director
John Carpenter
screenwriters
John Carpenter
Nick Castle
producers
Larry J. Franco
Debra Hill
cinematographer
Dean Cundey
music
John Carpenter
editor
Todd C. Ramsay
cast
Kurt Russell (Snake Plissken)
Lee Van Cleef (Bob Hauk)
Ernest Borgnine (Cabbie)
Donald Pleasence (President)
Isaac Hayes (The Duke)
Season Hubley (Girl in Chock Full O'Nuts)
Harry Dean Stanton (Brain)
Adrienne Barbeau (Maggie)
Tom Atkins (Rehme)
Charles Cyphers (Secretary of State)
Frank Doubleday (Romero)
Nancy Stephens (Stewardess)
George 'Buck' Flower (Drunk)
Ox Baker (Slag)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 99m
u.s.
release: July 10, 1981
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other john
carpenter films
reviewed on this website:
- escape
from l.a.
- ghosts
of mars
- halloween
- the
thing
- vampires
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"I thought you were
dead."
At the start of the '80s, both
John Carpenter and Kurt Russell were in need of a little image
rehab. Carpenter had made two back-to-back horror hits, and likely
wasn't interested in going for number three; he was offered The
Philadelphia Experiment, but chose instead to whisk the dust
off a futuristic action script he'd tinkered with in the early
'70s. It's possible that Carpenter wanted to go back to his true
calling as a maker of Westerns in non-Western garb, and Escape
from New York is a natural companion piece to his earlier
Assault on Precinct 13. For Russell's part, he'd done
Elvis (with Carpenter) and had just finished Used Cars;
but that was a comedy, and Russell needed something as
far away from his Disney roots as humanly possible. S.D. "Snake"
Plissken, the scruffy, cynical, one-eyed combat veteran turned
career criminal turned unwilling rescuer, was just the ticket.
There are essentially two John
Carpenters: the one who makes bleak horror movies and bows to
Hitchcock and Val Lewton, and the one who makes bad-ass movies
and genuflects to John Ford and Howard Hawks. Escape from
New York is Bad-Ass John in full effect, and its influence
cannot be understated; Robert Rodriguez studied the film closely,
and James Cameron, who worked on the movie's special effects
and matte paintings, owed a very large debt to Escape
in The Terminator, which can fairly accurately be read
as the best John Carpenter movie that Carpenter never made. Escape
also changed the look of urban action films, which had tended
towards the gritty and grainy; Carpenter, aided by cinematographer
Dean Cundey, made the action genre safe for midnight-black compositions
bisected by blue flares of light or illuminated by flickering
orange flame.
Beyond that, we have one of
the world's simplest plots. The President (Donald Pleasence in
a nice change-of-pace comedy turn) has been kidnapped -- his
plane has gone down behind the walls of the maximum-security
prison that the entirety of Manhattan has become. In his possession
is a tape that might forestall nuclear war. He's alive, somewhere
in the urban jungle dominated by "crazies" and criminals
under the iron fist of the Duke of New York (Isaac Hayes). Snake,
who's doing life for attempted bank robbery, is brought to police
commissioner Bob Hauk (Lee Van Cleef, in a masterstroke of casting)
and offered a deal: If he can get into New York and retrieve
the President, he'll be pardoned for his crimes. To make sure
Snake doesn't high-tail it to Canada, he's injected with micro-explosives,
which will go off in 22 hours unless he returns with the President
and/or the tape. Grudgingly, Snake accepts the mission, which
he doesn't actually give a shit about.
Once Snake lands on the World
Trade Center, Escape takes off. Carpenter loads it with
lively supporting characters: the effusive Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine),
the duplicitous Brain (Harry Dean Stanton) and his "squeeze"
Maggie (Adrienne Barbeau), and a weirdo named Romero (Frank Doubleday)
whose teeth are as pointy as his hair, and who shows off the
President's finger as proof that he's in the Duke's clutches.
Season Hubley makes a brief appearance as "Girl in Chock
Full O'Nuts," a punk-haired waif whose offer of sex in return
for getting out of New York with Snake is about the closest this
dour film comes to a romantic interlude. In this dystopian world
of 1997, everyone is out for himself; Snake emerges as a hero
only because he won't betray anyone -- he's been hung out to
dry before, and didn't like it much.
Surprisingly, there isn't a
whole lot of action. Six million dollars only buys you so much,
and there's a stutter of gunfire here and there, but most of
the movie is dedicated to pursuit or retreat. Even the gladiatorial
match between Snake and the towering Ox Baker is over almost
before it begins -- a few whacks, then Snake dispatches his opponent
with two well-aimed blows from his nail-studded baseball bat.
Carpenter doesn't shy away from lengthy set-pieces when he has
to, but Escape demands economy of motion; the clock is
ticking, and there's little time to waste on big action sequences
that serve no purpose other than to display the director's skill
at squibbing or fight choreography. Snake is like a brutally
impatient editor set loose in the screenwriters' story. Does
it move the story along? No? Fuck it, we don't have time.
Carpenter's anti-authority/libertarian
leanings really pop out at the end, when Snake asks the President
(being pampered and puffed for an impending TV address) how he
feels about the fact that a lot of people died to bring him home.
The President uncorks some fatuous statement about how the nation
is grateful for their efforts, and Snake hisses out cigarette
smoke and slouches into the night, casually unravelling everything
those people died for. This is Carpenter at his most cheerfully
nihilistic: God and country are foolish jokes not worth fighting
or dying for. Escape adds film noir to a Western
plot; it's only set in the future because it can't be set in
the present, and nobody would have given Carpenter the money
to set it in the past -- the Wild West, let's say. Snake is a
gunslinger whose dim view of human nature is already several
leagues past Gary Cooper at the end of High Noon. He strides
into a dirty town, shoots up the joint, goes about his mission,
and strides off into the moonset (for there is no sunset, or
sun, in this film) with only the vague consolation of his freedom
-- whatever that means in a world run by idiots like the
President or tyrants like the Duke.
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