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8
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10 |
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10
= Highest Rating |
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Guest
Review by Troy
Howarth |
1997:
New York City has been turned into a maximum security
prison. While on a flight to an important summit
conference, the President of the United States
(Donald Pleasence) is attacked by radicals and
escapes, via a special pod, only to end up right
in the heart of the Big Apple. U.S. Police Force
commissioner Hauk (Lee Van Cleef) makes a deal
with war hero-turned-criminal Snake Plissken (Kurt
Russell): get the President out of the city in
time for the conference, and he'll be granted
a free pardon.
Following the surprise commercial and critical
success of Halloween
(1978), John Carpenter found himself in a position
of tremendous pressure —
every film he delivered was expected to duplicate
its success, and when The Fog
(1980) failed to do so, it sent a signal that
perhaps his career wouldn't be so easy as it initially
appeared. Nonetheless, The
Fog, despite its flaws, performed well
enough for Avco Embassy to grant the director
a larger budget for his next picture. Based on
a script written by Carpenter in the early '70s,
Escape from New York
remains one of the most imaginative action films
of all time. The final product is a colorful amalgam
of Carpenter's dark pessimism and the humor of
co-writer Nick Castle. Like most Carpenter films,
this one focuses on an anti-hero with an attitude.
Snake Plissken, as played by Kurt Russell, is
a kind of extension of the silent and laconic
"Man with No Name" protagonist of Sergio Leone's
westerns; Russell even modeled his whispered,
clench-teethed delivery on Clint Eastwood. A thief
with little to no concern for the rest of the
human race, Plissken is an ex-war hero pressured
into becoming a hero a second time around, though
his motivation has less to do with actual concern
for the President than an instinct for self preservation.
The film's dark coda sees Plissken succeeding
in his task, only to destroy an important tape
recording the President intended to avert nuclear
war.
Carpenter's dark sense of humor permeates
the film, as Plissken, like Homer's Ulysses, encounters
one bizarre character after another on his journey.
To bring this dark vision of the future to life,
Carpenter is assisted ably by the skills of production
designer Joe Alves and director of photography
Dean Cundy, who shot many of Carpenter's earlier
films. The film takes place almost entirely at
night, with the sets and locations illuminated
by fire and other natural sources. Their dystopian
view of the future may seem somewhat clichéd
now, but at the time it was a bold alternative
to the antiseptic view of Kubrick's 2001:
A Space Odyssey (1968). In fact, Escape
from New York plays out much like a futuristic
film noir, with Plissken's enigmatic "investigator"
besieged by shady femmes fatale and over-the-top
villains. Also contributing to the film's effectiveness
is Carpenter's synth score, the main theme of
which is among his very best work as a composer.
The simple but effective melodies help to maintain
a suspenseful mood throughout.
Full marks also go to the excellent cast,
headed by Carpenter's favorite leading man (and
on-screen alter ego), Kurt Russell. Russell first
impressed audiences as a serious adult actor in
Carpenter's TV miniseries Elvis (1978);
before that he was associated with clean-cut heroic
roles in various Disney productions. As much as
an impression as he made in Elvis, however, nobody
at the time was prepared for his transformation
into big screen action hero par excellence,
as he achieves here. Carpenter, by Russell's admission,
was the first to see his true potential and they
continued to collaborate off and on as recently
as 1996's Escape
from L.A., a flawed but enjoyable sequel to
this film. Though openly aping Clint Eastwood
in the same way he echoes John Wayne in Carpenter's
marvelous Big Trouble in Little
China (1986), Plissken is very much Russell's
signature performance —
a bastard not so much with a heart of gold as
his own set of principles that engage us on a
larger than life level. In addition to Russell,
Carpenter cast a number of other favorite actors
as well: Donald Pleasence (Halloween),
Adrienne Barbeau (1978's
Someone's Watching Me!, Carpenter's first
made-for-TV movie), Harry Dean Stanton (Christine,
1983), Charles Cyphers (Assault
on Precinct 13, 1976), and Tom Atkins (The
Fog). Pleasence is odd casting for the
President of the United States, and Carpenter
reportedly conned him into playing it by creating
a backstory whereby he was the son of Ronald Reagan
and Margaret Thatcher! The veteran British actor
does a fine job in the role, adding some touches
to his scenes of torture that uncomfortably came
from his own experiences as a P.O.W. during World
War II. Barbeau and Stanton also make a terrific
team, the former sexy in a Lauren Bacall (but
far bustier!) vein and the latter amusingly smug
as the aptly named "Brain". Other key roles are
played by Lee Van Cleef and Ernest Borgnine. Van
Cleef, a Sergio Leone veteran (For
a Few Dollars More; The
Good, the Bad & the Ugly), helps to cement
the film's debt to the westerns Carpenter loves
so much. In his scenes with Russell, the audience
is irresistibly reminded of his interplay with
Clint Eastwood, and despite the relative brevity
of his role, he adds tremendous presence and authority
to the proceedings. Borgnine, another veteran
of classic Hollywood westerns like Johnny
Guitar (1949), is amusing and endearing
as the oddball "Cabbie", who drives through
the bombed out streets of New York in his yellow
taxi, a recording of the American Bandstand
theme always echoing in his wake. Carpenter's
fondness for the characters is obvious and gives
the film an edge over some of his other films,
notably his previous effort, The
Fog. With its cunning mix of humor and
pessimism, and a very imaginative central idea
that still seems very timely,
Escape from New York is a classic of its
kind.
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MGM's
2-disc special edition of Escape
from New York is reason to celebrate for
Carpenter fans. First released on VHS via a muddy,
horribly panned and scanned edition by Avco Embassy
in the 1980s, home viewers first had their chance
to see Carpenter's stunning 2.35 compositions
intact through Image's laser disc release of the
late 1990s. Though a state of the art transfer
for its time, it was nevertheless ripe for a revisit,
and MGM's first, barebones release didn't fit
the bill. But now, the studio comes through with
this stunning SE. The film itself is perfectly
framed at 2.35 and is enhanced for widescreen
TVs. Print damage is nonexistent, and colors are
strong and vivid like never before on home video.
The audio has been remixed under the supervision
of Carpenter collaborator Alan Howarth (no relation)
and is treated to a spiffy 5.1 track. The original
mono soundtrack is also included, and both sound
fine and free of distortion. Disc One includes
two separate audio commentaries. The first one,
culled from the old Image LD, features a lively
conversation with Carpenter and Russell. The two
men are close friends. and it shows. As Carpenter
points out during their conversation, their jokey
interplay is far closer to "real filmmaking" than
the pretentious pseudointellectual analysis that
most people believe to be the case. Carpenter
has recorded commentaries for most of his films
by this point but none of his tracks are better
than the ones he's shared with Russell. The second
commentary is by producer Debra Hill and production
designed Joe Alves. Though informative, it's dry
in comparison and isn't likely to compel people
to revisit it more than once.
Disc Two includes a number of other extras,
most notably a 24-minute making of documentary
that includes comments from Carpenter, Russell,
Hill, Alves, Nick Castle, Dean Cundey, Harry Dean
Stanton, Isaac Hayes and Adrienne Barbeau. Of
the principal players, only Ernest Borgnine is
conspicuous in his absence; sadly, Van Cleef and
Pleasence passed away years ago. Among other savory
extras, the one most likely to be controversial
is the inclusion of a 10-minute sequence cut from
the final film by Carpenter. Though Carpenter
scored this scene originally, and the cue is preserved
on the Silva Screen CD of the film's soundtrack,
he opted to re-score it for the DVD —
he
does a nice job, but I think the cue on the CD
is far better and more evocative. The scene, essentially,
explains why Plissken is in jail. Though exciting
and well done on its own merits, it detracts from
the mystique of Snake and was wisely discarded.
Nevertheless, there has been some grumbling about
Carpenter's decision not to cut it back
into the film. The whole thing is nicely packaged
and comes with some concise liner notes by Carpenter
and a full-color Snake Plissken comic book. Fans
of the director, and of this film in particular,
are sure to regard this as one of the best DVDs
of the year and one can only hope that future
SEs of Christine,
Starman (1984) and
other neglected Carpenter films are in the pipeline.
12/29/03
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