Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  Towards the end of the movie, for just a few minutes, The Warriors suddenly, abruptly, taps into novelist Yurick’s original, politicised vision, and gets real. These two key scenes involve neither balletic fight sequences, nor explosions, nor crazy made-up gangs.

  First, Swann and Mercy have actually made the last stretch of the train journey to Coney Island. As they recline, relieved, three squeaky-clean teen couples, on their way home from the prom, board the train. They sit opposite our Warrior couple and we are suddenly hit by the contrast between middle class and working class, rich and poor, the socially integrated and the social outcast. Swann gives them a hard stare as the prom couples take in his and Mercy’s battered appearance and symbols of gangdom. They shift uncomfortably, but not as uncomfortably as Mercy. The rough girl is suddenly acutely aware of how she looks in comparison to the nice girls. She drops her eyes and begins to fiddle with her hair. Swann, while still staring defiantly at the clean teens, simply raises one hand and, gently but firmly, stops her from subconsciously trying to improve herself. Without saying anything, without even looking at his new love, he has told the couples, and Mercy herself, that he chooses her over conventional teen femininity. It’s genuinely moving and romantic to a degree that should be impossible in such a deliberately unreal movie.

  Swann and Mercy finally reach the end of the line. They disembark the subway as dawn is beginning to rise, and . . . we see what they see. Coney Island from above: a set of cramped, dirty and malevolent slum dwellings. The blank, handsome hardness of Swann’s stare makes his question all the more resonant: ‘This is what we fought all night to get back to?’

  But actually, they fought all night to give us the final showdown, which has to be between evil Luther and heroic Swann, and has to be beside the seaside. Yet again, inspired improvisation plays an enormous part, because it turns out that The Warriors’ most quoted lines and image were made up on the spot.

  Hill had a first go at shooting the scene where The Rogues arrive on the Coney Island boardwalk in their graffiti-ed Cadillac hearse and call The Warriors out. But he felt that what was in the script simply wasn’t enough. He took David Patrick Kelly aside and told him that he had to find a more intense, interesting way of taunting The Warriors, and that he had to come up with it in about five minutes.

  Kelly lived in a rough New York neighbourhood and had a neighbour who delighted in trying to freak him out. He did this by singing his name in a high sing-song whine. Kelly used this and a couple of beer bottles that he spotted under the boardwalk, and came up with a taunt which, when coupled with his runty, maniacal, almost Charles Manson-esque features, became the film’s catchphrase and this entry’s key line, accompanied by the percussive clink of beer bottles jammed onto his fingers, like hooligan castanets. It’s so catchy and joyfully malevolent that it’s difficult to imagine anyone loving The Warriors as much if Kelly had simply shrugged and reminded Hill that he wasn’t the screenwriter.

  The Warriors was an immediate teen smash and hit No. 1 at the US box office. But there were newspaper reports of gang violence at theatres in California and Boston. Paramount pulled advertising, cinemas hired security staff at screenings, and the studio finally panicked and pulled the film out of American cinemas for a few weeks. The furore died down and The Warriors was redistributed, going on to do quite nicely. But crucial momentum was lost and The Warriors didn’t quite become the mega-hit that it potentially was.

  It’s extremely hard now to see what the fuss was about. Contemporary critics compared the film’s impact on teens to the seat-slashing antics inspired by The Blackboard Jungle (see here) and Rock Around The Clock in the 1950s, but what seems far more likely is that The Warriors was a victim of its own word of mouth: gang members went to see it because it was a gang film, spotted rival gang members and kicked off. The violence in The Warriors, with its cartoonish exaggeration and acrobatic dance moves, looks incredibly tame after the buckets of blood unleashed in the last 20 years of action movies.

  What does stand up is Hill’s understanding of what makes great camp. You have to play it straight and deadpan, and keep just enough meaning behind the mocking to make the characters’ nobility or amorality stick, and get you cheering and booing and enjoying the experience. This, and a unique mise en scène that presents New York as a more authentic take on Gotham City, keeps The Warriors as fresh as a newly hosed sidewalk. Can we dig it? Yes, and for ever.

  QUADROPHENIA

  1979

  Starring: Phil Daniels, Lesley Ash, Mark Wingett, Toyah Willcox, Phil Davis, Sting, Ray Winstone

  Dir.: Franc Roddam

  Plot: Fix up. Look sharp. Go bonkers.

  Key line: ‘I can’t think straight, that’s all. I mean . . . nothing seems right apart from Brighton . . . I was a mod there, y’know? I mean . . . that’s something, innit? Eh?’

  One of the most intriguing factlets about Quadrophenia concerns Johnny Rotten. The Sex Pistols singer apparently screen-tested for the role of Jimmy Cooper in this classic mod film based upon The Who’s Quadrophenia double concept album, and was set to do it. But the aura of violence and infamy that surrounded The Pistols still hung around Rotten aka John Lydon in 1979, despite his departure having effectively split the band early in the previous year. Insuring Lydon for the role proved prohibitively expensive for Quadrophenia’s mod-est budget. The lead role went to young cockney thesp Phil Daniels instead.

  How weird would it have been if John Rotten had been Jimmy The Mod? It’s not that he wouldn’t have been able to pull it off: if you get the chance, track down 1983’s Order Of Death, a strange, sado-masochistic little noir in which Lydon has to share equal billing with none other than Harvey Keitel, and does enough to not get entirely blown off screen. No . . . the problem would have been that the Sex Pistols were still so notorious, so adored and reviled in equal measure, that Quadrophenia would have immediately become a Sex Pistols film by default. Both critics and punters would have judged the movie based on how much they wanted Lydon to succeed or fail, expecting his every word and glare to start the revolution, or somesuch. Add the ‘rock ’n’ roll swindle’ schtick that Malcolm Mclaren had successfully attached to his former protégés and young audiences at the time would have found themselves second-guessing the entire movie as some kind of smartarse scam. Lydon’s presence would have transformed the most admired and popular British teen and rock movie of all time into a post-punk celebrity circus.

  Quadrophenia without Phil Daniels? Unthinkable, innit? The wiry urchin channelled Johnny Rotten’s wired, furious, thousand-yard stare anyway, particularly in the train scene, which is surely the closest Brit cinema has ever got to a vision of male madness as iconic as Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Daniels’ schizoid energy drives Quadrophenia, perfectly capturing the manic extremes, futile violence and self-immolating self-pity familiar to any working-class man who went through an adolescent period of feeling so helplessly alienated that each new emotion comes hard and uncontrollable. The more one wants to break down and cry for Mummy, the more one feels trapped by the tribe’s demand for unflinching machismo. When you feel like that sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll – even The Who – just don’t help.

  Quadrophenia’s greatest achievement is its success in taking something very specific – British mod culture in 1964 – and making it universal rites-of-passage stuff. Jimmy Cooper is still every boy who felt that life was laughing at him, that he shouldn’t be here, that The Void may be preferable. No wonder Daniels never got any better. This was Big Magic to make at the tender age of 20.

  Key to that magic is Daniels’ ability to make us feel so warm towards Jimmy. Because Jimmy is a little shit. A violent, racist gobshite so lost in his own relatively petty problems that he can’t relate to anyone around him. He sees everything – especially women – in terms of status symbols. His values are so screwed that he allows his friend Kevin (Winstone) to get beaten up because he can’t bring himself to stand up for anyone outside of his futile
tribal allegiances. Kevin and Monkey (Willcox) represent salvation, simply being decent people who offer him love. But he barely notices either, so intent is he on pyrrhic victories and mythologising his aimless life. We ought to be hoping he does throw himself off Beachy Head (incidentally, he doesn’t, and there’s no mystery about the ending – the opening shot has Jimmy walking away from the cliff, beginning his story at the end) but we don’t, because Daniels so successfully makes Jimmy a product of his times, and a symbol of whatever bad choices we made when we were teens. He might be dumb, but he’s not stupid, and Daniels lets us see, in every frame, that he will inevitably escape the hole he is in. He’s better than those around him, full of potential, just as we like to think we were when we were hanging with a bad crowd or treating people like crap when we were kids. We cheer him on because we fondly imagine that we went through the same journey, even if we never swallowed tons of speed, or rode a scooter, or took part in massive tribal battles on Brighton beach.

  The ending to Jimmy’s tale is important because it illuminates the major differences between Quadrophenia the album and Quadrophenia the film, and tells us why Quadrophenia is not merely a curio of ’70s rock excess, like Ken Russell’s 1975 film version of The Who’s Tommy. In Pete Townshend’s original tale, the emphasis is on Jimmy’s mental illness, whereby he is four entirely separate personalities, hence ‘Quadrophenia’ instead of schizophrenia. He does live the mod lifestyle, take part in a bank holiday seaside riot, row with his parents, fuck up everything he holds dear and head down to Brighton on a commuter train. But, while seeing that The Ace Face (memorably played, or rather, posed by Sting here) is actually a bellboy in a posh hotel does dash the last of his mod-power dreams, album Jimmy goes further than film Jimmy in escaping his nightmare. He nicks a rowing boat and makes his way to a rock off the Brighton coast (I live in Brighton. There isn’t a rock. But poetic licence and all that), where, driven by a storm and huge power ballad ‘Love Reign O’er Me’, he experiences some sort of cosmic epiphany. What he does with this new info remains a mystery, but, as his boat has smashed and he’s being lashed by storm waves, there’s every possibility that he just dies and ascends to some kind of higher state of consciousness.

  It was all a thinly veiled statement about Townshend’s own discovery of the teachings of spiritual guru Meher Baba. And, although it made for a fantastic album – maybe The Who’s best – it was always a dodgy post-hippy, prog rock premise, what with the supposedly enlightened Pete being strung out on smack and booze at the time; surely the kind of thing that great enlightenment is supposed to render redundant.

  So director Roddam and co-writers Dave Humphries and Martin Stellman made a great decision about the script. In their view the most interesting things about Quadrophenia were the references to the mod lifestyle, the bank holiday riot, and the barely sketched characters that surround Jimmy in his Shepherd’s Bush rat-trap milieu. Having written a teen drama ripe for shooting in realist style, no good could come from Jimmy ascending to heaven from a mythical rock. So instead, Jimmy smashes the ultimate symbol of the futility of joining tribes, following self-appointed leaders and buying into consumerism. The film’s ending is still beautiful, and somewhat mystical. But it’s also logical, real and damn good advice to any watching adolescent.

  After over 30 years, a sequel to Quadrophenia is apparently in the pre-production stage, with an early script written by Martin Stellman. I admit, I’m intrigued. Does Stellman hire the new Phil Daniels and begin with Jimmy walking away from Beachy Head? If so, does he break away from his life entirely or head back to Shepherd’s Bush to attempt to mend bridges and conform? Or do we meet Phil as Jimmy 30 years later, fat, lazy and ignorant like his Dad, complaining about his teen son watching hip hop on TV, wondering how they call that noise music?

  It’s intriguing . . . but a big part of me hopes it slips into development hell and never sees the light of day. I like being left with Jimmy, walking away from Beachy Head, heading onwards and upwards to God knows where. The best stories don’t have endings. They belong to us and carry on for ever.

  OVER THE EDGE

  1979

  Starring: Matt Dillon, Michael Eric Kramer, Pamela Ludwig, Harry Northup, Vincent Spano, Ellen Geer

  Dir.: Jonathan Kaplan

  Plot: White riot, they wanna riot.

  Key line: ‘Sometimes I think they’re really like a herd of baboons!’

  One of the strangest and most prescient curios in the teen movie lexicon, Over The Edge is the movie that punked the ’50s teen rebel movie, inspired the smell of Kurt Cobain’s teen spirit, and discovered Matt Dillon. It was given a limited release and seen by few, but is one of those movies that was destined to be clasped warmly to the bosom of future generations of cult movie aficionados. It’s also one of those films that is both fabulous and bizarrely flawed, because it throws two opposing cinematic forces together to create a camp update of ’60s youth revolt fantasies like If . . . (see here).

  On the one hand, Kaplan’s drama of suburban teen alienation in a ‘planned community’ in the American desert (called ‘New Towns’ in the UK) did immaculately docu-dramatic things: story based on real events in Foster City, California 1973, cast of real teens who had never acted before; grim location setting, accurate run-through of the problems inherent in environments where kids are given nothing to do. But, on the other, Kaplan melds these vérité authenticities to a melodramatic plot and a camp revival of the tropes of ’50s and ’60s message movies, right down to the teen martyr death of a James Dean figure, cops and parents who comically don’t understand, a liberal ‘therapist’ of the system, a caption of portentous ‘facts’ over the opening images, cheesy incidental music, and a triumphalist ending designed to make watching kids punch the air and feel suitably rebellious towards The Man.

  In short, it’s a movie that predicts the true-life tales of no-man’s-land council estate environments featured in serious future movies like La Haine (see here) and Fish Tank (see here), but behaves like Rebel Without A Cause (see here) and kitsch parodies of early rock movies like Rock ’n’ Roll High School (see Popcorn) and the original Hairspray (see Popcorn). It shouldn’t work at all, but, somehow, it does. And when you add a culturally accurate contemporary soundtrack – which acknowledged that suburban kids mixed the metal of Van Halen with the punk of the Ramones and the radio-friendly new wave of bands like The Cars and Cheap Trick, because they didn’t have the self-conscious fashion snobberies of kids from major cities and college towns – then you can understand exactly why suburban kid Kurt Cobain cheerfully(!) admitted that Over The Edge had been a childhood favourite and a major influence on the attitude of Nirvana’s breakthrough video for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’.

  The action takes place in New Grenada, a dystopian mix of condominiums and townhouses (filmed in a real planned community in Colorado) surrounded by freeways, arid marshland and a never-ending building-site. New Grenada has a whole bunch of problems: the contrast between the swanky detached homes and the cramped tenements mean that this brave new world has simply replicated the class conflicts that families had fled the city to escape; the relationship between politicians, business leaders and police is a little too cosy; and .. . Goddamn, it’s ugly.

  But the biggest problem is that planners built the homes and moved families in before giving a thought to the adolescents of the community and what the hell they are expected to do with themselves after school. There is one community youth centre – a warehouse called The Rec run by youth worker Julia (Geer), the only adult in town who gets these kids – and it shuts at 6 p.m. The response of adults to this problem is curfews, crackdowns and futile attempts to bully The Kids off the streets, because the most important thing to this new venture is money, and the only way to attract investment is to invite businesses to town and assure them that New Grenada is a desert Stepford full of willing workers and law-abiding citizens. When the kids even attempt to explain why they are being so naughty, the grown-ups, includin
g their parents, just put their fingers in their ears and go blahblahblah until they stop. Or make them sit and watch spectacularly bad public service films about why they should all be good girls and boys, which they cheer and applaud every time something smashes.

  No surprise, then, that The Kids seek to bust the nightmare of boredom by way of sex, drugs, booze, vandalism, theft and shooting BB guns at cars from the safety of a bridge overlooking the freeway.

  The fascinating thing about Kaplan’s take on all this is his complete lack of anything approaching a balanced view. Even a knowing exercise in bad taste ’50s pastiche like Class Of 1984 (see here) entertains the viewer with lots of gratuitous teen violence but paints the bad kids as Bad Kids who eventually have to be defeated by adult nice guys, no matter how ironically. Kaplan has no time for this kind of having it both ways. He loves kids on drugs doing dangerous shit. Every shooting, drug deal, winding-up of the cops or stolen car is played out to excellent rock ’n’ roll and shot as not only fun, but entirely the right thing to do under the circumstances. There is no movie in existence that loves juvenile delinquency as much as Over The Edge.

  Things eventually turn properly dark when evil copper Sgt Doberman (Northup) gives high-speed chase to Carl (Kramer) and Ritchie (Dillon) after the latter nicks Carl’s Mom’s car. Ritchie is tooled-up and Doberman inevitably shoots and kills him.

  Dillon dominates the film and you understand why he became the most in-demand teen actor of his generation, despite the fact that Over The Edge wasn’t a hit. The casting directors found Dillon in a school while searching for their non-actor stars. It was a fairly posh middle school, but Dillon was apparently slouching away around the corridors and acting tough, faking that whole Dee Dee Ramone-meets-The-Fonz dumbass accent and teen rumble demeanour that has pretty much carried him through a 30-year career in movies. They spotted well, because he really does capture, in Over The Edge, that good-looking kid you knew who was always in trouble and lived to bait authority, but got all the girls because he was basically a sweetheart hiding behind a macho façade that he’d been raised to adopt as a survival mechanism. But, no matter how much you liked him, you knew he was bound to come to a sticky end. Not because he was nasty, but because he was as thick as two short planks. Dillon fans who’ve never seen this movie might be surprised at how androgynous the boy looks with long, Farrah Fawcett hair, though.