1979 cult classic film and… 2005 Rockstar published video game?

A low-budget gangster film from the late-1970s has gone on record to achieve the cult classic status it would enjoy some 20 to 40 years later.

The basic premise of The Warriors is that the largest and most powerful gang of hoods, the Gramercy Riffs, calls upon all the gangs in the five boroughs of New York. Gramercy Riffs’ gang leader Cyrus spends the early film urging peace amongst all the gangs, all of whom outnumber the NYPD 3 to 1. Whether this includes corrupt cops and mafiosi isn’t explained, but beating the piss out of one cop would come after first trying to bribe approximately four or five. Four cops take the cash and look elsewhere, the fifth needs knuckle persuasion.

But time and time again, history shows that historical bonds based largely on ignorance instead of shared interests and goals of a positive future almost always lead to complete and utter mayhem. Even if the gangs all agreed to resist the cops because f[bang]k ’em, greed will still impede any thing that looks like an alliance. And this long-term breakdown of mutual trust would only apply if one doesn’t account for the oddball. Of the majority of attendees, one, Luther, the eccentric leader of The Rogues, produces a revolver when the big meeting in the Bronx explicitly prohibits weaponry of any kind.

He fired the literal Chekhov’s gun of the film to kick off events and immediately framed the upstart Warriors, led first by Cleon before the Riffs bodied him in the park, the next leader is Swan whose priority is to get the rest of the gang back to Coney Island before they share Cleon’s fate.

The devil is always in the details and to see who makes it back and who doesn’t, the film is available for viewing at any time. I’m certain I’ve spoiled it enough.

The movie and the later 2005 video game developed by Rockstar that we’ll get to later in this post are the well-known aspects of the property, but what is less well-known is that it’s not a completely original film script. It was actually a novel penned by Sol Yurick in 1965, and the book’s setting and release are meant to be a social commentary on poverty in the inner city. Inner City Blues?

Channel: MarvinGayeVEVO

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Can’t stop the pattern recognition, though this is slightly anachronistic considering the song was released in 1971 and the corresponding music video in ’94, but splitting hairs isn’t good for your health.

The film we got in 1979 is fundamentally different from the novel penned during MLK’s lifetime. The name for them, the Warriors, isn’t even in the original text–they’re called the Coney Island Dominators–and the characters depicted on the screen are older than their description on the pages. Young men as opposed to teens. Likeable anti-heroes compared to hopeless, foolhardy anti-villains. Still flawed, but the book’s Wikipedia page suggests one or more of them commits a sexual assault or more in the book. Who specifically?

Ajax here is the one most likely. Spend five minutes and he’s either gonna f[やめ！]k something without consent or chastise you as a f-ggot for not approving.

Not to mention, the shift to mythic thriller fits the inspiration for the original book. Yurick based it on the tales of Xenophon’s Anabasis which is a 4th century BCE Ancient Greek story about Xenophon and the Greek mercenaries hired by Cyrus the Younger to take back the Persian throne from his brother Artaxerxes II (awesome name by the way). But when Cyrus dies, the mercenaries, numbering in the tens of thousands, march back to Greece while stranded miles behind enemy lines. You know what that sounds like to me? The Warriors IP, and quite literally Behind Enemy Lines.

Actually, a handful of military movies make the cut, not all of them modern. Observe:

Two things are nearly absolute here: 1. Soldiers of elite militaries are guaranteed to get lost behind enemy lines, and 2. throw a stone at an old movie and Michael Fassbender will be a part of it. He’s been both Greek and Roman. Make him an Egyptian and you add another to the set.

So let’s look at the timeline here. Xenophon writes the Anabasis based on a failed rebellion against the King of Kings of Persia in the 370s BCE; Sol Yurick bases his novel both on that and the contemporary civil rights movement of the mid-1960s; the property is acquired by American Pictures International in 1969, and sits in limbo for about a decade before getting a film. Maybe not necessarily low-budget, but filming it in the Bronx (not too far from where my own mother grew up, I might add) gives it a kind of grittiness that only indie films can achieve these days. F[bash]k all the CGI and expenses, f[ka-ching]k all the humongous budgets and boardroom-approved inoffensive drivel; I want movies that activate every emotion. I wanna behave like the average chick flick audience-goer watching the 9,000th romcom. Superheroes are past their prime…

Sometimes they s[rocks]t gold though.

And to put the cherry on top, The Warriors has the unique distinction of having a well-done video game. Not content with merely retelling the events of the 1979 film, the 2005 video game expanded on what was already present, gave the player more time with the characters, established rivalries and behaved as more than just a graffitied NYC-set beat ’em up.

Channel: Tactical Bacon Productions

Available on the PS2 and PSP, the game adds more to the existing characters and lore. Rockstar’s Toronto branch worked on the game and has worked on prior well-received yet unsung video games. Be that as it may, once the property was handed to Rockstar Games, they didn’t necessarily need to change too much–and they didn’t. They merely added to the foundation. Extravagant castle with touch-ups of paint and an upgraded ornament, if you will.

Having said that, in my research, Sol Yurick falls into the familiar trope of the novelist who feels the movie bastardized the book, though taking a look at the source material, you sympathize slightly less with Yurick and slightly more with Hollywood. The original 1965 book was supposed to be the logical conclusion of systemic racism’s harsh treatment of non-white teens and young men. The cast is majority black and Hispanic and no matter what, the things these boys do in the novel are not nice. Murder, vandalism, rape, and I don’t think they’re supposed to make it back in one piece. Huh, the Inner City Blues thing was supposed to be a joke. It still is, but it’s dark. Darker than Thomas Jefferson’s lovers.

He’s on the $2 bill. If you find it, call yourself lucky ╰(￣ω￣ｏ)

So a white author writing about a bunch of murderous black and Latino kids from the wrong side of the tracks in 1960s NYC terrorizing the city and suffering the consequences of their actions may as well be media suicide. I’d have a heart attack with s[golf]t like that, and I bet my two-dollar bills (if I had any), that such a book would be appreciated by this guy…

…for all the wrong reasons. Like if I wrote a novel titled Tragedy of the Will based on a fictional unit of Schutzstaffel personnel and was gifted flowers by the National Socialist Movement.

Such a project would, in no way, celebrate the work of the SS, and Yurick’s novel wasn’t meant to critique or reinforce racist stereotypes lobbied at the black and Latino communities at the time, but to adapt the book unchanged around, say, 1970 would be extremely controversial. The book preceded the 1967 race riots and the liberties taken by Hollywood in 1979 were admittedly an inverse of the grit fatigue exhibited by films priorly released in the decade. Taxi Driver, The Panic in the Needle Park, Death Wish, and other classic 1970s films all had bleak and ambiguous endings. A biblically accurate adaptation of The Warriors would, at best, make no news on the night of the premiere, or at worst, ignite the fury of the NAACP.

And as a writer, as much as I understand the desire to change little to nothing about the original source material, sacrifices would still need to be made to prevent the original creators from becoming media pariahs, prejudice-wise. It’s usually one of the two controversies that accompanies fame, isn’t it? It’s so hard to find someone who’s neither f[nein]cking a neo-Nazi nor a minor.

100 years being an all-around good guy, we need more people like ol’ Dick （￣︶￣）↗

That’s all well and good, Tiberius, but am I missing anything by ignoring the novel? Aside from context, not really. Yurick wasn’t a fan of the film adaptation per se, but it reinvigorated interest in the book, which Google tells me is still in print, so let’s say you finish reading this and want to start getting into The Warriors. Before I give you an Evangelion-esque watch order to follow:

Credit: u/DaviGueimer, r/Evangelion

I’m not gonna reach through the screen and threaten you with marriage if you start anywhere else but the XYZ. If you wanna engage with a few of the sources, great. If you want merely the film and the game, then you might as well queue up. That’s probably the most common way people absorb the property. If you want Xenophon’s Anabasis, the 1965 novel, the 1979 film, the 2005 game, and some of the fan comics, have at it, you rich man north of Richmond.

Definitely richer than the boys in the original novel to be able to track all that down, and while your at it, why don’t you put on your blue suede shoes and board a plane to the Delta Blues?

I could do this all day (￣﹃￣)