'NEW YORK': CYNICISM WITH STYLE
By Kevin Thomas
Talk about loading a situation!
In John Carpenter's stylish, scary and utterly nihilistic ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (selected theaters) it's 1997, and the crime rate is so bad that Manhattan has been turned into one big sealed-off prison.
The President (Donald Pleasence) is headed for a summit conference in Hartford, Conn., when terrorists commandeer Air Force 1, and it crashes into a Manhattan skyskraper. The President survives by having slipped into a special escape pod, but he must be rescued within 22 hours to make that conference in order to blackmail the world into peace with a nuclear fission formula contained in a cassette in his possession.
At just that moment a much-decorated hero of the Russian and Siberian Wars turned bank robber (Kurt Russell) is being told to choose between execution and imprisonment in Manhattan. The commissioner of the U.S. Police Force (Lee Van Cleef) tells him if he rescues the President he will be set free. Russell accepts, but just to make sure he follows through, Van Cleef has him injected with a drug that will make his arteries pop unless he meets the deadline and thus will be able to have the drug neutralized by X-ray.
Whew!
With HALLOWEEN and THE FOG behind him, John Carpenter certainly knows how to work up an audience, but how deeply you become involved in ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK will depend on whether you will be able to root for the relentlessly surly Russell (who starred in Carpenter's TV movie ELVIS)
Neither he nor anyone else in the film generates a trace of sympathy, but the youthful audience with whom Carpenter has connected so successfully may like Russell. How he turned from war hero to robber is left unexplained by Carpenter and his co-writer Nick Castle, who apparently expect people to identify Russell with the disenchanted veterans of Vietnam.
But then ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK is a totally disillusioned film that presents the government as an absolute monolith dedicated to the unhesitating and hypocritical exploitation of the individual. Not that the criminal denizens of Manhattan are any better. There are monthly drops of food supplies in Central Park, but other than that, the prisoners are completely on their own in devising fuel supplies and satisfying all their other needs. They have been reduced to animals engaged in an unrelenting struggle for survival in the ravaged metropolis.
What Carpenter has projected with his usual effectiveness is a vision of hell on earth. His view is utterly cynical, but his cynicism is one of exploitation rather than protest. Along with large doses of brutality with strong visceral appeal there are sexist and racist overtones. In this, as in so many other talented filmmakers' work, it's hard not to find Carpenter irresponsible. (He, no doubt, could argue that he's simply telling it as it is.)
Carpenter's Manhattan is seen almost entirely at night, which makes for an ominous mood and a good disguise of any limitations of budget. His derelict prisoners gather in a moldy Art Deco movie palace for seedy live entertainment. Gladiators with spiked maces fight in a ring set up in a vast old Romanesque train station lobby. (It's Union Station in St. Louis, where much of the film was shot.)
The supreme ruler of New York is the menacing Duke (Isaac Hayes) who tools around in a Cadillac with crystal chandeliers decorating the hood. His top adviser is The Brain (Harry Dean Stanton) who lives with his tough moll (Adrienne Barbeau) in a public library with an oil well pumping up in its main reading room. There's a crazed old cabbie (Ernest Borgnine) who somehow has managed to drive the same cab for 30 years.
ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK is crude, brutal but undeniably vital. It is the kind of film widely admired in Hollywood because Carpenter and his colleagues have managed to get every cent of its relatively modest $7 million budget right up there on the screen. A new special lens and other new gadgetry have allowed cameraman Dean Cundey to shoot most effectively in darkness, and production designer Joe Alves has been most imaginative in evoking a Manhattan in ruins. Carpenter's sense of style is strong enough to sustain some obvious miniature work, and his eerie, insistent synthesizer score, which he composed with Alan Howarth, contributes strongly to the film's brooding aura of danger.
In short, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK is a film of sleekly impressive surfaces. Its suspense is not really all that inherent but rather derives from Carpenter's reputation for the unpredictable. ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (rated R for strong violence and language) can be compelling, but it's perfectly understandable that many will not be able to go along with the corrosive, pessimistic view of humanity that Carpenter projects with such force.
