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ASSAULT
ON PRECINCT 13
7/10
USA
1976
dir
John Carpenter
91 mins
By
no means Carpenter’s best picture - it’s less accomplished than
either his next feature Halloween, subsequent releases The Fog,
The Thing, or the later
Prince of Darkness, which it closely resembles - but it’s definitely
his leanest and tensest, a ferociously economical cross between George
Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo.
Carpenter
sets up his scenatio with customary briskness, switching between various
separate plot strands which gradually converge in Anderson, an LA ghetto.
The police station (actually Precinct 11, Division 13) is closing
down, the officers having already transferred to a newer facility nearby
- only a skeleton staff remains to oversee the shutdown of the phones
and electricity, including laid-back cop Bishop (Austin Stoker) and cool
secretary Leigh (Laurie Zimmer).
Meanwhile,
a vicious street gang vows revenge on the police department after some
of their members are killed in a shoot-out... Meanwhile, a harassed fortysomething
dad drives his young daughter around the underpopulated, deceptively calm
streets in search of his new girlfriend’s house... Meanwhile, a prison
truck picks up a trio of inmates, transferring them to a new jail - among
them a notorious death-row veteran, the wisecracking Napoleon Wilson (Darwin
Joston) - but on the way, one of them falls ill and needs medical attention.
Meanwhile...
The
story itself isn’t anything special - if anything, the set-up is slightly
far-fetched, and the dialogue often strains uncomfortably towards hardboiled
toughness. But few viewers will mind, so exciting is Carpenter’s slam-bang
pacing, his astonishingly assured grasp of widescreen technique, and,
not to be underestimated, the pounding relentlessness of his own, much-sampled,
synthesiser score. It’s a no-name cast, but also no-nonsense one, a refreshing
mix of races, genders, cops and crimimals thrown together, balls to the
wall, as the street gang lay siege: lights out, phones cut, silencered
bullets pinging around them in the claustrophobic rooms, they peek out
through the shattered windows at the darkness beyond, where shadows lurk
and stir to action.
In
short, this film could hardly be better executed, especially on such a
tight budget. And perhaps it’s unfair to expect much intelligence or depth
from a quickie which seems so proud to be as ‘b-movie’ as possible. But
there is something objectionable about the way Carpenter so gleefully
exploits the worst paranoid fears of ‘respectable’ audiences: his level
of debate never goes any further than Bishop’s despairing reference to
‘them crazy young bastards.’
Walter
Hill explored similar turf with in his 1979 picture The Warriors.
As Danny Peary’s notes in Cult Movies:
Paramount’s
initial poster ad featured a few hundred gang members looking
straight at us defiantly, with a caption that began: ‘These are the Armies
of the Night. They are 100,000 strong. They outnumber the cops five to
one. They could run New York City.’ Now, this is scary stuff - especially
if you live in New York City and happen to see the poster on a long subway
ride home. If this ad did indeed properly reflect the theme of the picture
it was promoting, then The Warriors could correctly be called an
inciteful film.
Inciteful
meaning the film could be accused of making the ‘gang problem’ worse,
by causing the gang members to suddenly realise their own strength,
and start acting accordingly.
Assault
On Precinct 13, on the other hand, is inciteful, but it aims
to rabble-rouse the potential victims of the gangs. While The
Warriors is cartoonish, opportunistic and superficial, at least it
bothers to give its gang members distinct personalities, separate
identities, ideas, reasons, lives - and lines. In fact, we hardly
ever hear from the ‘straights’ through whose worlds the warriors strut.
In
Assault, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of gang members, but,
apart from a couple of mumbled phrases very early on, where four ‘warlords’
(they’re actually named in the end credits only as White Warlord, Black
Warlord, Oriental Warlord and Chicano Warlord) take a blood oath of vengeance,
Carpenter gives none of them anything to say. Carpenter goes to ludicrous
lengths to make the gang members strenuously multi-racial - the unlikely
nature of this is even commented on by a radio newscaster during an early
broadcast mentioning the ‘juvenile gang problem.’ But the members nevertheless
remain faceless, wordless, unstoppable, child-killing psychopaths, and
so they presumably deserve all they get. They’re slaughtered, like zombies.
Like injuns.
by Neil
Young
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