Who Are The Warriors?

I was watching some episodes of American Dad and one of the episodes made reference to the 1979 Walter Hill movie The Warriors. I hadn't seen that for a while so I popped that movie on. Check out the opening few minutes at YouTube. I first saw it in the theater and thought it was so entertaining that I went back a couple of weeks later and paid again. Not the usual thing for me but that was all you could do in the days before video recording. I had a vhs copy of a rental tape at one point and later I upgraded to a copy from some guys laserdisc. The first dvd came out in 2001. It was expensive, void of extras, I didn't buy it and it went out of print. There's a copy over at Amazon for $31 right now but I'm not going to buy that. I have the 2005 dvd with the Ultimate Director's Cut that's got a really nice looking copy of the film. T he small changes aren't that annoying to me but I understand some complainted. There are some good featurettes but no commentary. The movie got some poor ratings from the critics when it was new and some of those guys have changed their tune since. I knew it was good from the start and I was captivated by the style. It's awash with color and action and music. When I got the soundtrack I listened to it over and over again. There's a fair bit of social commentary tossed in but it isn't that heavy handed. The movie opens with the gangs heading for a meeting. Nine guys, no weapons. Cyrus, the leader of the Gramercy Riffs will be speaking. Some douchebag frames The Warriors when he kills Cyrus. Now the largest gang in the cities wants them dead. When the Riffs put out the call for the Warriors heads all the other gangs jump. Some fight and some use other methods of slowing the boys down. Some of the guys fall to the cops but most of them get home. There a bit of a romance along with the chase when Deborah van Valkenburgh hooks up with Michael. The script works pretty well, the actors are mostly pretty good, and the action plentyfull. There's lots of nice photograpy and cool places to visit. I particularily enjoyed the early work of James Remar and David Patrick Kelly. Remar is fun to watch and Kelly is a pretty horrible pyschopath who gets some well deserved hockeystick justice. The movie is based on Sol Yurik's novel of the same name and that novel is based on the Anabasis by Xenophon. I don't think I have read the Yurik novel but I'm not sure. Maybe I just looked at one in the store. I do know that I haven't read Xenophon's book. I'll stick to re-watching the movie. That's more fun and only takes 93 minutes to watch. I'd recommend it for some folks.