
Press > Escape From New York > Reviews
Hollywood Reporter [Jun 12/1981/US] By Arthur Knight
The year is 1997, and Manhattan -
all of it from the Battery to the Bronx - has been converted into a walled-off,
maximum security prison in John Carpenter's Escape From New York.
Theoretically, escape is impossible. The bridges are mined, and radar maintains
an implacable vigil over the surrounding waters. And yet an escape route must be
found - and in less than 24 hours - for the President of the United States
[Donald Pleasence], whose sabotaged Air Force One has placed him in the hands of
New York's criminal population.
Who can set him free? Police
Commissioner Lee Van Cleef believes he has found his man in Kurt Russell, a
scruffy war hero who is also a convicted master criminal. If Russell can
accomplish his mission, he can go free; if not, two tiny explosives implanted in
his arteries will kill him - which doesn't leave him much choice.
The focus of this Avco Embassy
production is on Russell's efforts to locate the President in the ravaged city
despite organized terror gangs and the murderous, hunger-driven "gypsies" who
roam the streets by night.
Despite his assortment of futuristic
gadgetry [including a gun that never seems to run out of bullets] Russell is
forced mainly to rely upon - or to outwit - such hardened criminal types as
Season Hubley, Ernest Borgnine, Harry Dean Stanton, Adrienne Barbeau, the
androgynous Tom Atkins and, most formidable of all, Isaac Hayes' self-styled
Duke of New York. [Hubley, who gives him his first lead, is billed simply as
Girl in Chock Full o'Nuts - and is unceremoniously dragged underground for her
efforts].
Escape From New York is the
kind of movie that calls for an immediate suspension of disbelief. One must
credit Carpenter [and co-writer Nick Castle] for their ingenuity in devising the
central situation; but that granted, the major credit would seem to go to
Carpenter's teams of special effects experts and stuntmen, to Joe Alves, his
production designer, to Stephen Loomis, his costume designer, and to Brian Chin,
for his brilliant miniatures. Together they have created an altogether
convincing picture of New York's grisly future - and all the more impressive for
knowing that most of the exteriors were shot in St. Louis and Los Angeles.
Using the new Elicon camera
equipment, Carpenter remains ever on the alert for the confirming details -
figures that flit disconcertingly by or that menacingly materialize out of the
shadows, rats that have become unconcerned by the presence of man, a vast
terminal lined with decrepit and mouldering railway cars. The photography,
supervised by Dean Cundey, startlingly combines the deep, electric blues of
dark, rain swept surfaces with an oddly cold orange given off by the flickering
street fires that appear everywhere. Carpenter, working for the first time with
a budget [$7 million] approaching the adequate, has given his picture a
marvelous look.
It also has a great sound to it
thanks in part to his judicious use of Dolby [which has a tendency to enhance
effects while obliterating dialogue], and to his own twangy, percussive
electronic score, which Carpenter both wrote and performed in association with
Alan Howarth. It is admirably functional, underlining and at the same time
enhancing the action passages.
Which is important, for in the long run, it's the film's incessant action, along
with its high imagination, that will spell out the success of Escape From
New York. There are few of the shock elements of Halloween or
The Fog; in spirit, it's much closer to his earlier Assault on Precinct
13, which ever since it's recent rediscovery has been developing into a
cult classic. My guess is that Escape won't have to wait so long. It
has got an intriguing premise, an effective cast, and it has been expertly
mounted.
SoHo News [Vol 8/Issue 41/Jul 08-14/1981/US] By Veronica Geng
IT'S 1997. The entire island of Manhattan has been turned into a
maximum-security penal colony - perimeters walled, bridges mined, food dropped
in by copters, prisoners abandoned to their own devices. When Air Force One
crashes inside this nightmare, the authorities send in Snake Plisskin, a famous
war hero with two Purple Hearts "from Leningrad and Siberia," youngest man ever
decorated personally by the president, and just caught robbing the Federal
Reserve Depository - offering him a pardon if he rescues the president within 24
hours.
It's 1981, and the summer movie circuit has finally come up with the hip
alternative to Raiders. It's Escape From New York, a nocturnal
adventure pulsing with the personalities of its star, Kurt Russell, and its
director, John Carpenter.
Russell's Snake Plisskin is a hero whose name strikes respect into the hearts of
prison wardens and opens any door in the underworld. There's a running gag where
each cynical or despondent criminal he meets says in astonishment, "You're Snake
Plisskin? I heard you were dead." The mere fact of his survival means that
civilization as we've known it hasn't bit the dust quite yet. Propping it up are
the most glamorous pillars ever to stand between us and apocalypse: Kurt
Russell's thighs. On his entrance into the office of the U.S. Security Police
Commissioner [Lee Van Cleef] on Liberty Island, Snake is teasingly shadowed in
the doorway, visible only from the waist down, in dashing knee-high boots that
set off his long-boned, muscular thighs in gray-and-white-patterned camouflage
pants as tight as baseball britches. In fact, Russell used to play minor-league
ball, and his Snake, the last American hero, who wears an ancient brown leather
jacket like a treasured baseball glove and is forced to defend himself in
gladiatorial combat in the ruins of Madison Square Garden with a baseball bat.
Escape's rich premise doesn't expand into a study of anarchy or a satire
on contemporary New York; it keeps narrowing, with Snake at the point. Russell
makes it move and develop with his increasingly physical acting. Finally,
wounded in one thigh, racing against the time limit, he lopes desperately
through the night streets, using one hand to drag his injured leg behind him,
hauling the action like a pitcher in late innings determined to go the distance.
This is the most dynamic below-the-waist movie acting since Toshiro Mifune quit
stripping down to his samurai didies.
Russell had plenty of practice as the star of Carpenter's Elvis - surely
the best performance in the history of television, in the best TV movie ever
made [recently rebroadcast as a fitting substitute for Monday-night baseball
during the strike]. Under the sexuality, Russell's Elvis had an innocent
sincerity - always the sad, chaste boy who sang "Old Shep" to his high school
class. Back then, Russell's dimples, long cleft chin, and modeled, slightly
sneering lips looked eerily unreal; his features seemed soft but enameled, as if
he [a former child actor] had never done anything but make movies and had
physically adapted to survive under bright artificial light. This was perfect
for Elvis, the creature of fame. In Used Cars, Russell brought the
mixture of innocence and falseness to his childishly venal car-lot con man, who
exuberantly fixed women with his gaze and said "Trust me." He used his mannequin
look to stay on the surface of his masculinity and give it a funny tinny
quality.
In Escape From New York, with his slick features roughened by a scraggly
moustache and beard and flowing hippie hair, and one of his veiled eyes under a
black patch, he's so deep inside his masculinity that he doesn't have to say
"Trust me." Even if you once crossed Snake [as did his old buddy, played by
Harry Dean Stanton, who turns up living in the New York Public Library with his
"squeeze," Adrienne Barbeau], you can trust him to give you a second
chance. [But three strikes and you're out.]
Snake is honor betrayed. He's been exploited by warmongers and now he's being
exploited again by the police - a victim who won't go down, more sympathetic
than the movies' action-aristocrats, and with a more emotional smokiness in the
de rigueur laid-back voice. It's a hurting voice. As gimpy, black-eye patched,
embittered war veterans go, he's a beaut - the morally driven John Heard
character in Cutter's Way pitched at the sexy adventure level of Sean
Connory's 007. Russell makes Escape more than a romp. He makes you
believe that the weight Snake drags along behind him with those powerful thighs
is a moral weight - the accumulating memory of honor and of a society where
honor once had a place, a society he's too young to have known. This isn't great
acting, but it's a star turn the likes of which you won't see on any other
first-run movie screen.
Escape From New York is the first of John Carpenter's movies to have a
lone male hero, the sort of character more or less identified with a
director-writer's personality. [I'm not counting Elvis, of
course, a bio written by others.] Dark Star and Assault on Precinct 13 were
about small-group dynamics; in Someone Is Watching You, Halloween,
and The Fog, the heroes were women. Escape was written for Kurt
Russell, but Snake's salvaged self-containment and methodical, linear
persistence are pure Carpenter, too.
Carpenter likes tight rules [time frames, isolation, arbitrary evil] and limited
means [silence, fog, darkness] that pressure his characters and himself. Instead
of being distracted by the problems of making movies inside or outside the
studio system [he's chosen the latter], he's thrived on them, using budget
restrictions to focus himself, form his simplicity of style, and keep his
independence. His movies have a hampered grace, like Snake's quiet, sinuous way
of reaching across the police commissioner's desk for a cigarette and lighting
it with a match while wearing handcuffs.
Escape has this lovely Carpenter tone of self-sufficiency and poise. It's
a pleasure to trust him as he takes his time, laying out the situation and the
geography: Liberty Island at night, with the Statue of Liberty watching over two
escapees from New York paddling on a raft, warned from a helicopter to go back;
Manhattan ringed by jewel lights, ironically like the "precious stone set in the
silver sea" in Shakespeare.
When Air Force One is hijacked and crashed [as a political gesture by a woman
revolutionary], and then Snake flies a sportscar-sized black Gullfire glider
into Manhattan, we see the glittering gray water and the approaching
skyscrapers, alternating with colored geometric position-diagrams on video
screens. As Carpenter has admitted, one a
$7
million budget [lavish for him] he isn't going to make you believe you really
see a glider landing on top of the World Trade Center. But the effects are
lovingly executed, in tune with the movie's spare elegance, and enjoyable
because he doesn't insist that they blow your head off.
The night cityscapes of ruin [mostly filmed in St. Louis] through which Snake
tracks the president by means of an electronic bracelet, to one of Carpenter's
own sad, throbbing synthesizer soundtracks, have a mournful beauty. The black
isn't the hard, glossy, surface blue-black of Thief but a vaporous black
you can feel enveloping you and the whole city, all the way into the distance.
[The cinematographer, Dean Cundey, also did the northern California seascapes
with black trees and white foam, and fog, in The Fog.] Almost the whole
movie takes place at night, and the single scene of outdoor daylight - a food
drop in Central Park, with prisoners stretching their hands up to the
helicopters - is a refreshment that's almost painful. It makes you feel the
returning darkness as the prisoners must - a punishment and a refuge.
Carpenter doesn't reach for impact beyond what he's set out to do. There are
scenes in Escape that other directors would bloat into self-aggrandizing
set pieces: a slow ride in a broken-down car through a gauntlet of
debris-throwing thugs on what remains of Broadway; the Madison Square Garden
scene, with four huge torches at the corners of the fight ring dispersing light
through hazy gloom. He may be the only director who knows when to stop showing
the elapsed-time countdown on a digital watch.
As a screenwriter, though, he lets too much go. The character of the Duke of New
York [Isaac Hayes] is no more than a twitching eye-tic and a pimpmobile with
crystal chandeliers for headlights. And I'd like to have seen a little more of
the prisoners' domestic lives than Adrienne Barbeau's undies drying on a wooden
laundry rack in the library. The first question raised in your mind by the
movie's premise has to be: left to anarchy, how do these prisoners sort
themselves out and live? It begins to be answered in an early scene when Snake
sees a man exit furtively from a building; he goes in through dark halls and
abandoned rooms, making his way toward distant, echoing music, and finds himself
in a hall with theater seats where a scattering of derelicts sit watching a line
of men on a stage in can-can drag, kicking and chorusing through a
musical-comedy number with lyrics like "This is your life and it's great!" in
the wobbly collegiate Mask & Wig style. There's entertainment even in the lower
depths: the scene is funny and moving, almost worthy of Sullivan's Travels.
And Carpenter doesn't milk it [though Ernest Borgnine's bouncy, eye-rolling
audience reaction does]. If the movie touched us in more ways than this, with
the fragility and endurance of culture, Snake would carry an even more emotional
weight.
Carpenter's cowriter here was Nick Castle [who did some effects on Dark Star
and played the masked boogeyman in Halloween]; before this, he's written
alone or with his producer, Debra Hill. Maybe he needs some new writing blood.
With material as dense and powerful as the life of Elvis, Carpenter's plain
clarity as a director worked to create emotion. He reclaimed Elvis for us by
stripping away the encrusted legend and nostalgia, going back to the young man,
the music, and our teenage responses; each simple scene came as a fresh
surprise.
The dangers in his clean-genre-rules writing are overcaution and repetition.
There's long been something conservative in his acceptance of pure evil as a
convenient premise. Escape doesn't revel in gang warfare, like The
Warriors, but almost all the prisoners come off as monolithically evil
[though scenes like the Central Park food drop suggest that the authorities have
made them that way]. One hissing, androgynous member of the Duke's gang - like
Mick Jagger left in formaldehyde for a year - must represent something so
horrible I don't want it explained. This character enjoys dressing up the
captive president [Donald Pleasence] in a long platinum-blonde wig. I don't
think Carpenter equates effeminacy with evil - he just bites off more than his
story lets him chew.
But he's trying to find ways to let images express what he has to say, and he
has his own subtle sense of proportion. In Escape, he's not interested so
much in pictures of life under the anarchy as he is in the physical path taken
by Snake, the war veteran, through a city that resembles a war zone to rescue
the man who had sent him into war. The silences and omissions, even the glancing
treatment of the confrontation between these two men, are powerful - like the
traumatized speechlessness of the father who set off the assault on Precinct 13
by going there for help when his daughter was killed, and who stayed as silent
witness to the killers' attack with silenced guns. Escape is often so
visually eloquent it could be silent but for Russell's husky whisper and a
surprise burst of music that wraps up the plot.
John Carpenter's fans [his true fans, not the leeches who sucked the blood from
Halloween and moved on to the plasticbaggied plasma of his imitators] are
right to feel a personal affection for him. From his first feature, the sci-fi
satire Dark Star, his presence in his movies has been one that a young
audience can identify with and still respect, even while he's working to find
his way. [The same is true of Brian De Palma, who has inspired a one-of-us
fondness that's different from even the emotional admiration for Martin
Scorsese, who with Mean Streets was already an artist.]
Carpenter has so much character that even when his movies seem schematic,
they're not cartoons or anonymous blueprints but drawings by a familiar hand,
alive with his integrity, modest temperament, and delight in craftmanship. He
appeals to the stylish underdog in people - the part of us that wants to think
we can rise above our circumstances by saying "Got a smoke?" in a signature way.
Watching him take his time is one of the best pleasures of moviegoing these
days.
Time [Jul 13/1981/US] By Richard Corliss
It is 1997. Manhattan Island is a maximum-security prison, surrounded by a 50
ft. high wall and containing every scurvy convict in the land. When Air Force
One crashes on the island and the President [Donald
Pleasence] is taken hostage, only one man
has the smarts and guts to get him out alive: War Hero and Master Criminal Snake Plissken
[Kurt
Russell]. He has 24 hours to accomplish
his mission before the President misses a summit conference and the microscopic
explosives implanted in Snake's arteries are automatically detonated.
On its face - and a stubbly, scarred, scowling visage it is -
Escape From New York
functions smoothly as another of the new action-adventure films. John Carpenter,
who hit it big with a pair of graceful, scary horror movies [Halloween,
The Fog],
here returns to the tones and textures of his earlier garrison melodrama
Assault on Precinct 13:
an apocolyptic shootout between the good-bad guys and the forces of maleficence.
With his runty muscularity and a voice whispered through sandpaper, Kurt Russell
is a sawed-off, charmless Clint Eastwood. Rather than involving the viewer with
the characters, Carpenter seems content to put them on elegant display. Take it
or leave it, love 'em or hate 'em, this is the face of America's future.
Maybe. But it makes more sense to see
Escape From New York
as a ferocious parody of popular notions about Manhattan today - the mugger's
playground and pervert's paradise made notorious in comedy monologues and movies
like Death Wish and Taxi Driver. In
Escape, parking meters are piked with gaping corpse heads,
bridges are mined to kill, the New York Public Library houses an evil genius
named Brain, and Penn Station is littered with train carcasses out of a
brobdingnagian's toy chest. John Carpenter is offering this summer's moviegoers
a rare opportunity: to escape from the air-conditioned torpor of ordinary
entertainment into the hothouse humidity of their own paranoia. It's a trip
worth taking.
Newsweek [Jul 27/1981/US] By David Ansen
How's this for a pulp premise? It's 1997, and all of Manhattan has been
converted into a maximum-security prison for the country's convicts. There are
no guards inside, just crooks - and the captive President of the United States [Donald
Pleasence], who's been hijacked en route
to a summit conference where the future of the world hangs in the balance. Who
can get him out? The job falls to an eye-patched felon named Snake Plissken [Kurt
Russell], who must successfully complete
his mission in 24 hours or else two lethal time bombs implanted in his neck will
explode.
What follows in John Carpenter's dark and dangerous
Escape From New York
will probably satisfy most action-movie addicts. It's a good workmanlike,
unpretentious entertainment. But given his terrific setup, does Carpenter really
make the most of it? The fun in store isn't just a matter of how Snake will
rescue the Prez, but how Carpenter will play with the Big Apple. What kind of
crazy society have the outcasts created? What will the new New York look like?
There's a fine, funny and menacing scene when Snake first arrives and stumbles
into a decrepit, candlelit old theater whose wardrobe has been appropriated by
some old bums for a low-camp Broadway song-and-dance routine. It's a promising
intro, but Carpenter and co-writer Nick Castle don't give their imaginations
free reign. Escape from New York gets more conventional as
it goes along, settling for chases and narrow escapes when it could have had
wild social satire as well.
BoxOffice [Vol 117/Issue 7/Jul/1981/US] By David Linck
John Carpenter is a master of atmosphere. The tense subtlety with which he
handles the shocks in his earlier successes Halloween and The Fog
lifted those stories out of the overcrowded "terrrorploitation" bin into big
profits.
Although Escape From New York is not a horror film, it too owes its soul
to its young director's dedication to pacing and setting. A bit corny in spots
and much too violent to be considered real camp, this Avco Embassy thriller
should nonetheless attract a horde of young moviegoers.
Basically, the film is "Clint Eastwood Meets The Warriors" in a future United
States rife with violent crime. Due to a 400 percent rise in the crime rate, the
government has cleared Manhattan Island of its residents and made it the world's
largest prison. A 50-foot wall surrounds the Island and its bridges are heavily
mined. If that isn't enough of a deterrent to escape, the Army is camped along
the wall.
The big problem arises when the President [Donald Pleasence] is kidnapped and
survives an airplane crash on the island. He is immediately captured by the
criminals and held for ransom, which in this case is amnesty for all the inmates
of Manhattan.
Warden Hauk [Lee Van Cleef] has one ace up his sleeve in felon Snake Plissken [Kurt Russell], an inmate awaiting transport to the prison who once was a top
American soldier.
Hauk gives Snake 24 hours to retrieve the President and the vital nuclear plans
he has with him. No president, no clemency for Snake. Just his death on either
side of the wall.
The bulk of the film entails Snake's rescue of the important hostage and their
race to the wall. Fighting hordes of inmates on the way through the littered
streets of New York, Snake manages to survive this living nightmare and deliver
his quarry.
Carpenter, who co-wrote the imaginative script with Nick Castle, keeps
everything tongue in cheek with his characters. The dialogue intentionally
recalls gangster films of the 30's and is laced with humor and cliches. This
device works against much of the action, which, if played straight. would never
have been quite intriguing on its own.
But Escape is left to wander between farce and fierceness. Its dark,
slimy streets crawling with convicts are expertly designed and lit, creating a
truly evil and primitive world among the New York ruins. Technically, the film
is brilliant. Its a shame that the story couldn't match its surroundings.
Carpenter works well with his actors, particularly Van Cleef and Russell, though
the latter speaks in a less than convincing hiss. Adrienne Barbeau, Carpenter's
real life spouse, appears as a futuristic gun moll and is little more than
broken window dressing, while Harry Dean Stanton and Ernest Borgnine ably handle
small parts.
Promotional themes centered around Russell's escape from this futuristic Hell
should work quite nicely. Word of mouth from youths who like their adventure
tough and tense should stimulate grosses.
Film Comment [Vol 17/Issue 4/Jul-Aug/1981/US] By David Chute
John Carpenter's sci-fi
action picture Escape From New York was the annual sneak preview offering
at Filmex this year, and the response was tumultuous. Carpenter has a supremely
likeable directorial personality, and I wish I could become a charter member of
his cheering section. But while Escape has all the elements of an
irresistible entertainment, it didn't lift me out of my seat the way it should
have. There is finally something a tad pedestrian about John Carpenter's talent.
There is not enough imaginative instability in his work - the special lilt and
urgency that directors like Walter Hill [in The Warriors], George Miller
[in Mad Max], and Steven Spielberg [in anything] bring to zippy
comic-book imagery.
Alas, Escape From New York is almost more fun to describe than it is to
watch. What it is, I tell people, is "Sergio Leone meets Edgar Rice Burroughs"
[the Mars books, not Tarzan], with a pinch of Terry and the Pirates and
[inevitably] a twist of Howard Hawks. Carpenter's score is his best ever, an Ennio Morricone pastiche that becomes an aural running gag. Kurt Russell, as a
snarling 1990's outlaw-trouble-shooter named Snake Plissken, doesn't give a
performance in Escape, but does turn in the most precise and
purposeful Clint Eastwood imitation ever; it's a witty stunt that's terrific fun
to watch. As a crowning touch, the iconic Leone regular Lee Van Cleef is second
billed as the Chief of Police of the United States, a gimlet-eyed hard case who
blackmails convict Plissken into undertaking a suicidal rescue mission:
snatching the kidnapped American President [Donald Pleasence] from the concrete
jungle of Manhattan, long since walled off in its entirety for conversion into a
mammoth maximum security prison.
Carpenter pokes fun at his goofy premise in a sarcastic prologue that seems to
shrug: "You know this is silly. I know it's silly. But forget about that.
Trust me. It'll be a gas." If only that note of giddy zest had been sustained.
Carpenter doesn't embellish or personalize the old movie tricks and gestures he
borrows. He just lays them out flat, one careful step at a time; and they're
already so familiar that his caution seems pedantic - some visual shorthand
wouldn't hurt, just to perk things up a bit. Carpenter has irony, but he's not
really a playful director. In Escape, his pace is too solid, too
methodical, for the looney-tunes heroic-fantasy material.
Individual sequences, however, rank with the best set pieces in Assault on
Precinct 13 and The Fog: an attack by New York's subterranean
"crazies," frenzied albinos with kohl-rimmed eyes and filled teeth who swarm out
of manholes and subway tunnels; and a smokey back-lighted boxing match, in the
ruined rotunda at Grand Central Station, that is the most exciting thing of its
kind since the "martial arts" episodes in Hard Times and The Long
Riders.
Escape From New York should make pots of money. Every 12-year old in
America is going to adore it.
Rolling Stone [Aug 20/1981/US] By
Michael Sragow
Judging from the number of imitators, the
most influential movie of the Seventies was not Jaws or The Godfather
or even Star Wars - it was John Carpenter's Halloween. Produced in
in 1978 at a cost of $300,000, it went on to gross $60 million worldwide, making
it perhaps the most profitable independent production of all time.
Everything in Halloween recalled other movies, especially Carrie
and Psycho. Only its raw relentlessness was distinctive. There wasn't much
plot [just a mad killer on the loose], the humor was freshmanic, and the
characterizations amounted to dividing teen angels into "good" girls and "bad"
girls.
But Halloween's sizzling financial success sent smoke signals to other
independent filmmakers: the easiest way to a quick buck was to show mad killers
terrorizing teenagers. For Hitchcock, the thrill of anticipating a shock
was more entertaining than the shock itself. Carpenter and his imitators were
content to pinch nerves. A deluge of cheap chop-'em-ups followed, from Friday
the 13th to Final Exam. For a large part part of the mass movie
audience, it seems that a general cultural depression has set in - only the
whooshing slice of an axe can keep them awake in the theaters.
In his later films, Carpenter makes this depression an explicit theme, plunging
ever deeper into no-mind nihilism and bringing many of his fans with him. In his
1980 feature, The Fog, the ghosts of a nineteenth-century leper colony
take vengeance on a town whose founding fathers robbed and murdered them. The
message: American history is a bummer. Carpenter's latest movie, Escape From New
York, is an equally pessimistic, dimwitted nightmare of the future.
The follow-the-dots screenplay, by Carpenter and Nick Castle, portrays the
United States in 1997 as a police state with all of New York City turned into a
maximum-security penal colony. The convicts - nearly every one of them a nut, a
junkie or a slimeball - are left alone to roam the rotting Big Apple and stew in
their own rank juices. The fascist police stay outside, quartered [ironically
enough] on Liberty Island. Carpenter has said that his vision of New York as a
rat hole derives from Death Wish, but this movie is more like Dirty
Harry, the ultimate mean-cop film. Like the space mine in Outland.
Manhattan in 1997 is supposed to be a mere extension of our present-day
existence. What Escape From New York tries to tell us that the U.S. is
out of control - its citizens crazy and its cities virtual insane asylums: the
only objective standard and reforming force is the power of a gun.
At the start, a kamikaze revolutionary hijacks Air Force One and crashes in
Manhattan in an attempt to kill the president, who's carrying plans for a
nuclear fusion bomb. The president, however, escapes in a special "pod." The
Liberty Island cops send famous war hero and crook Snake Plissken to retrieve
him. According to Carpenter, this oddly named hero "is a real person. A friend
of mine from high school, kind of a hoodlum." Indeed, Plissken could be
summarized in a yearbook caption: "He's a rebel... loves those weights..." In
Plissken, the image of the high-school delinquent and the righteous strong-arm
tough guy come together. He's all sneer and glare.
As Snake, Kurt Russell looks like Jeff Bridges gone rancid, with pirate-length
hair and a Moshe Dayan eye-patch. He sounds, however, like Clint Eastwood
- he has the same toneless, desert-dry inflections - and he moves like Eastwood
too, with a surly language. The vicious top cop who employs him is played by
Eastwoods' arch nemesis, Lee Van Cleef - the ugly third of The Good, the Bad
and the Ugly.
Carpenter has to rely on borrowed iconography for his effects, since he's not
very good at construction himself. He'll either throw shocks in your face, jump
between subplots to create a frenzy or move the camera along on a smooth track
until he stops for a deliberate jolt. None of his films exposes his
one-dimensionality as grueling as Escape From New York. Even in this
futuristic action- adventure, "crazies" clutch at the characters through manhole
covers and floorboards, threatening to drag them down and eat them. People
disappear, seemingly for good, only to turn up two reels later. Do Carpenter's
movies seem so arbitrary because that's how he sees life?
Life in this film is just the way capitalist philosopher Thomas Hobbes said it
would be in the state of nature: nasty, brutish and short. But there's no
political consciousness behind this movie's tear-it-down spirit. The crooks
walled up in the city have so little humanity that most audiences will probably
wind up rooting for the ruthless, clack-shirted cops. The closest a con comes to
representing the human species is an engineer called The Brain [Harry Dean
Stanton at his most comical, low-key and malevolent]. Though he holes up with a
voluptuous "squeeze" [Adrienne Barbeau] in a deserted library, mostly he works
for the Duke - the city's gang warlord and the president's captor, played by
gaudy Isaac Hayes. The Duke dresses like a turn-of-the-next-century Super Fly
and conducts his affairs like a jungle chieftain. And though it's not very clear
what points are being made in this movie [if any], you could take the Duke's
leadership as a racist vision of what happens to city government when blacks
take over.
The movie might have some potency if it suggested why society has come to this
unpretty pass. Even Mike McQuay's novelization indicates that a failing economy
and gas warfare have wreaked havoc with the body politic. But Carpenter plugs in
dumb gags where his explanations should be. He said he hoped to make "an
extremely black comedy, reflecting my very dim, cynical view of life." but
there's hardly any mental energy in this movie at all - black, dim, cynical or
otherwise.
There are a few lame running jokes: most everyone stops the hero in the street
and says, "Snake Plissken - I though you were dead!" And whenever anyone calls
him Plissken, he says, "Call me Snake." But Carpenter's tone is so unsteady
you're often not sure whether to laugh or choke. What are we to make of the
character called Cabbie [played by the irrepressible Ernest Borgnine], who
smiles like a lunatic and brags, "I've been driving a cab in this city for
thirty years"? Did he love New York so much he couldn't bear to leave? Carpenter
sure doesn't - the only part of the city he takes full advantage of is the
skyline.
It's typical of the movie's mingy-mindedness that in order to ensure Snake's
speedy return with the president, Lee Van Cleef injects him with microscopic
time bombs that will blow his body apart unless he returns in twenty-four hours.
The fellow who administers this punishment is called Cronenberg [after David,
director of Scanners], while the Duke's most zombiefied lieutenant, a
pointy-toothed, spiky-haired near-albino is called Romero [after George,
director of Dawn of the Dead.] Carpenter must see himself as part of an
unholy trio - three cinematic outlaws trashing taboo. But he also borrows from
higher sources. Escape From New York aspires to the nighttime carnival colors of Walter Hill's The Warriors, and there's a brutal fight
with nail-studded baseball bats staged like a clumsy imitation of the street
fights in Hill's Hard Times. Carpenter has used Joe Alves, Steven
Spielberg's production designer on Close Encounter's of the Third Kind,
to fill the cops' flashing instrument panels with electronic pastels. But
Carpenter isn't a visual virtuoso - he's got no rhythm. And as the composer of
his own thudding electronic score, he proves himself to be a real Johnny
one-note as well.
If our cities really do continue to degenerate, and if the young - increasingly
lost in affectless altered states - turn to cynical tough men for ideals, a
movie like Escape From New York will have contributed to the problem.
It's a dumb-cluck Clockwork Orange.
Ares [Issue 10/Sep/1981/US] By Christopher John
After the success of the small-budget horror film, Halloween, everyone
keenly awaited to see what director John Carpenter would do next. When the
movie, The Fog came out, cries were raised that Carpenter's career was
over; those of little faith announced that he was a one-trick director who had
already shot his bolt. These people had obviously forgotten his earlier works,
such as Assault on Precinct 13, and Elvis. They must have also
been extremely surprised when his newest film Escape From New York was
released.
Escape takes place in 1997, a time when the island of Manhattan has been
turned into a penal colony. Escape from this maximum security prison is
impossible; the tunnels have been sealed and the bridges mined and walled. The
Statue of Liberty has become a guard tower from which infra-red goggled officers
can blast escaping prisoners on sight. Radar and rocket-firing helicopters track
the island constantly, forcing the three million criminals inside to prey on
each other for survival.
Into the decaying remains of New York is sent Snake Plissken; his mission is to
rescue the President of the United States after Air Force One is sabotaged and
purposely crashed in the center of the island. The President is carrying a tape
cassette crucial to the survival of world peace [there has already been at least
one more World War]. The catch is that the tape must be presented to the
Russians and Chinese at a summit conference within 24 hours, or the threat of
another World War is almost certain. Plissken, both a war hero and a famous
master criminal [everyone who comes across him in New York greets him with:
"Snake Plissken. I thought you were dead."] is offered amnesty if he can go in,
rescue the President, and bring both him and the tape out safely, inside of the
24-hour time limit. To insure his continued co-operation, two microscopic
explosives are implanted in Snake's main arteries which will kill him instantly
if they are allowed to detonate.
The film is fast-paced and logically developed. Snake invades New York by
glider, landing atop the World Trade Center. From then on, his next 22 hours are
a hell of sewers, fights, and back-alley chases. Surrounded by rats, cannibals,
and three million hardened criminals, he struggles to save the President and win
his freedom.
Escape is Carpenter's best work to date, much more entertaining than
The Fog. He has taken the old "one-man-might-succeed-
where-an-army-couldn't" storyline and has decorated it with a fine cast and an
extremely well thought out collection of sets and locations. [Most of the film
was not shot in New York, but no one would ever be able to tell.] He has
produced one of the best straight out action/adventure films of the summer.
Carpenter's vision of New York is a bleak, fire-lit one, the entire film taking
place either at night, or inside poorly illuminated buildings. Very few sets
were actually constructed for the film, although those which were are incredibly
believable and elaborate. The central control center for the United States
Police Force is more than the usual display of flashing lights and computers.
Working video monitors offering three-dimensional readouts adorn the
headquarters, and other recognizable bits of hard and software blend together to
give the center a solid, functional look. By not setting the story too far in
the future, Carpenter's presentation of things to come feels more believable
simply through the high recognition values of known sights in the city. Coupled
with the sets which make up the massive wall supposedly surrounding New York,
Carpenter lulls one's disbelief in a rather outrageous plot situation.
Escape is not a special effects picture, however. Its main concern is
with the people involved. Relying on a number of performers he has used before,
Carpenter creates a realistic interplay among his characters. As usual, his bit
players are a trifle too wooden, but they are on and off the screen quickly,
doing little damage to the flow of the picture. For instance, in the opening
sequences, there are a number of dully delivered lines from some of the
secondary actors. Such moments are forgotten, however, when Kurt Russell and Lee
Van Cleef exchange their pointed witticisms and ripostes. Carpenter has a talent
for showcasing his stars which shines throughout Escape.
Another talent Carpenter has in abundance is his ability to inject humor into a
dark situation without breaking the pace of his film. It worked well in
Halloween; it works even better in Escape. The continuing "I thought
you were dead" routines and the character of Cabbie [Ernest Borgnine] show
Carpenter's ease with, and yet tight control over, humorous elements. Both of
these running bits are used carefully through the picture and offer a necessary
change of pace, as any good bit of continuing humor should do in a serious
drama.
Of course, like any picture of this kind, Escape From New York is not a
classic. It is solid summer entertainment of unusually high caliber. By not
pretending to be more than it is, but by also not settling for any less than it
could be. Escape becomes an exciting, fast-moving drama, the likes of
which we haven't seen in years. Using a new, imaginative setting for what seemed
to be a tired plot line, Carpenter has presented us with one of the better films
of the summer.
Cinefantastique [Vol 11/Issue 3/Sep/1981/US] By Stephen Rebello
The smart money still rides on the talents of director John Carpenter [Dark
Star, Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween]. Sooner or later,
he'll make the breakthrough film that will catapult him solidly into the big
league. Unfortunately Escape From New York, like last summer's The Fog,
isn't it. While it is one of summer's most entertaining pleasure machines,
Escape From New York serves mostly as an appetizer for better Thing[s] to
come.
Carpenter's newest film is a dark, comic vision of the future. The year is 1997,
and Manhattan Island is a maximum-security prison, an end-of-the-line,
gang-infested hell hole. The crime rate has risen over 400% and three million
hardcases are sealed behind the 50-foot containment wall that encircles the
island. Into this maelstrom, the President [Donald Pleasence], while en route to
a peace summit, is force-landed by a terrorist group. Wily, snarling "Snake" Plissken
[Kurt Russell] is given 24 hours to get the President out or be blown
to smithereens by the explosives planted in his neck. All the plot screws are in
place, all right, but Carpenter is amazingly slow in applying them.
Escape From New York, made for a comparatively puny $7 million,
represents Carpenter's uptown move. Although it is graced by the mighty
contributions of production designer Joe Alves [you can practically hear him
goading everyone to THINK BIG], it is the film's smaller, looney-tunes physical
details that give it snap: the ragged, psychotic crazies who roam above and
below the city's hellish streets like human packrats; a scary, almost-love scene
in a scorched-out Chock Full O'Nuts; the lighted candelabra on the hood of "Duke
of New York's" stretch limo; the gallows humor of a left-for-dead theater where
a male chorus sings "Everyone's Coming to New York" in drag; the grated-over
windows of a yellow Cab zig-zagging toward the landmined 69th Street Bridge to
the strains of the American Bandstand theme. This is nice, sly stuff, but
it's not enough to fuel Escape From New York's surprisingly enervated
rhythm.
The broad-stroke star-turns by Harry Dean Stanton, Season Hubley [Russell's
wife], Pleasence and Ernest Borgnine work wonders in fleshing out paltry
characterizations and goosing the stop-start screenplay into gear. There isn't
an actor on this picture who doesn't looked primed for a rousing good time, but
they are all given so little to say that most of them are reduced to attitudes
hiding behind costumes.
Russell, who did such fine work on Carpenter's TV film Elvis, does a mean
parody of Clint Eastwood and, with his eye patch and leather shirt, has terrific
on-screen presence. His performance, however, wears thin after the first twenty
minutes or so, since he has nothing to do but snarl, shoot and run.
Adrienne Barbeau, as a tart-faced gun-moll, trade's a few jibes with the
monotone hero ["Snake Plissken? I thought you were dead!"], but, like so much in
Escape From New York, the sexy banter is dropped and the characters run
breathlessly for a few more reels. By the time Russell and the band of burn-outs
group together for the big effort, even though Carpenter's slambang editing and
action take off like a firecracker it's almost too late for us to care. Doesn't
Carpenter realize we're longing to see some hokey, Hawksian, B-movie
camaraderie?
Dean Cundey's cinematography uses Panaglide extensively and has a handsome,
big-movie feel in its use of nighttime landscapes from the inferno. New
World/Venice and Roy Arbogast are to be applauded for their realizations of a
ravaged city where beheadings, detonations of landmines, plane crashes and
molotov cocktails are commonplace.
Finally, for those who find that sort of thing reassuring, Escape From New
York is studded with in-jokes that score on everything from The Bride of
Frankenstein [very wittily] to George Romero to David Cronenberg - enough to
assure anyone picking up on all of them at least six months' membership in the
National Society of Movie Trivia Aficionados.
Films On Screen And Video [Vol
1/Issue 10/Sep/1981/UK] By Eric
Braun
With Escape From New York John
Carpenter and his producer Debra Hill turn from domestic horror to nation-wide
devastation; the terror that stalks the small town community escalates into a
criminal community, contained in a New York that has but survived a brutal war
against the United States Police State. From this maximum security prison-city,
escape is impossible; every bridge is mined and walled, the surrounding waters
are filled with electricity and the Statue of Liberty has become another guard
tower from which officers in infra-red goggles blast any prisoners desperate
enough to try to get away. Radio scanners circle the island of Manhattan
ceaselessly and the survivors within are left on their own to prey on each
other, apart from a monthly food drop made by air into Central Park. The year is
1997, and we're Orwell country out of H.G. Wells; the Zombies who have inherited
George Washington's land of liberty are not carnivorous, just mindless and
faceless, dominated by scanners that monitor every movement, and lest we have
any doubt in whose territory we are, two of the characters are called Romero and
Cronenberg.
A neat touch in what can only be described as satirical sci-fi; a nod from a
giant in the field of mind-blowing horror to his peers, and an almost loving
reconstruction of the kind of fate towards which we could be hurtling as the
crime rate in the American capital rises 400 per cent from 1988 onwards, so that
all traces of humanity are erased from controllers and controlled alike. The
President is Donald Pleasence at his most reptilian; 'Snake' Plissken, the
master criminal on a lethal 24 hour parole who will be terminated unless he
rescues him from his New York captors in time to get to a summit conference
'vital to world survival' is Kurt Russell, complete with eye-patch, leather gear
and an outfit that makes his mission look more like a trip into 'crusing'
territory; and the deadly enemy, the Duke of New York, played by Isaac Hayes as
a black giant whose limousine obviously looted the chandeliers which serve as
headlights from the home of miraculously preserved Liberace, turns out in the
long run to be if anything on a slightly higher moral plane than the President.
At least the Duke cares enough to go to all lengths to secure release for the
captives of the big City, whereas the President's peace mission is just one more
hypocritical ploy in the world power game. This cynical framework encapsulates a
marvellously well-controlled and spine-tingly adventure story, with just one
human touch in the casting of Ernest Borgnine in a prototype performance of all
the lovable, good-hearted Martyesque characters he has played in the past, as
the Cabbie who's guileless, warm hearted and even able to enjoy the unspeakable
drag show on offer at the surviving boite in the city, The Chock Full O'Nuts. Of
course he's too good to live, but he's a joy while he's on.
The cast in general serve the director well, with Mrs Carpenter [Adrienne Barbeau] the only female accorded maximum exposure as the semi-goodie who rather
inexplicable is prepared to lay down her life for love of Brain, in the coldly
two-timing persona of Harry Dean Stanton. The film rates AA, partly because the
violence is almost all of the Superman - Ray Gun variety - except for two scenes
where the Duke makes Plissken submit to torture by knife and by unarmed combat
with a nail-filled baseball bat - and because the only hint of sex is a briefly
chaste kiss in the Chock Full O'Nuts between Russell and his real-wife Season
Hubley in her tiny guest role as the most comely groupie surviving in the Club,
before she is abruptly terminated by the invading hordes. All this family
cosiness may well be another reassuring touch from the Carpenter-Hill team, to
round out a tough but exciting movie that succeeds in all its sets out to do.
For the charasmatic Kurt Russell, whose laconic growl is located somewhere
between Brando and Bascall and whose performance owes as much to Presley as it
does to Eastwood this could be the one to do as for him as The Gun For Hire
did for Alan Ladd: the up-dated version of the heartless but infinitely sexy
mercenary.
Monthly Film Bulletin [Vol
48/Issue 572/Sep/1981/UK] By Richard Combs
1997. With a four hundred per cent rise in the crime rate. Manhattan Island has
been turned into one vast maximum security prison, encircled by a wall on the
opposite shore. When the U.S. President, hijacked on his way to an important
summit conference, bales out over the city and is taken prisoner by the convict
gangs, security commander Bob Hauk is faced with the problem of getting him out
within twenty-four hours [before the summit is over]. He offers "Snake" Plissken,
once a war hero now a felon on his way to the island, the chance of a reprieve
if he carries out the mission [and ensures his compliance by having two
electrodes, set to detonate at tile end of the time period, implanted in his
neck]. Landing by glider, Snake makes his way through the ruined city, meeting
Cabbie [who still drives a hack and who recognizes him] and learning that the
President is held by the convict kingpin, the Duke. After a narrow escape from
the "crazies" [who emerge from the subways to hunt after dark], Snake is taken
by Cabbie to meet "Brain", the Duke's adviser. Recognizing Brain as an old
confederate who once betrayed him, Snake forces him [and his 'squeeze' Maggie]
to lead him to the Duke's HQ in derelict railway coaches. But Snake is captured
while attempting to rescue the President, and later put in the ring for lethal
combat with the convicts' champion. Snake wins, and then escapes during the
confusion after Brain and Maggie take the President (Brain has a map which will
allow them to escape over the mined 69th Street bridge). Snake joins up with
them, and from the ensuing chase with the Duke [who hoped to use the President
to secure an amnesty for all the convicts] only Snake and the President survive.
The electrodes in Snake's neck arc neutralised and the President leaves for the
summit - though the precious tape he was carrying has been cynically swapped by
Snake for one of Cabbie's music tapes.
At seven million dollars, Escape From New York is John Carpenter's most
lavish production to date. That, however, is still almost low-budget in today's
Hollywood, particularly for a fantasy set in New York, 1997, when social
desolation has to be specially effected [in St. Louis, Missouri, apparently]
along with electronic sophistication. And for about as long as it takes him to
set his plot in motion, Carpenter generates all the excitement or genuinely
shoestring film-making, the knife-edge dynamism of a project with rather greater
ambitions than it has resources to fulfil. Mainly this is a matter of knowing
just how much of his spectacle to leave to the movie consciousness of the
audience. In his exposition - one or two shadowy figures and a fragment of wall
representing the security forces who man a rampart that now entirely rings the
maximum security prison of Manhattan Island; some swift action in the river
demonstrating the impossibility of escape against a matte of the familiar
skyline - economy and cheek are mixed with true Hitchcockian flair. The trouble
is that Escape From New York has rather too much plot to set in motion,
and by the time Carpenter has finished explaining what has happened to New York,
the plight of the President, and why his anti-hero simply must go through with
the rescue [two electrodes, deceitfully planted in his neck and due to explode
in some twenty-two hours, must be electronically defused...], the film seems to
have run out of steam. Certainly nothing that subsequently happens in the ghost
town of New York could not have been predicted by a computer programmed with the
foregoing exposition. Added to which, the whole plot apparatus revolves around a
detail - the President is carrying a tape about nuclear fission which must be
delivered to a summit conference - so perfunctory it scarcely even qualifies as
a MacGuffin. The beauty of Carpenter's past plot conceits is that they had a
simplicity and compression [even, in the case of Halloween, a dangerously
reductive one] that gave them their charge as pure movie fantasies. But only in
his musical score this time does Carpenter seem to be working to the requisite
relentless pulse. Escape From New York never has an effectively clear
image of what it is about, and looks too often as if Carpenter were simply
trying to spin more material out of the Assault on Precinct 13 situation
[the story was apparently conceived at the same time as the earlier film]. Hawksian echoes also filter through these characters, though without adding
anything to the atmosphere. The pity is that Carpenter, who had shown signs to
[in the underrated Fog] or being able to flesh out his elemental movie
situations with some sense of place and character, retreats here into basic
Saturday matinee juvenilia. Even leading lady Adrienne Barbeau, a New Woman in
The Fog, more or less just goes along for this ride as a 'squeeze'.
New Musical Express [Sep 26/1981/UK] By Paul Rambali
The idea is something of an American joke; New York has become a prison, with no
warders and no rules. The city has finally been over-run by criminal violence,
and a wall has been erected along the Jersey and Long Island shorelines to
contain it. The subway graffiti has spread like a jungle vine up the World Trade
Towers and the Chock Full O'Nuts is now chock full o'rats.
In this prison, America's maximum security compound from which there is no such
thing as a reprieve, crashes Airforce One with its cargo, the Presiden of the
United States. It's brought down over New York as a political gesture by the
People's Liberation Front of America, But the President [Donald Pleasence]
survives, and it's up to the chief warden [Lee Van Cleef] to get him out. Warm
up the helicopters. Forget the Chock-Ice.
With the whole movie business seemingly falling over itself to lay bouquets on
Raiders of the Lost Ark ["The movie Hollywood was born to make"], John
Carpenter's new action suspense fantasy will probably miss out on some of the
running, despite being made with a fifth of the budget and five times the savvy.
Escape From New York also boasts three of the screens most watchable old
buzzards [Ernest Borgnine besides Van Cleef and Pleasence] and one of its most
striking locations [New York City gone to hell]. With a combination like that,
even Steven Speilberg couldn't go wrong.
Within minutes, Lee Van Cleef is characteristically scrutinizing the barrel of a
gun as he calculates the odds involving in handing it over to a newly-convicted
criminal named Snake Plissken [Kurt Russell] and sending him in to rescue the
President in exchange for a pardon. Plissken is a disaffected ex-soldier, with
allegiance to no-one but himself. Lee Van Cleef, doomed to re-live For a Few
Dollars More but doing it at least with dignity, has to coolly pre-emt a
possible double-cross. A minute bomb is injected into Plissken's bloodstream,
set to go off in 24 hours, when the President is due to make a crucial
broadcast. If he brings him back by then, the bomb will be neutralised, if
not...
The minutes tick by in nerve-racking digital silence. The tension is wrought
with deadly quartz accuracy. New York City Jail is crawling with punks, vampires
and inhuman vermin [another American joke]; the inmates have organised
themselves into a vicious piratical gang with the Duke [Isaac Hayes!] as their
leader, and they're holding the President hostage. Cabbie [Ernest Borgnine], a
New York cab driver [this is something of a New York joke] saves Plissken from a
pack of vampires who live in the subways: "You shouldn't be hanging around 42nd
Street at this time of night!" Kurt Russell doesn't stand a chance.
Escape From New York is a fast, cynical, expert thriller with its tongue
never far from its cheek. John Carpenter made this combination work before in
Halloween, the first and by far the best of the recent rash of films about
terrorised females, which was obviously tongue-in-cheek [at least I hope it was]
because only the promiscuous females in the film were terrorised. Escape From
New York has the same kind of humour about it: enough for it not to be an
insult to your intelligence, and just enough to stop you choking on the
suspense.
Its one serious mistake is using someone a little too hunky and handsome for the
part of Snake Plissken instead of giving it to Lee Van Cleef. Its one commercial
error may well be the fact that it doesn't come to an entirely all-American
conclusion.
But don't let old-fashioned values like that put you off. Escape From New York
is worth every penny of the £2.50 it cost to see Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Playboy
[Sep/1981/US] By
Bruce Williamson
In yet another futuristic tingler, Escape From New York
[Avco-Embassy], writer-director John Carpenter proves once more that he is a
very skillful movie-maker but not a very astute judge of his own script. Far
more ambitious than either Halloween or The Fog, Escape From
New York has everything else clicking in on cue - fine effects depicting
Manhattan in 1997 as a kind of maximum-security Devil's Island for vicious
criminals, a flamboyant performance by Kurt Russell, smashingly dramatic
soundtrack by Carpenter and Alan Howarth. One of the flashier new faces in
cinema, best remembered for Used Cars and TV's Elvis. Russell
plays Snake Plissken, an amoral master crook with a patch over his eye and no
visible scruples, who is sent into Manhattan to rescue the President of the U.S.
[Donald Pleasence] after Air Force One crashes inside the walled city. The idea
is pretty good, though Carpenter and his collaborator Nick Castle fail to
develop it much beyond some standard doomsday melodrama. Lee Van Cleef, Isaac
Hayes, Ernest Borgnine, Harry Dean Stanton and Adrienne Barbeau [Mrs. Carpenter,
by the way] all do their bits to make Fun City look lethal. Mayor Ed Koch should
be horrified. Otherwise, it's not dull, just mildly disappointing, for Carpenter
does things so well that he teases his audience into anticipating a grandly
imaginative adventure, then leaves 'em wondering at the end why the really
big lift never came.
The Face [Issue 17/Sep/1981/UK] By Giovanni Dadomo
John Carpenter's last picture, the disappointingly
Disneyesque none-too-super delve into the supernatural The Fog, did
little enhance the director's erstwhile "hot" reputation which had been built by
on a tho of highly promising genre pictures. First off, the Sheckleyian comic
delight of sf spoof Dark Star, then the magnum-powered urban Western
Assault on Precinct 13, reaching apotheose with the brilliantly underdone
[and all the more chilling for that] Halloween, undisputed king of recent spook pics.
Like its immediate predecessor, Escape From New York has a low budget air
to it, from a leading man who's obviously come straight from 85th place in the
line of Kris Kristofferson lookalikes to some painfully obvious use of models
and painted backdrops.
That said, this modest adventure of the near future has its moments, even if its
clanking plot doesn't always have the momentum the director's past might have
led us to expect.
Carpenter's own script pushes the calendar forward a quarter of a century, a
time when the island of Manhattan is one colossal prison where all of America's
millions of bad guys are doomed to live out the rest of their naturals,
unsupervised and kept in check by a police force with a license to kill any
potential escapee instantly. Well cool.
Until the President of the USA, victims of a terrorist hijack [cue dummy plane,
cue zealot pilot], becomes a prisoner in this thieves kitchen. Now what?
Police chief Lee Van Cleef has it sussed: take one newly-convicted ex-war hero [tantalising
references to action in Siberia] and get him to fetch the prexy. How d'you know
he'll do what he's told? You implant a couple of explosive devices in his throat
with a timer device - he either completes his mission successfully or gets it
all too literally in the neck.
Of course our hero's journey through the city of lost souls ain't no picnic -
there's a close brush with the carnivorous band of psychos who live in the
subways [echoes of the revenant sailors of The Fog] a gauntlet through a
stone-throwing, jeering mob that carries shades of the scarier stories of whites
driving through contemporary Harlem, and finally capture by the gang of
ultra-baddies who run the city for a self-proclaimed Emperor Of New York [Isaac
Hayes] who is prone to driving through the streets in a customized pimpmobile
straight out of Liberace's worst nightmares.
It's at this point that the film enjoys its most memorable scene, when the
wounded good guy has to battle the baddies' champion - a huge, bald, mountain of
laid out of Yul Brynner and Giant Haystacks - in a crumbling hall packed to the
rafters with ragged jeering criminals.
Everyone performs with a great deal of relish, yes, but, as everybody knows, no
matter how much relish you put on it a burger still doesn't have much meat in
it, even if it may taste marginally better. So it is with Escape From New
York, distracting, but hardly essential. And what a waste of Lee Van Cleef.
Film Review [Vol 31/Issue 10/Oct/1981/UK]
The scene is one of utter desolation. Among piles of garbage in the unbelievably
sleazy streets, weird figures in tattered garments momentarily flit by before
disappearing into darkened alleyways. Piles of rubbish smoulder fitfully,
occasionally bursting into flame which merely serves to heighten the prevailing
picture of decay and squalor. Where are on Earth are we? A clue appears in the
far distance - the silhouette of one of the world's most famous land marks - the
Statue of Liberty. Surely this can't be New York? Alas! it is, and this is what
confronts us in Escape From New York.
The explanation of the holocaust is simple. The year is 1997 and we learn that
in 1988 the crime rate in the United States rose by 400 percent. So widespread
were the riots and disorder that the federal authorities actually declared war
on the criminal fraternity. A United States Police Force was recruited that year
to fight the criminals, and by 1994 the war was over with victory for the
police.
The problem was what to do with the three million convicted criminals from all
parts of the United States, and a drastic solution was agreed upon. The entire
Manhattan Island was turned into an enormous prison, a completely walled-in,
high security penitentiary which was virtually escape-proof. The prisoners have
food air-lifted in to them, but only when a new prisoner arrives do they get any
news of the outside world, and when a prisoner lands in this hell hole, he or
she is there for life.
For two years the system works without a hitch. Then, as usually happens, fate
takes a hand. The US President's plane, Air Force One, is carrying him to an
important international summit meeting, but the aircraft has been sabotaged by a
revolutionary group bent on killing him. The plane crashes on the prison
complex, killing everyone on board except the President who has been put
in an escape pod. He is at once captured by the savage inmates of Manhattan and
held to ransom. The terms? The immediate release of all the three million
criminals!
Police Commissioner Bob Hauk [Lee Van Cleef] leads a squad into Manhattan to
rescue the President [Donald Pleasence], but the prisoners demand the immediate
withdrawal of the police or the President will be summarily executed. As an
earnest of their intentions, the police are shown the President's severed
finger. Hauk has no option but to comply.
Back at his headquarters, Hauk decides to enlist the help of a convict who is on
his way to Manhattan. He is Snake Plissken [Kurt Russell] who is offered his
freedom in return for his knowledge of the underworld and his criminal skills to
locate and free the President. Snake reluctantly agrees but Hauk, taking no
chances of a double-cross, injects two tiny capsules into Snake's bloodstream
which will explode and kill him if they are not neutralized within 24 hours -
which is the time Snake has to complete his mission.
Snake is well known to the shady fraternity in Manhattan, including Cabbie
[Ernest Borgnine] who agrees to lead him to the gang boss, "Duke" [Isaac Hayes],
who is holding the President. Locating and freeing the President is one thing,
getting him out of Manhattan with the Duke in his cohorts in hot pursuit is
another - especially with the fast approach of the 24-hour deadline.
Escape From New York was directed by John Carpenter, who also co-authored
the screenplay. Carpenter is one of America's leading young directors, who
showed that a fine new talent had emerged when he came up with Assault on
Precinct 13. He followed with that chiller Halloween and after a
successful spell on TV, he returned to movies to direct, co-script and write the
music for The Fog which was a great box-office success.
In the role of Snake, the toughie who decides to aid the law, Kurt Russell has
come a long way since his days as a child actor in the 'sixties. He appeared in
The Absentminded Professor in 1960 and followed this with many others,
chiefly for Disney. He achieved stardom in Elvis - The Movie, which was
also directed by John Carpenter. Kurt's wife, Season Hubley appeared with him as
Priscilla Presley and incidentally is with him again in Escape From New York
as the girl in the cafeteria, Chock Full o' Nuts - or what remains of it.
Those two veteran stars, Lee Van Cleef and Ernest Borgnine, each make telling
contributions to the story. Van Cleef's police chief has an air of toughness
that brooks no quibbling about ethics when he's after his man. Borgnine ekes out
some sort of living as a Cabbie, his cab as ramshackle as the drabness
surrounding him. Another veteran performer is Donald Pleasence who has made
numerous appearances in every type of movies. Here we see him as a much put-upon
President who has to be rescued if world stability is to be maintained.
Escape From New York [Cert AA from Barber International] is a well-made
thriller with a highly professional cast directed with a confident touch. The
special effects are as convincing as they are chilling, sets like the run-down
Madison Square Garden interior being completely believable. The film certainly
doesn't "preach", but it cannot help conveying a warning of what might happen
should law and order break down in towns and cities and violence take over.
Films Illustrated [Vol 11/Issue 121/Oct/1981/UK]
By D.C.
At this rate, no-one is going to accuse John Carpenter of over-burdening his
films with messages. He is an enthusiastic riviver of the genre picture and,
although this futuristic action adventure, is empty-headed, it doesn't come
empty-headed. I don't think Carpenter could make a film without style if he
tried. Escape From New York projects our urban nightmares a little
further into the future, 1997, by which time the inner city areas have become
open prisons wherein criminals are sealed to live by jungle law at the mercy of
one another. Manhattan is the maximum security prison-island on to which crashes
'plane carrying the US President [Donald Pleasence] and some Very Important
Documents. Kurt Russell's macho anti-hero must penetrate this lethal wilderness,
rescue the President and get out again before the time bomb capsules implanted
in his body detonate. Carpenter keeps a crisp, even pace to the largely
nocturnal excitements and the side-glimpses of anarchy on a free rein are always
interesting, if under-developed. Russell is beginning to show signs of a real
screen precence, though Adrienne Barbeau is largely wasted and Ernest Borgnine
saddled with a tiresome role as a cabbie with a heart of gold. But as a piece of
adventure filmmaking, it never allows its cutting edge to be blunted.
Photoplay [379/Vol
32/Issue 10/Oct/1981/UK]
By M.S.
A peek into the 'not-so-distant' future
when the crime rate in the States has risen so drastically that the whole of
Manhattan Island, New York, has been turned into a prison. Virtually inescapable
and totally isolated, the prisoners divide into gangs and are left to their own
devices. Into this squalid, horrifying place crashes the plane carrying the
President of the United States. He is taken hostage by the Duke of New York
[played by soul balladeer Isaac Hayes] who demands the release of all the
in-mates.
Enter hero Snake Plissken [Kurt Russell], a courageous war veteran [he fought at
the battle of Leningrad] turned master criminal. He's offered a reprieve if he
can rescue the President within 24 hours. Just in case he tries to escape
himself, explosive capsules are injected into his blood stream which will go off
in 24 hours unless neutralised. Gripping stuff indeed.
All from director John Carpenter and his co-writer Nick Castle, a lifelong buddy
of Carpenter's who played the killer in Halloween.
Carpenter's wife, Adrienne Barbeau, who made her film debut in The Fog,
plays one of the prisoners as does Kurt Russen's wife Season Hubley. The couple
met and married while working on Carpenter's Elvis The Movie.
Carpenter's movie is tailor-made for 1981 with so much civil strife about. All
the prisoners dress in punkesque pirate fusion, prowling the run-down streets,
dodging the over-turned cars, killing, mobbing and terrorising their fellow
inmates.
Kurt Russell plays Snake with a mean look, gruff whisper, patched eye and a lot
of muscle.
As Snake is waiting to be transported to the prison a voice comes over the
tannoy announcing that the shuttle will leave for the prison in two hours during
which time the prisoners may be cremated on the premises if they so desire.
The problems of trying to film a deserted New York proved a difficult task and
Carpenter had to resort to models which look decidedly unrealistic. Luckily
they're only used for the first ten minutes or so.
A thoroughly enjoyable futuristic story from John Carpenter, the man who has
given us so many movie thrills.
Rod Serling's
The Twilight Zone Magazine [Vol
1/Issue 7/Oct/1981/US] By Gahan Wilson
Somewhere in his writings, dear sane Henry David
Thoreau [which rhymes with furrow, which surprised me when I learned it
and may surprise you] observed with gratitude that he had been born "in the nick
of time." I knew exactly what he meant when I read it back in high school, and I
still do - but with a good deal more force and profundity now, because
extraordinarily clever people have gone to great lengths and have exhibited
astonishing ingenuity in order to show me, clearly and precisely, leaving
nothing to the imagination, what lies just beyond this precious, darling,
nevermore-to-be-seen-again nick of time wherein you and I, reader, have the
amazing good fortune to dwell.
Look around yourself with gratitude. Observe that there are green things
growing, if only in a pot on your desk; note that the air is breathable by
humans - with some difficulty in the larger cities, admittedly, but
breathable - and, with tears of joy, consider that there are at least some
lingering fragments of humanity, some vestiges of the romantic notion that men
should be considerate of other men, still to be found in the laws and
regulations governing this land.
It will not be so for long, reader, not long at all. If my instructors are
correct [and they present their message most convincingly], it's all going to
begin coming apart in the Eighties - yes, these very Eighties; and by the time
we hit the tag-end of the Nineties, the only sensible move left to any of us
will be to press our laser pistols to our temples and vaporize our brains.
Hints and whispers have been given us for some time past. Things to Come,
filmed classily from H.G. Wells' script, informed us that things might get a
little tacky after the Great War, but made it clear that they would all work out
swell in the end, thanks to Raymond Massey. The Day the Earth Stood Still
suggested, but very obliquely, that we might, in time, become a little
bit too dependent on robots. Star Wars, in between those jolly fights we
all enjoyed so much, demonstrated the strong possibility that advanced
technology in no way assured the doing-away of scruffy architecture and general
clutter, not to say an atmosphere of all-round junkiness.
But these films, and others like them, were only pessimistic around the edges,
so to speak; they admitted that the future might have its flaws, its little
unpleasantries, but they all heartily agreed with one another that essentially
the future would be good. Better, actually, as all of us, moviemakers and
moviegoers alike, were still deeply immersed in the naive and childish fantasy
that we were engaged in a process called progress and that, inevitably,
everything was improving, thanks to science and sliced bread and so on.
Well, things don't really seem to be getting better after all, now, do they?
Statistical curves tend to go up when we'd like them to go down, and down when
we'd much prefer seeing them go up; ecological trends are best not thought of;
and the Third World and the Inner Cities seem, in gloomier moments, society's
avant garde. Is there any hope? Any hope at all?
No, says Escape From New York, there is not. We shall give up on one
another, we humans, and we won't take long about it. By the late Nineties we
shall have become so defeatist that we will permanently jail anyone who
transgresses our laws. There will be no discussion of rehabilitation,
reformation, or any of that crap. We will lock up criminals forever, throw away
the keys, and the only mercy we'll extend [so heartless we have become] will be
to offer to cremate them instead.
Outside of the fact that it's presenting us with the picture of a totally
defeated society, Escape From New York is really quite a dandy thriller,
but you must be careful not to ponder its deeper implications while viewing it
or you may break into racking sobs. The basic premise, amusing if examined with
sufficient abstraction, is that New York City has collapsed completely [no doubt
with the rest of the decadent East Coast, all the decent folk having presumably
retired to the Sun Belt], and that our government, in its wisdom, has turned all
of Manhattan into one big jail - except that, unlike Alcatraz and those other
old-timey island prisons, there are no guards in the place to maintain order,
there is only a sort of super border patrol. The prisoners, once dumped, can do
with one another what they like.
I assume this abominable state of affairs is the result of a bill passed by both
houses and signed by the President, so it is satisfying - some nice
things will happen in the future - when that President, played by an
astonishingly fat Donald Pleasence, finds himself dumped into the middle of this
officially sanctioned hellhole and at the mercy of its understandably cranky
denizens. They are led by a piratical character played with obvious enjoyment by
Isaac Hayes, a fellow usually associated with the somewhat gentler field of soul
music. Here he enjoys killing people, staging horrible fights, and upsetting the
President of the United States by shooting at him till he whimpers and by
slapping a fright wig on his bald Presidential head. Hayes is assisted by a
whole pack of rogues and [albeit unreliably] by Harry Dean Stanton, doing
another one of his excellent fretting criminals.
This dreadful state of affairs is thoroughly disapproved of by Lee Van Cleef, an
officer of the Federal Police Force. Van Cleef bullies a supercriminal called
"Snake" [Kurt Russell, with a nice hissing voice and a reptilian tattoo] to slip
into Manhattan and rescue the leader of our country so that the President can go
on the air and save the planet - you see, things are even worse than you thought
- from an imminent nuclear holocaust!!! What the hell.
As I say, outside of its remarkably depressing environment, Escape is
good escape, and certainly the best thing John Carpenter has done to date. There
are two flaws, though. The film attempts to present us with a New York City in a
state of horrendous disrepair, not only a New York abandoned for years by the
Sanitation Department and Con Edison, but one which has been at the mercy of a
graffiti-mad criminal class for the same length of time; yet though there are
scenes of spectacular demolishment, the place is really a lot tidier and less
scuzzy than many sectors the adventurous tourist from Ohio can see for himself
today. I also get the impression that Carpenter knows his Los Angeles better
than he knows his New York. The second flaw is that, for the sake of a weak
joke, Carpenter has his hero doom us all to destruction with a juvenile gesture
at the end, and I find that harder to forgive because, by the time I'd gotten
through the movie, I'd grown to like old "Snake" and to expect better things of
him.
Questar [Issue
13/Oct/1981/US]
John Carpenter's "repertory company" has
just issued its first science-fiction-oriented film, and as with Carpenter's
The Fog, Escape From New York exemplifies a curious reversal on MPAA rating
mores: It is a picture of "PG" content hiding behind the audience draw prompted
by an "R" rating.
Escape's anti-hero is one Snake Plissken [Kurt Russell], a criminal
dragooned into rescuing the President from Manhattan Island - now a maximum
security prison for the losers of a civil war with the United States Police
Force circa 1997. Producer Debra Hill calls Escape an "action comedy" -
this unlikely classification being about the only way to gracefully excuse the
mishandling of such a dynamic basic story concept. Lack of talent as a rationale
is out; Carpenter is no incompetent. Yet his approach to this material seems
terribly naive, making his action predictable and his comedy [as such] forced
and misleading. The forcefulness of his scenario - the futuristic prison-island
- is not backed up with anything substantial, plotwise, except a lot of busywork
serial action.
Story has never been Carpenter's strong point. He admits Halloween was
nailed together from a two-word story concept ["babysitter murders"], while
The Fog never really embellished beyond its own ghost-story teaser. The
problem is inflation of economically basic and sinewy story-hooks to such a
girth that their inherent defects become too big to ignore.
In Escape, the hard conflicts among central characters one would expect
to result from the brutal reality presented just don't exist. The hinted-at
showdown between Snake and Hauk [Lee Van Cleef as the facist police official who
pressgangs Snake into the rescue] never really happens, and the one between
Snake and the Duke of New York [Isaac Hayes, recalling the name of the pub
frequented by Clockwork Orange's droogs, as Manhattan's baddest gang
overlord], when its not being handled by subordinates, is cut short by sadistic
intervention on the part of the President [Donald Pleasence]. The triad of
opposed wills and power among Snake, Hauk, and the Duke does not spark; what
drives them to their differing [yet not dissimilar] callings remains unknown,
irrelevant, in fact, to the story of the title. The actual Escape From New
York is what this film is about, and it pursues that end alone, with
Mission: Impossible singlemindedness. It is a mechanical sort of narrative,
dwelling on how ends are accomplished, while entirely bypassing motivation, the
why.
By ignoring the duties of honor - or retribution - that would drive such
characters, Carpenter falls short of the Sergio Leone idiom he has chosen to
emulate in Escape. The formidable presence of Van Cleef, and the
imposition of a Clint Eastwood rasp on Snake's voice, seem more spaghetti parody
than hommage. Ironically, Carpenter already describes his forthcoming actual
western, El Diablo, as a "gothic."
Mechanically, then, it is no surprise when an entire company of peripheral
players is blatantly set up for a countdown/bumpoff that betrays itself as mere
action spicing for the climactic escape we knew Snake would make all along. Much
point is made of the suicidal impossibility of crossing New York's
wreckage-and-mine-studded 69th Street Bridge to freedom, but the comicbook
bloodbath that follows defies every rule established in advance. The death of
Cabbie [Ernest Borgnine] would be tragic if it weren't so offhandedly jokey
[his
cab breezes through two direct mine hits to be blown cleanly in half by a third,
which all escapees save him survive]. His demise is reduced to the byproduct of
a Keystone Kops bit; and what deterrent do those mines represent if it takes
three to stop a car? Brain [Harry Dean Stanton], keeper of a map of the mines'
location only he can read, blunders into one. And Maggie [Adrienne Barbeau], the
only peripheral still alive at this point, milks a sixshooter for at least ten
slugs in true Western style when she blows away the Duke's pimpmobile, which has
chased them at high speed unimpeded by the same mines Cabbie was only able to
dodge using the map. Snake and the President are still running on the bridge
blindly, but the mines, having served their purpose by snuffing everyone
extraneous, are no longer lethal.
The snapshot of Snake's personality offered after all the cliff-hanging
nonsense is what Escape should have been about. His minor, though
personal, triumph implies that life for him in the USPD's police state is no
different than squatting by a garbage campfire in a Manhattan sewer. He is oddly
compassionate [thankfully, he doesn't waste every crook in sight ala The
Ultimate Warrior], yet unsympathetic to the crude comradeship Hauk offers
later; they are, like their namesakes, eternally opposed predators. But this is
a parting shot, not the film's central concern.
Smoothing Escape's plot drawbacks are conviction-laden performances,
sterling model work, and Carpenter's most driving and textured musical score
ever. He also forments several successful running gags about Snake's Marvel
Comics name, and dubs a pair of the film's resident whackos after fellow genre
filmmakers - "Romero" [George] is the Duke's demented, spacepunk hatchetman,
while "Cronenberg" [David] is the doctor who injects head-explosives into
Snake's main arteries. The inspired casting of character-types Borgnine and Van
Cleef are due to the always-pleasing genre savvy Carpenter consciously injects
into each of his films. Often, his own craftsmanship makes slipping past the
subsidiary illogic of his misfired premise easy [like why the immense silencer
on Snake's Ingram gun doesn't work, or whether a one-eyed man would have the
depth perception necessary to land a glider atop the World Trade Center in the
dark].
Starburst [38/Vol 4/Issue 19/Oct/1981/UK] By Phil Edwards
The year is 1997 and Manhattan Island has been turned into a maximum security
jail. The bridges to the island have been either sealed or are mined. The good
guys are keeping the bad guys locked up in the biggest prison in the world.
The president of the USA is on a desperate flight to a meeting which will decide
the fate of the world, with Russia and China on the brink of the apocalyptic
confrontation. His plane is taken over by terrorists in mid-flight and is
crashed into Manhattan Prison. Big problem. How to get the Prez out in time for
the meeting.
This is the basic premise of John Carpenter's latest film and right away I'll
say that it is his most assured work, full of the kind of touches one has come
to expect from this most independent [outside of David Cronenberg] of film
makers. However Escape From New York is also the most frustratingly
disappointing of John Carpenter's features, but I'll get to that in a bit.
With the President down among the ruins of humanity the cops fly in their Dolby
helicopters. They are met by a super-weirdo, Romero [Frank Doubleday], who
presents them with one of the president's fingers and the news that the man is
being held by the Duke of New York. Further instructions will follow.
Police Commissioner Hauk, played by Lee Van Cleef in his best reptilian manner,
remembers that Snake Plissken [Kurt Russell] is on his way to Manhattan Prison.
Snake is a heavy dude. Not only was he a hotshot pilot in the last big
bang, he's also a black belt in karate, hasn't watched for about six years and
wears an eye patch. Snake gets his name from a rather large cobra which is
tattooed on his stomach. As this decoration grows up from the waist band of his
combat pants it's likely that Snake has other outstanding attributes. But this
is a AA certificate movie [and review] so we'll leave that there. He's also
equipped with a delivery that reminded me of a young Marlon Brando - "Call me
Sssnnake" he hisses several times.
Snake gets the job with the promise of a free pardon, but just to make sure he
stays in line a couple of explosive charges are implanted in his neck - by a
character called Dr. Cronenberg no less. He's got 20 hours to get the Prez out,
and if he doesn't then the mini bombs will go off, blowing Snake's arteries out
of his neck. Pretty inventive stuff, thanks to the script of Carpenter and Nick
Castle, who of course played The Shape in John's Halloween.
Enough of the plot, you all want something left for your money. Escape is
like an outrageous comic strip, though finding a comparison to Snake Plissken in
comicdom is a little difficult. Carpenter tells us just enough about this good
apple gone bad to make us like him enough to feel some kind of identification,
though not in the same way as Indiana Jones in Raiders, for example. A
more fitting comparison would be with Clint Eastwood's "Man With No Name" from
the Dollars movies of the Sixties. A totally amoral hero. Just right for the
bleak Eighties.
Carpenter has peopled Escape with some fascinating characters. There's
Brain played by the excellent Harry Dean Stanton. All nervous energy, Brain has
always lived on his wits and is obviously the smartest man in the prison, living
in the remains of the New York Public Library, an oil well pump casually
installed in the massive apartment he shares with Maggie played by the
delectable Adrienne Barbeau.
Isaac Hayes makes a pretty good job of the Duke of New York, at once threatening
and somehow likeable. Duke drives around in an armoured Cadillac, fitted out
with chandeliers for headlamps. Fun, but not really that much different from
some of the outrageous autos one sees in New York today.
The President is played by Donald Pleasence, an odd bit of casting that really
works. Poor old Donald is treated terribly. Beaten up, finger sliced off, used
for target practice, dressed up in a long blond wig and generally humiliated. Bu
the manages to come out at the end OK, in time to show himself as just another
creepy Prez. But Snake has thought of this and his final retribution on the
ungrateful man is complete. It's also one of the best gags in the movie.
Escape From New York looks terrific, thanks to the production design of
Joe Alves. It's about time somebody recognised the talents of this artist. Alves
was responsible for Jaws and, most spectacularly, Close Encounters. Aided
by Carpenter's usual cinematographer Dean Cundey, Alves presents the ruins of
Manhattan Island as a tribal wasteland.
The film is also a big special effects movie, although most of the spectacular
effects were executed in a tiny area in Roger Corman's effects facility in
California. There are several incredibly artificial model shots which despite -
or because of - their very phoniness imbue the film with much of its atmosphere.
The flight into New York by glider and the landing on top of the derelict Trade
Towers is masterfully handled. A thrilling combination of computer graphics and
model work.
As with all Carpenter films there are some well staged set pieces involving
action and stunts. Once down in the human jungle, Snake meets all kinds of
weirdoes and gangs. Perhaps the most frightening are the Crazies - another tip of
the hat to Romero The Crazies live in the deserted subways and the sequence in
which they emerge through the sewer covers and up through the floorboards of
crumbling buildings anybody who has suffered at the hands of Chock Full O'Nuts
will get a laugh - is genuinely creepy.
Likewise, a gladitorial battle in which a badly wounded Snake slugs it out with
spiked baseball clubs with a mountain of a man to the bloodthirsty cheers of
Duke's gang is well staged, though if keeping the audience a trifle distant. The
climax of that particular battle is nasty to be sure but once again a comic
violence element is there to defuse it.
So what's disappointing about Escape From New York? I liked the film a
lot. It demonstrates Carpenter's growing ability to handle increasingly bigger
budgets and bigger casts. Like The Fog it shows that the director is in
control of complicated effects sequences. It bodes well for Carpenter's next
film, a remake of Hawks' The Thing. From all reports Billy Lancaster's
script is tough, hard and terrifying. l can't wait for that one.
But there were times during Escape when I wanted to scream at the screen.
The truth is that Carpenter, with this film, blows more opportunities to wind up
suspense than he takes up. The sequence with the Crazies is, as I've already
said, really quite frightening. However it ultimately goes nowhere. It builds
and builds with hairsbreadth escapes and stunts and ends with a totally defused
pay off.
The same thing happens in the final chase sequence. All the bridges leading off
the island are supposedly impassable, except for one for which Brain has a map
showing the location of the mines. With the seconds ticking away for Snake the
chase gets underway. Sure, mines go off and there is some heated screaming about
heading left and right and people die. But somehow it just doesn't carry any
suspense. You just don't care when people meet their bloody deaths people that
Carpenter has carefully built up into rounded, likeable characters.
Likewise the final confrontation between Snake and Duke. It should have been
terrifying, real edge of the seat suspense. Of course you know that Snake win
win, he's too interesting a character to die after so much hard work. The
sequence just doesn't hang together. It's clumsily staged and badly edited.
As much as I liked the film it has given me a doubt about Carpenter's ability to
write and direct endings for his films. The doubt started with Halloween.
At the time the climax seemed suitable. In retrospect, I'm not sure. The doubt
was compounded by The Fog. Like Escape that film just ran out of
steam. The tacked-on ending showed through. The best pans of The Fog were
at the beginning of the film. The sequence on the fishing boat held a
claustrophobic horror as did the scene in which Adrienne Barbeau was attacked by
the ghosts atop the lighthouse.
And so it is with Escape From New York. The film just runs out of
excitement. The opening is well-staged. Various set pieces are put together in a
masterful fashion. Images, like the Crazies rising from the underground, the
superb throwaway shot of a disembodied head stuck on a parking meter, the single
flash of a figure in the supposedly-deserted Trade Centre, the somehow touching
sequence of prisoners putting on a drag vaudeville show in the ruins of a
theatre are all terrifically evocative of a desolate futureworld. It's almost
wasted with the badly-staged last ten minutes of the film.
Do see Escape From New York. Carpenter is an important talent. It is a
pleasurable if sometimes frustrating experience to watch that talent grow and
mature. With Escape he has almost thrown off the ghost of his inspiration
Howard Hawks. There is little of Hawks in Escape, apart from one running
gag. But there is also little of that cloying movie consciousness which so often
intruded into Carpenter's films in the past.
Like David Cronenberg, Carpenter is an emerging artist. Their films have nothing
in common other than that they are two people who fought in their own ways to
make the type of film they wanted.
The Brood, not Scanners, was Cronenberg's breakthrough film. In
the same way Escape From New York is John Carpenter's. Sixty per cent a
perfectly realised film. It's my guess that The Thing will add to that.
The Campaigner [Vol 14/Issue
7/Oct/1981/US] By Ira Leibowitz
Unfortunately, most of the millions who saw this movie when it was released in
July and the millions more who can be expected to see it when it is released in
December are children between the ages of ten and seventeen. It would be prudent
for parents to mobilize now to outlaw Escape From New York before it
returns to the theater this Christmas season to guarantee that neither their own
nor other children are exposed to this sick and pathetic film.
The plot of Escape From New York is as mercilessly simplistic as the
proliferating variety of "kung fu" films that also appeals so deeply to
children. The movie depicts New York following some unnamed national crisis amid
ongoing warfare with the Soviet Union. All is a smokey, grimey rubble-heap of a
former civilization. Now the sealed-off Manhattan is populated by cannibals
living in the abandoned subway tunnels and sewers, and ruled by an elite of the
streets.
This terror hierarchy is overseen by "The Duke" [Isaac Hayes]. On the guard
towers, the Manhattan zone is ruled by a warden [Lee Van Cleef], who is also the
chief of the national police force. Van Cleef, bald and sharp-nosed, wears a
navy blue jumpsuit and gold earrings, and comes across as a very convincing
caricature of none other than New York's Mayor Ed Koch.
A tour of this inferno is occasioned by the accidental crash landing inside
Manhattan of America's British-accented President [played by British actor
Donald Pleasence] on his way to an international disarmament conference in New
Haven. To retrieve the President , the warden arranges for the release from life
imprisonment of the hero, one "Snake" Plisskon [Kurt Russell]. Plisskon, a
"decorated war hero of the battle over Leningrad and Siberia," agrees to rescue
the President within twenty-four hours, and to be put to death if he fails. Of
course he succeeds, leaving a trail of imaginatively dispatched bodies across
the screen.
Throughout the entire movie, not one human emotion is portrayed, not human fear,
human love, or even tears. The audience sees scene after scene of violence and
death mirrored by the actors with blank dread or an occasional wild zombie leer.
This is the same blankness and detachment I've seen on television interviews
with adolescent muggers who retell their murders, robberies, or rapes of senior
citizens. Through this and other visual reminders, Carpenter does a very
effective job of driving home the message that "this is just like New York's
seamier side right now." In one scene, Snake walks onto an abandoned City
Hall-area street in the daytime. It looks a bit more garbage-strewn and
graffiti-plastered than the usual business day 1981, but in other respects
normal - until you notice there are human heads impaled on the parking meters.
Later, Snake meets a punk rock woman in an abandoned Wall Street café, after
being chased by a gang of cannibals who piled out of the sewers. While he is
getting information on which gangs run with the turfs, the woman kisses Snake in
a bid to escape with him - the first approximation of a human impulse in the
film. But as she does, the cannibals suddenly breaks through the floor boards
and drag her down below for their feast. Snake runs off, his machine gun
blazing. As the woman's scream fade, Carpenter has made his point.
At this shocking moment, a wide-eyed nine-year-old boy sitting in my row asked
his father: "Dad, what are they doing to the lady?"
The total vocabulary of Carpenter's screenplay does not exceed two hundred
words, accented by highly audible grunts, groans, and thuds. The vocabulary and
these sound effects revolve around the only relevant form of verbal action in
Carpenter's gang-dominated world: who is to kill or main another person. Such
verbs as "run," "duck," and "gimme" proliferate.
In fact, Snake's only distinction as a "successful hero" is his determination
and fitness to kill before he gets killed. Thus, the language geometry of
Escape From New York perfectly matches Carpenter's intention of creating a
visual universe in which the ultimate endpoint of Jeremy Bentham's hedonistic
calculus - the "law of the jungle" - reigns supreme.
The Movie [Issue 99/Nov/1981/UK]
By Philip Strick
John Carpenter's Escape From New York
is the most elaborate illustration yet of the siege theme that recurs through
the director's work. The black monoliths of the Manhattan skyscrapers, dark and
[from a distance] seemingly lifeless, are like the ultimate beleaguered
enclosure of the twentieth century, set about with military-style patrols,
searchlights, radar, minefields and the unceasing buzz of helicopters laden with
formidable weaponry. The urban prison - a concrete trap complete with its
muggers, its unmoving carpet of traffic pumping out noise and pollution, its
over-population by day, its uncanny emptiness by night - is a familiar image to
thousands of city-dwellers. For most of them, their environment
already has elements of detention and punishment, and Carpenter's idea must
sound echoes of familiarity if not of whole-hearted recognition.
The echoes also come, of course, from cinema itself. Street-gang movies like
The Warriors [1979]; the sidewalk-vendetta stories That originated in
Thirties gangster films and made their way, via The Godfather [1972], to
horrific desperadoon-the-rampage films like Mean Streets [1973], Taxi
Driver [1976] and Fingers [1978]; even one-manversus-the-whole-town
dramas like The Phenix City Story [1955] and Invasion of the
Bodysnatchers [1978] - all have prepared the movies for a portrait or the
city as evil entity.
But there is more than one side to the siege presented in Escape From New
York. Once the President has been stolen into the dark heart of New York, it
is his colleagues outside the city who are under pressure. They too are in a
trap, marked by the seconds ticking by, which will destroy them unless it is
sprung. The film is, in fact, constructed around a series of no-wayout
situations - Manhattan itself ['Once you go in.' announces a voice at the start
of the film, 'you don't come out']; the capture of the President [shut like some
prehistoric embryo into the egg of his survival pod]; the predicament of the
Police Commissioner ['One more step,' hisses the kidnapper, waving a severed
Presidential finger, 'and he dies'], which he promptly inflicts on Snake Plissken by pumping him with explosives that will detonate if the mission is not
accomplished; and the global time-limit hanging over them all.
Snake's adventures are in serial cliff-hanger style, one dead-end after another.
He is trapped by a horde of 'crazies' in a desperate shoot-out; his getaway car
is backed into a street blockade by gangs with a taste for decapitation; he
finds himself in a boxing ring with a giant [resembling Flash Gordon's enemy,
the Emperor Ming], while a vast audience demands his blood; and finally he hangs spotlit halfway up a wall, clear target for the killer just beneath him. And
since he is portrayed as a mumbling, grumbling, eye-patched mercenary Snake
makes no special demands on the spectator's sympathy; nor does the cowering,
ineffectual President at his side. The only reason for willing his escape is the
modest hope that international catastrophe can thereby be averted, although it
is by no means clear how the vital cassette tape, once recovered, is going to be
able to achieve this [it is a Hitchcockian MacGuffin, in fact an otherwise
irrelevant pretext for issues more central to the story].
The whole concept resembles yet another cinematic tradition, that of the
detached band of hired gun-slingers playing one political faction against
another and walking blandly away from the resultant holocaust at the end. The
presence of Lee Van Cleef as the police commissioner, and his long-distance
partnership with Snake, with whom he finally sides against the Establishment,
has strong affinities with Sergio Leone's tales of invincible gunmen versus
terrorized towns - films which starred Clint Eastwood. Leave them to destroy
themselves, runs the message, and ride with a whole skin into the sunset.
A story like many others then, but does it, in Carpenter's hands, have anything
new to offer? With its pace and drive, Escape From New York gives the
strong impression of a film-maker in a hurry, experimenting with ideas,
situations, characters, images. What could have been the definitive exploration
of what one science-fiction writer has termed 'The Coming Destruction of the
United States", the logical next step in post-Vietnam paranoia and
anti-authoritarian gunplay in the glittering arena of high technology becomes
instead a quirky, back-street, fast, furious and hell-bent for somewhere else.
Carpenter's destination, once he has achieved his first target as the prolific
creator of commercial successes, will be some very fine films indeed. Until
then, the cinema will have to settle for lively, spectacular compromises like
Escape From New York.
Epic Illustrated [Vol
1/Issue
9/Dec/1981/US] By Dennis O'Neil
It's summer, and I'm a naturalized New
Yorker, so I've been escaping. To the beach, to the mountains, to the open
highway - anywhere that's not the swelter of the familiar streets and avenues.
It's our anual custom: the temperature rises, and we flee. If I can't go
anywhere else, I run to the Alpine, the Fortway Fiveplex, the State, the
Criterion, the air-conditioned theaters of Brooklyn and Manhattan.
Add humidity to the pollution, crime, noise and the asphalt becomes intolerable
to the New Yorker. He scrambles to California or Denver where he meets tourists
from Chicago and Cleeveland, tells him his horror stories, and they return to
the Midwest convinced that Gotham is, indeed the Gomorrah gentlefolk from
elsewhere claim it to be. New York has become an emblem of urban catastrophe.
That's probably why John Carpenter's new movie is titles Escape From New York
instead of Escape From San Diego or Escape From Tempe, Arizona.
[Or, most reasonable, Escape From St. Louis, since the climatic scenes
were actually filmed there.] I'm guessing Carpenter conceived the movie as a
blend of adventure and satire - the trick Theodore Flicker managed so superbly
in The President's Analyst. He begins with a premise that could certainly
support this intention: the Manhattan of 1990 is a maximum security prison
operated by the inmates with no outside interference and no parole allowed.
Terrorists cause Air Force One to crash in the lower quarter of the island while
the President is en route to a summit conference that could decide the
fate of civilization. Someone has to get him out within twenty-four hours. Snake
Plisskin is elected. Snake is a master criminal condemned to the prison for
unspecified crimes, and he's not happy with the job, but if he succeeds he gets
a full pardon. The catch is that if he fails a tiny bomb implanted in his
skull will burst his brain.
Having established this nifty situation fraught with possibilities for satire,
writer-director Carpenter then settles for a fairly standard action-adventure
flick. Such satirical duties as there are fall entirely to Ernest Borgnine, who
plays a jolly cliché of a cab driver. Borgnine is the complete professional: he
is also seldom more. Almost all the potential for simple humor - much less
satire - is left implicit, never to be realized. Carpenter does better with the
violence, but not as well as I expected from the director of the truly scary
Halloween. In that earlier effort, he demonstrated an ability to manipulate
his audience's expectations to produce maximum fright with minimum gore; here,
he seems content to deliver a standard package of fights and chases.
Escape From New York's worst problem, however, is its star. Kurt Russell,
who plays Snake, imitates movie tough guys in general and Clint Eastwood in
particular. Mimickry is not acting, at least not film acting. Russell's
performance is a collection of postures, poses and mannerisms, not a
characterization. It lacks both resonance and a center; when Russell is alone on
the screen, there's nothing to look at except moving light.
The movie is by no means terrible. It's just not what it might have been. I had
the feeling its theme - flight from a civilization grown oppressive - was left
wandering somewhere just outside the camera range.