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The Warriors

© Steve Honeywell

I was talking with a compatriot recently about movies, and about some of our favorites when I mentioned The Warriors, a classic film about street gangs in the late 70s. Well, okay, it's about street gangs about as much as Star Wars is about Wookies, but that's beside the point. The point is that he'd never heard of the movie, which I think is a terrible tragedy.

Here's the skinny: Before gangs armed themselves with high-powered weapons, they existed, at least in myth, as groups of punks who hung out together and beat the crap out of each other, extorted money, and generally did small-time crooks stuff for kicks. Enter the Grammercy Riffs, the largest gang in New York City. Under the leadership of Cyrus, the Riffs decide to exercise their right to free assembly. They gather 9 delegates from 100 gangs in the city and offer a plan: if they can keep up the current truce, all of the gangs can unite and take over the entire town, seeing as how they outnumber the police by at least 3 to 1.

Unfortunately for this bold plan, fate takes a hand when a member of one gang shoots Cyrus in the chest. He then blames the poor unfortunate Warriors, a gang from Coney Island, for the shooting. And there's the plot in its entirety. The Warriors try to get back home while every gang in the city is looking to get them and drag them screaming back to the Riffs for a crime they didn't commit. In fact, on a single viewing it's hard to actually pick out the names of all of the Warriors. (The are, for the record, Cleon, Swan, Ajax, Rembrant, Snow, Cochise, Cowboy, Vermin, and Fox).

What happens during the course of the movie is a lot of fighting. A lot of fighting, indeed. These are good, old-style knock-down fights with fists and baseball bats and clubs and knives, not gunfights. There's some startling fight choreography, and some extremely inventive battles (including one in a public restroom).

It's also worth noting that this movie was controversial when it was released in 1979, because violence surrounded it. It was notorious for causing gang fights in theaters where it was shown. (In fact, I had to wait until my folks were out of town and convince my brother to rent it in the early 80s so I could see it for myself. Mom did not approve of her youngest watching such violent fare.)