dir.; Carpenter, Nick Castle, scr.; Debra Hill, Larry J. Franco, pro.; Carpenter, Alan Howarth, mus.; Dean Cundey, cin.; Todd C. Ramsay, ed.; Joe Alves, prod. design; Stephen Loomis, costumes; Arthur Gelb, graphic design; Alan Howarth, special synthesizer sound effects; Roy Arbogast, Pat Patterson, Eddie Surkin, Gary Zink, F/X; James Cameron, special visual effects/matte artwork; 99 min.; Color; 2.35:1.
CAST
Kurt Russell (Snake Plissken); Lee Van Cleef (Hauk); Adrienne Barbeau (Maggie); Ernest Borgnine (Cabbie); Donald Pleasence (The President); Isaac Hayes (The Duke); Season Hubley (Girl in Chock Full O’Nuts); Harry Dean Stanton (The Brain); Tom Atkins (Rehme); John Diehl (Punk); Debra Hill (Computer, voice).
MOST MEMORABLE LINE
I thought you were dead.
VIRTUALLY EVERY CHARACTER IN THE FILM, UPON MEETING SNAKE PLISSKEN
BACKGROUND
With his ultra-low-budget Dark Star (1974), John Carpenter (1948–) earned a reputation as an edgy indie director with an offbeat sense of humor and a natural feel for sci-fi. The writer-director achieved notoriety with the unexpectedly popular horror movie, Halloween (1978). Its success allowed Carpenter to argue successfully for a bigger budget, $6 million, to be allocated for Escape from New York.
The idea for the film began to take shape in the early 1970s after he viewed two seminal films, each capturing an aspect of that era: Death Wish (Michael Winner, 1974), starring Charles Bronson as the vigilante who sets out to destroy the street criminals who have taken over New York City; and All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976), a drama about the journalists who uncovered the Watergate scandal and brought about the fall of a president. Carpenter merged the two themes into a dystopian future sci-fi script co-written by Castle, who had played the monstrous “Shape” in Halloween. Debra Hill (1950–2005), one of the so-called Movie Brats who had seized control of the industry at this time, had worked her way up from script supervisor and assistant editor on Carpenter’s early (and excellent) urban crime drama, Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), to become a leading producer.
THE PLOT
The crime infestation of Manhattan is so out of control that a decision has been reached from a committee of high-ranking officials: give up trying. A wall has been built around the city, manned by military police, and the government dumps the fiercest convicts into the burned-out ruins of a once-great metropolis. No one who enters ever leaves—at least until a plane carrying the president crashes into these meanest of mean streets. Hauk, a nasty official in charge of engineering a rescue, promises super-convict Snake Plissken that, if he can bring the president (and his all-important briefcase) back within twenty-four hours, he can walk free. If he can’t pull off this near-impossible mission within that time limit, he will be exploded from afar by remote control.
THE FILM
As New York City had become too costly for anything but immensely expensive projects, most of the shoot took place in East St. Louis. A devastating fire had turned sections of that city into precisely the sort of wasteland Carpenter needed for his desired look. Most interiors were shot on Los Angeles soundstages, with only one significant image—a helicopter whirring past the most famous skyline in the world—achieved on location in Manhattan.
Carpenter nixed Bronson as the lead, supposedly owing to that actor’s age. It is more likely, however, that this decision had to do with the fear that a major star would immediately seize control from a young and relatively inexperienced director. Tommy Lee Jones, Nick Nolte, and Jeff Bridges all turned down the role before Russell finally won it by default. AVCO Embassy executives feared that Russell’s long association with light comedy would disqualify him from being taken seriously as an action star, but the public’s full acceptance of him proved them wrong. The character as written did not wear an eye-patch; Russell added that detail on the first day of shooting. Co-writer Castle was the one who came up with the idea of Ernest Borgnine’s cab driver for comic relief.
THEME
The running gag that has almost every character expressing surprise upon learning that Snake still walks the Earth has resonance beyond its effectiveness as a recurring laugh line. Snake is Carpenter’s own incarnation of the Man With No Name as played by Clint Eastwood in the spaghetti Westerns of his early career and High Plains Drifter (Eastwood, 1973), the first Eastwood vehicle to imply that his remote character is ghost-like and mythic. In point of fact, despite Carpenter’s association with eerie projects, he had always hoped to direct Westerns. To a degree, he had the opportunity to do so here; the irony is that the East Coast city has been reconstituted into a final vestige of the old West in its wildest days. With that in mind, the casting of Lee Van Cleef, Eastwood’s friendly enemy in such films as For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone, 1965), takes on additional meaning beyond the actor’s rightness for this role. Here then is a film that, like Star Wars, recalls the science-fiction film’s identity as a kind of futuristic Western.
TRIVIA
Frank Doubleday and John Strobel respectively play minor characters named “Romero” and “Cronenberg,” Carpenter’s in-joke way of thanking fellow sci-fi/horror filmmakers George Romero and David Cronenberg for their assistance.
Future “king of the world” director James Cameron, who had been preparing F/X for low-budget films at Roger Corman’s Concorde Pictures, created some of the impressive matte shots.
The character “Snake” might have seemed something of a no-brainer for a franchise, but that never quite happened. The belabored sequel, Escape from L.A. (1996), struck most fans as too little, too late, despite the considerably larger budget.
Musician-turned-actor Isaac Hayes was picked for the role of Duke owing to his association with the so-called black exploitation flicks of the early 1970s, vividly recalled here. The styles designed for the young stragglers offered an early vision of cyberpunk.