Trailer on the MOD DVD: Boulevard Nights (1979, Michael Pressman)

Michael Pressman's Boulevard Nights gets lost in the 1979 gang movie shuffle that also includes The Warriors, The Wanderers, Over the Edge, and Walk Proud, but it's an effective and sobering drama which is worthy of reconsideration.  It was initially lambasted by critics and special interest groups in the wake of violence in theaters where it and The Warriors screened.  The film was criticized for being a routine drama that resorted to Mexican-American stereotypes.  In the years since, it's become a cult film in the Latino community, particularly for its portrayal of lowrider culture, and while the narrative is not exactly fresh or all that surprising, the good performances, particularly lead Richard Yniguez, and period, cultural details make it better than it might sound on paper.  The relationship drama between Yniguez, his longtime girlfriend Marta DuBois, and his troubled younger brother Danny De La Paz, is predictable for the most part...the difference is, at least in 1979, we still hadn't seen too many, if any, versions of this story with Latinos in the lead roles.  

I'd have liked to see the filmmakers concentrate more on the relationship of Yniguez and DuBois, but I suspect that the studio and moneymen pushed the gang content and requisite revenge plot. Yniguez plays the part of a former gang member turned hard-working auto mechanic.  His girlfriend works an office job in a white collar environment and wants Yniguez to follow suit, but part of him still wants to be king of the Boulevard, showing off his souped-up wheels and taking part in lowrider car-hopping contests.  His younger brother is constantly in trouble and getting more deeply involved in the neighborhood gang, VGV.  It is a not so thinly veiled Latino variation on Saturday Night Fever, with the Boulevard, of course, taking the place of the 2001 Odyssey, and the car-hopping reminiscent of Manero's dance contests or the mechanical bull at Gilley's.  Yniguez and DuBois play well off each other and are an attractive couple and I was more interested in the possibilities of the drama surrounding their relationship, rather than Yniguez' futile efforts to get his younger brother out of the gang.  

Here's a good interview with Yniguez, who, unfortunately, did not get many opportunities outside of Latino-specific roles.  He can also be seen in the lead role in the 1976 telefilm, The Deadly Tower, also available from the WA.

The above trailer is quite effective, mixing evocative still frames with a propulsive Latin beat courtesy of maestro Lalo Schifrin, and good, dramatic voiceover from a Latin-American-accented v.o. artist. This trailer is available on the DVD-R from Warner Archive, which features a film-like, unrestored 16X9 transfer complete with original Saul Bass red and black WB logo.

The film was lensed by top-notch cinematographer John Bailey, who was fresh off of operating camera on Days of Heaven, and who would move onto a decidedly more upscale end of town with his next film, Paul Schrader's American Gigolo.  Check out Bailey's blog on the ASC website.

The "VGV" graffiti scrawled on this Warriors display in Gigolo is an inside joke seemingly perpetrated by d.p. John Bailey.  It is the graffiti tag of Danny De La Paz's gang in Boulevard Nights.

Camera in the Sun

Have a look at my friend Christian's thoroughly interesting, well-researched blog Camera in the Sun.  If you visit now, you'll find a familiar face at the top of the site.  We had a good chat about "Dirty Old New York" and other things, which you can read there, along with interviews with the likes of Monte Hellman and William Lustig among many others.

Can Take Him Out of Memphis, Can't Take the Memphis Out of...

Memphis native Michael Beck briefly loses his New Yawk mojo, which you can hear in this scene from the television version, then gets it back twofold in the last act.

I recall, when I first watched this scene on cable years ago, thinking that Beck's Southern twang was much more pronounced than it sounds to me now.  It does still sound different to me than the rest of his line readings as the hardened, laconic, (ironically named?) Swan, another in a long line of Western-inspired heroes in the cinema of Walter Hill.

One could argue that the aforementioned television scene should have been in the theatrical cut, as it makes clear to Swan that every gang is looking for the Warriors, under the mistaken impression that they are responsible for Cyrus' death.  It could also be surmised that Beck's slightly "off" line reading contributed to its deletion.

Gigolo and Warriors Together Again, With a Special Thanks to Cinema Du Meep

As I've mentioned here before, Paramount did a nice little job of promoting one of their earlier properties, The Warriors, during a scene in Par's American Gigolo.  Other than the same studio, there isn't much they share, save for both having watershed synth-based scores that remain awesome 30+ years later.

Recently, over at his Facebook feed, where he manages to unearth one cool vintage newspaper ad or marquee picture after another, Cinema Du Meep posted a December 1980 ad featuring--you guessed it -Warriors and Gigolo on the same bill.  Curiously, Warriors, the earlier film by a year, appears as the first feature.  

This was actually a traveling double-bill put together by Paramount and which opened simultaneously at several local theaters, as you can see in the below New York listing.

In this old thread on the Warriors website, posters mention that the "VGV" ("Varrio Grande Vista") graffiti on the Warriors sign above is the tag of a gang portrayed in the LA-set 1979 gang feature Boulevard Nights, which you can see here.  So, it appears there was a little East Coast / West Coast rivalry which pre-dates Biggie and 2Pac.

Old Friends (Or, Ajax & Enrico Gimondi)

No matter what side of the fence you fall on when it comes to Quentin Tarantino, I don't think one can argue with the pleasure that comes from seeing which old(er), familiar faces from the past the filmmaker will resurrect next.  With Django Unchained, there is no shortage of cinema greats and near-greats from years gone by.  Perhaps most exciting was the "friendly participation" of original Django Franco Nero.  We get the likes of Don Stroud, Russ Tamblyn, Don Johnson, Lee Horsley, Robert Carradine, Tom Wopat, Michael Parks, Bruce Dern, Cooper Huckabee, James Russo, and the list goes on.

I personally most loved that Tarantino used two of my favorite actors from two of my favorite films of 1979 or any year...Dennis Christopher of Breaking Away and James Remar (in 2 roles!) of The Warriors.  Breaking Away may not be part of the official gang cycle of that year (Warriors>Wanderers>Over The Edge>Boulevard Nights>Walk Proud), but it did focus on a group of pals...a gang of sorts, albeit a non-violent one.  Anyhow, I imagine Tarantino had this in mind, to a degree, when he cast Christopher and Remar.

"Cause we got the streets, suckas!"

Somehow I missed this additional bit of Warriors-inspired graffiti, which is on the other side of the building where I found this.  That wall has since been painted over white, which has subsequently been tagged repeatedly.  For some reason, however, Cyrus hasn't been "silenced" yet.

The Armies of the Night

My obsession with trailers and The Warriors started young.  This, like the earlier videos from my recently-unearthed archive, was edited in my high school television studio with now-antiquated 3/4" video decks, sourced from the original Paramount laserdisc of the film and a VHS dub of the basic cable edit (for the edited "Did we lose these fucking clowns or what?" line).  I have no excuse for the rather inadequate voice over.

RCA Selectavision CED front cover

CED back cover

"No reason. I just like doing things like that."

I regularly pass this wall on my to the Fairway in Red Hook and figured I better capture it with my new iPhone before the whole thing gets a fresh coat of black paint.  Good to know that long after the Rockstar Games "Warriors" ads have come down, Luther and the Wonder Wheel live on, along with Bruce Lee.

When Cult Films Appear Within Cult Films

When a film scene plays out in front of a movie theater or in pre-Giuliani Times Square, I'm probably not the only cinephile who squints at the television set in order to read the marquee(s) or determine the one-sheet in the display. Of course, I really love it when the film within a film is a particular favorite of mine and /or a cult film.

Here are a couple of examples of "cult films within cult films," which I also happened to catch on 35mm within the last half year or so. Both examples hark back to a time when neighborhood theaters that played one film at a time were commonplace and the exterior and lobby were transformed into visual paeans to that film.

Darker Than Amber in Dusty and Sweets McGee:

The poster to the left of the ticket booth is different from the final one-sheet and resembles the key art in the British quad. The tagline reads, "If Travis McGee puts his life on the line, it's not going to be for free." Incidentally, we can also see a poster for what appears to be a stage production of Hair, just to the right of the man in brown leather.

British Quad (paired with Figures in a Landscape):

U.S. one-sheet:

Italian locandina:

The Warriors in American Gigolo

Most of the time, I'm sure the film advertising that appears within other films comes down to chance, but in the case of The Warriors and American Gigolo, the Warriors advertising prominently appears throughout the scene; my thought is that it's not a coincidence that The Warriors, and not The Wanderers, for example, is the film in the background given that both were produced and released by Paramount. To think I had the opportunity to ask Paul Schrader such an important question at a recent screening of Gigolo...and didn't do it.

Come out to play in June

"That's our train. We gotta make it!"

One of the first things I recall about Pauline Kael's rave review of The Warriors, which may have been the first Kael piece I ever read, was her allusion to the then-recent Saturday Night Fever at the start of the article. I don't have a copy and it's not available online so far as I can tell, but the gist of Kael's review was that the working class young protagonists of Saturday Night Fever seemed quite rough-edged and downtrodden at the time of its release in 1977, but that The Warriors was eye-opening because its characters were even lower on the socioeconomic scale.

Watching Saturday Night Fever again for the first time in several years, I most enjoyed the invaluable mid-'70s Brooklyn footage contained throughout the film. Here's a New York movie that mostly stays out of Manhattan, although it does have several iconic shots of the lower Manhattan skyline, and shows audiences a part of the city rarely depicted on film. This focus on the outer boroughs is one of the things I also love about The Warriors, which confuses things somewhat by substituting Brooklyn and Manhattan locations in some scenes that are supposed to take place in the Bronx.

Two of my favorite moments from Saturday Night Fever and The Warriors are the long subway journeys that come near the end of each film. In each film, the subway serves as a venue for the characters to rest after a long, arduous evening and also reflect upon what came before.

I'm sure it was coincidental, but I was struck by the visual similarities between John Travolta's Tony and the surviving Warriors on the graffiti-filled subway, from their weary expressions to the eye bruises that Travolta and Michael Beck's Swan share.

Check out Jeremy's tribute to the opening credits of Saturday Night Fever at Moon in the Gutter, which inspired me to pull out my DVD.

"New York's Toughest Against the Gang That Can't Be Stopped!"

Keeping that Warriors theme going:

"And, next Sunday, Lauren Hutton and Lee Majors are trapped in space."  Now, if that teaser doesn't get your heart racing...

Somehow the producers of Starflight: The Plane That Couldn't Land (really rolls off the tongue) wrangled Star Wars effects supervisor John Dykstra and Terry Frazee, who worked on Blade Runner, to perform the same tasks here.

You can find more of this stuff at RetroJunk.

Come out to Play-ay!!!

Though his performance as the psychotic Luther in The Warriors is what he is most well known for, David Patrick Kelly is also a renowned stage actor who has appeared on Broadway and collaborated with celebrated avant garde playwright Richard Foreman on several occasions.  I was fortunate enough to catch a performance of Foreman's Pearls for Pigs starring Kelly in New York about ten years ago.  Almost as memorable as Kelly's manic performance was the presence of a very entertained John Turturro several seats down from me.

Even less well known than Kelly's stage work, is his music career.  Before embarking on his screen career, Kelly performed at legendary New York clubs CBGB and Max's Kansas City during New York punk's mid-1970s heyday.  Now, over thirty years later, Kelly has self-released an album of his music entitled Rip Van Boy Man.  The disc includes new recordings as well as live performances from his 70s club days.  According to Kelly, Warriors director Walter Hill saw him perform in the Studs Terkel Broadway musical Working and liked his singing enough to encourage the actor to adlib the now-famous "Warriors come out to play!" chant.  I remember being shocked many years ago when I could not find this dialogue in the original David Shaber/Walter Hill shooting script.  You can read about this in an exclusive interview with Kelly at Gareth's encyclopedic Warriors site.  To add another CBGB connection, Kelly has stated in other interviews that the inspiration for Luthor's song came from a Bowery vagrant who would taunt Kelly in a similar sing-songy voice--"David, Daaaavid!"

Just as I was about to publish this post, I discovered a lengthy interview with Kelly at the Drunken Severed Head blog, which I've linked to here.

Oh, and Kelly can sing, too.  You can hear samples and download the album at iTunes amongst several other places.

And, even though they serve as prime examples of Hollywood's unfortunate propensity to pigeonhole talented actors, in Kelly's case as "that psycho guy," I must pay tribute to a troika of post-Warriors unhinged villains...

Luther, 48 Hrs. (1982):

Tommy Ray Glatman, Dreamscape (1984):

Sully, Commando (1985):

I'll sign off with Sully's rather ballsy farewell to Arnold in Commando:

"Here's twenty dollars to get some beers in Valverde.  It'll give us all a little more time with your daughter."  I can only imagine that Sully knew that she'd grow up to be Alyssa Milano.