ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK: How Two of My Favorite Westerns Aren't Westerns Pt. 1/2

Prologue: The Legend of Kurt Russell 

Kurt Russel is kinda the man. I'm a big fan of his body of work. Very few actors embody to me the specific blend of swagger, cynicism, charm, and out-right action hero charisma that he can bring to just about any role. He's got range, depth to his characterizations, and can make you like pretty much any villain he plays (look no further than Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 for that one), and can sometimes even make you kinda hate a hero he's playing (Lookin' at you, Sky High...). He's got it. That leading man star power. He's the man, man.

But he wasn't always. In the long ago and the far away he was pretty far from being the Man. In fact, if people knew him much at all it was as That Disney Movie Kid. In fact, according to legend "Kurt...Russel..." were the confusing and cryptic last words of Walt Disney himself. A compliment? A fever dream? A warning? We may never know. Not till we thaw out Walt's head anyway... But anyways, Kurt was making a pretty good living as an actor heading into the beginning of the 80s, even starred in a pretty well-regarded at the time tv biopic about Elvis Presley. But he was still known by basically any casting director out there as a wholesome child actor from things like The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes or The Strongest Man in the World, fluff-fare from the latter 70s output of the Walt Disney studios. And he wanted to change that.

As it turns out, there were two men out in the world that would help him do just that. One's name was John Carpenter. The other? S.D. Plissken.

...Just call him Snake.

I: BACK TO NEW YORK, or How Basically Every John Carpenter Flick is a Western

I've actually met John Carpenter. He's on the very short list of celebrities I've actually spoken to, also including Micheal Dorn and Marina Sirtis. But while that latter interaction went a little sideways, when I got to talk to John it was a really chill interaction and included some great advice. These were both at panels at conventions, by the way- it's not like we hung out. But yeah, he's a pretty cool guy. I was one of the last hopefuls who got to ask a question before the end of the panel when he, and I quote, had to head out "to meet up with my weed guy." Like a fuckin' legend.

I asked him how he chooses a project to focus all his effort into when a film can take so long to make and he obviously has such a wealth of weird ideas and projects. His advice? "Whichever one gets you the most excited, the one you can't stop thinking about." Which has definitely helped a scatterbrained creative like me, as it serves as a guide through my own mental wilderness. Which story should I work on? Well, which one's gettin' my dick hard right now? I have lots of ideas, but which one is taking up the biggest chunk of my attention, my enjoyable mental time? That's the one we work on. the others can wait. So thanks, John.

As you might gather from the other times I've mentioned Mr. Carpenter on this space, I admire both the man and his work very much. There's a leanness and intelligence in his films that are, to borrow a phrase, "all killer, no filler", especially apropos considering his breakout hit was of course the trend-setter of the Slasher Paradigm: Halloween. And one of the film-makers John has gone on record about admiring is Howard Hawks, who along with The Thing From Another World, also directed quite a few Westerns. As such, he's always talked about how a lot of his films are Westerns in structure, if not in genre or content.

And it's kind of a fun game to take some of the classic Carpenter films (especially ones that are original stories by Carpenter himself) and re-imagine their plots as Westerns, because you see the truth in his assessment almost immediately. Some still have a tinge of horror to them, but the premise tends to remain intact.

• Assault on Precinct 13: A rundown, nearly abandoned outpost of Texas Rangers is under siege from a coalition of bandits and hostile tribes while holding several dangerous prisoners in their cells.
• The Fog: A town founded on stolen gold is attacked one foggy night by the gang or descendants of the men they cheated out of the fortune to build their city.
• They Live: A drifter stars to discover the town he's come to is being controlled by an affluent family who will do anything to keep their control of it's citizens hidden, or hell, maybe just make it a drifter who is facing off against an early incarnation of the KKK.
• In the Mouth of Madness: A bounty hunter is sent to a lonely town to fetch a wayward writer of penny dreadfuls, only to find his quarry has formed a cult of brainwashed devotees to his "new bible" and will stop at nothing to either convert or destroy our hero.
• The Thing as a Western is just The Hateful Eight. There, bam done!

Which of course brings us to today's outing: a disgraced former soldier must rescue a kidnapped politician from a fortified camp of bandidos in hostile territory, with time running out to avert war without his charge, and to escape a death sentence. Could be a pretty bad-ass Clint Eastwood movie, maybe something by Sergio Leone with Charles Bronson maybe? But no, in a nutshell, that's obviously Escape from New York.

Hell, it's even got Lee Van Cleef!

Now, that's where I come back to Kurt Russell and the other cool character I mentioned a few entries back, New York City! Because much like in my review of C.H.U.D.  NYC is back in major character mode as the setting that makes the story.

The year is 1997 (and may I say, I was in like 4th or 5th grade in '97 and I remember none of this...). After a spike in the American crime rate of 400%, and the outbreak of World War 3, the island of Manhattan is converted to the sole maximum security penitentiary for the whole country. A fifty foot retaining wall surrounds the island, the bridges out are fortified and mined, and the US Police Force surrounds it like an army, making sure once you're sent in, no one ever gets back out. Only problem is a terrorist cell devoted to the downfall of this dystopian police state has just hijacked and crashed Air Force One, with the President onboard (Donald Pleasance, playing the love child of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher *No, really- that was the head canon Donald Pleasance made up to explain why we had a US President with a slight British accent and while John decided not to include this fact in the film, in my world it's canon*).

"Mummy never said being President was going to be like this, eh wot?"

So, when it falls to Bob Hauk, the US  Chief of Police (Lee Van Cleef, exuding more raw masculinity while balding and wearing a little gold earring than the Dean of Ass at Stomp University) to get a search and rescue op together, he knows just the guy: former Spec-Ops soldier, and current foiled bank robber and incoming inmate, S.D. Plissken. But he prefers to be called Snake.

Pictured here, just being a MOOD.

Now, when John Carpenter set out to make this, there was a leading man he had in mind for this hard-bitten Western style gunslinger he wanted to drop into this scenario: He wanted Kurt Russell. How did he know about him? Well, remember that Elvis movie I mentioned? Well, that largely forgotten bit of television cinema was directed by Carpenter and marked the beginning of a collaboration and friendship between John and Kurt that would stretch from Elvis to this, to The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China (side-note: I didn't include that latter film in my conversion list because the script actually started out set in the Old West before it ended up being modernized by a rewrite!).

So to this film, may I say:
"Ah-thank yew ver-eh muuuuch..."

So once again, an ensemble cast forms, crazy shit is happening in the Big Apple, and I'm here to talk about it. So let's jump in the Gullfire and talk about it, yeah?

II: "HEY, I KNOW YOU... I THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD.", or Why John Capenter's World-Building is A-Number One

So much about this movie just fucking works. You can regularly see the seams and spot the artifice of film-making if you're looking closely, but the strength of this flick is how well it's world is built. From set dressing (turning sections of actually burned out city in East St. Louis, IL into the seedy, dingy, rotten, and dangerous world of the prison island), performance and costume (Kurt as Snake was a revelation at the time, channeling Clint Eastwood out of awe of Lee Van Cleef, and showing up with an eye-patch that wasn't anywhere in the script on the first day of shooting, and wearing it with such confidence and assurance that Carpenter looked him up and down and said "...Cool.") to turning little asides in dialog into devices to make the world of the film feel much bigger despite the usual Carpenter trappings of claustrophobic settings and tight pacing driven along by his signature electronic score (which he composed himself more often than not).

"And how come you never show that kind 'eye-patch' initiative, huh?
 Like my earring. I worry about your future here, son..."

My personal favorite examples of this are the character of Cabbie (played by Ernest Borgnine, who some of you may recognize as the voice of Mermaid Man), who claims to have been driving the same cab for 30 years... so it stands to reason he was here BEFORE New York got turned into a prison and either couldn't get out when the island was cut off from the mainland, or was just a stubborn New Yorker who refused to leave. So now he is just dealing with how the neighborhood changing has made it harder to get fares and generally being the 'fun uncle' of this whole movie, being a comic relief character that isn't irritating as Hell ( no small feat).

And this scene, where he's so casually lighting off a Molotov cocktail
while chatting inanely and rescuing Snake never fails to make me laugh.
Again, world-building through subtle things, like how this just ISN'T weird for him.

And my other favorite being everything about the scene where Cabbie takes Snake to meet "Brain", (Harry Dean Stanton of Alien) a well-educated convict who has manged to use his knowledge of how to make gasoline (and his nest in the abandoned New York Public Library) to make himself indispensable to the lawless denizens of the city. See, when Snake finally meets him, he's got a familiar face. They pulled a job together a few years ago, but Brain (known back then as Harold) skipped out on him and left him high and dry.

And the kinda hilarious mention of "Fresno Bob" in this
scene always make me curious as to what other colorful characters lurk in Snake's backstory. 

So from there, the interplay becomes a mix of "I need your knowledge more than I want to kill you" and "How do I know you won't double-cross me again?" that makes all their interactions more fun. Plus, Brain has been 'given' a woman named Maggie by a grateful figure known as The Duke. Maggie is played by Adrienne Barbeau and her appearance in this movie is the whole reason that for years I just had a thing for Adrienne Barbeau and bad-ass women in cinema generally that I'm sure you've noticed by now...

Don't @ me, bro.

And of course, then there's the Duke. The Duke of New York, the Man, A-Number One, the most powerful gang leader in the entire prison colony, someone who has essentially carved himself a little kingdom of his own... and who got his hands on the President almost as soon as his escape module landed on the island.

He is also, in a turn that has always made me question how exactly this came about, played by none other than Isaac Fucking Hayes. Ya daaaaaaamn right...

Or, as you may have known him, the voice of Chef in South Park.

It's his only turn as an action movie villain that I'm aware of, and honestly? It's kind of amazing. Not only does the Duke have so much style that his personal car has chandeliers instead of headlights, not only does he have an entourage of psychopaths wild enough to make the biggest of ballers weep, but his actual screen presence as the Duke is enough to make you doubt NONE of this... his first proper introduction on screen, sauntering up to our captive hero all power and kingly authority then taking off his aviator shades (at night) to reveal a thousand yard stare and a distinctly un-medicated looking facial tic, is just one of those great moments that sticks with you after you've seen it.

 And then of course, there's the running gag anytime someone realizes who our monocular muscleman is: "Snake Plissken?...I thought you were dead..." And that ties in seamlessly to the device that Carpenter uses to propel this movie along at a pace that matches a careening taxi cab flying down a bridge full of mines: see, Hauk has placed two microscopic charges in Snakes neck, small enough to not impede function, but enough to open up both his major arteries and kill him in a few seconds, once a coating dissolves in 24 hours. During the last fifteen minutes or so they can be deactivated. But mean time? The irony of the running joke is one pointed out by Snake himself.

"I thought you were dead."
"I am..."

"Oooooh, NOW I get it..."

So the result is a tight, lean movie much like any other Carpenter piece. But because this one resides in a more fantastical world than Haddonfield, Illinois or the Antarctic wastes, the "futuristic" dystopia of New York in 1997 still feels really well developed through all these little touches, like there's a lot of stuff we're not seeing. It has a feeling of bigness on a budget a fraction the size of any film that could be compared to it in the modern landscape.

And speaking of that...

III: THE HOUSE THAT JOHN CARPENTER BUILT, or How to Make A Lot out of a Little.


Escape from New York was the biggest budget that John had ever worked with at this point in his career..six million dollars. Which is slightly less than a near-contemporary film a little low budget franchise starter called THE TERMINATOR. (Fun fact, there's a neat connection between these two films in that James Cameron worked in the effects department for Escape, helping create matte paintings for the panoramas of the ruined penal city. Just three years later he'd make that cyborg movie I mentioned with the beefy Austrian).

And while comparing the two doesn't seem fair, when one does? We see that John Carpenter has a skill that I think it's safe to say after films like Titanic (200 million that they're willing to admit to, but probably more) and Avatar (237 mil, estimated) that James Cameron doesn't. Jim needs millions upon millions to create immersive, distinct, and realistic worlds. To make Aliens and The Abyss took a combined 88.5 million dollars. Am I saying one director is better than other? No, I'm not.

What am I saying? Simple.

John needed six.

And delivered a spiked baseball bat post-apocalypse wrestling match that
a boy named Negan probably masturbated to with one hand while taking notes with the other.

I have talked before about fearless artists, like Richard Stanley or Nic Cage. And I think it takes a special brand of fearless to look at a (small to some, but) bigger budget than you've ever seen, wipe the dollar signs out of your eyes and the drool off your chin, and say "Ok, let's do it. I'm not wasting a cent of that shit." and then proceed to do just that. John was never scared when he made a movie cuz he's SMART, the kind of smarts you get making every piece work perfectly, making lean mean fighting machine movies.

By being all killer and no filler.

And in all of the films where John Carpenter has shined the brightest and his contributions have echoed the longest in cinematic canon, one thing has always seemed to be true: People stepped back and let him do his fucking job. Leave John Carpenter alone with some time, his weed guy, and six million dollars, he'll deliver you a timeless action classic.

Makes me wonder what he could have done with a project that was Cameron-level big, if people had the guts to try it instead of largely ignoring his work and doing so little to foster his career at certain points. And it pisses me off he's never gotten to make an actual  Western. How much greater could my favorite actual Western Tombstone have been if it had been handed to John Carpenter?

We'll never know, but if I ever meet him again, that's gonna be the question I ask him.

Watch Escape from New York on Amazon Prime, ya filthy animals.

And keep your good eye on this space for part 2 of this series, after our big project next week...

NEXT TIME: THE APOCALYPSE BEGINS....THREE TIMES.