1981 - ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, Carpenter's cult classic

Recently saw this as a revival in one of those upscale theaters that serves booze and delivers pizza to your seat as you watch the film. The digital copy looked fairly decent and it was sort of a relief not to have the film bathed in pink on an old 35 mm print when I saw this film a couple of years ago.

It always appeared to me that John Carpenter was trying to make a "B" movie action type of picture when this first came out.  As I recall a lot of the critics weren't very impressed with the film.  What were they expecting Wild Strawberries?

The film played fairly well, some of it was a little dated particularly the screenplay which chose 1997 as the date that the United States sealed off New York City and turned it into a maximum security prison.  Carpenter had worked with Kurt Russell before and choose him to play Snake Plissken an ex special forces guy.  Russell kind of channels him as a variation of Clint Eastwood for better or worse.

 

Carpenter also put together an entertaining cast starting with Donald Pleasance, Ernest Borgnine, Harry Dean Stanton, Isaac Hayes, Lee Van Cleef and Adrienne Barbeau as the big breasted girl. In keeping with the tone of the film it's a cast straight out of a "B" movie.  Carpenter's direction is good, he was in his prime as a film director.  He and his associate Alan Howarth created the effective pulse pounding score.

The cinematographer  Dean Cundy had been working with Carpenter since Halloween and he went on to an impressive career working on films like Jurassic Park, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Carpenter's The Thing.  Escape From New York still entertains because it never pretended to be more that what it was an entertaining summer action film.

The film was written by John Carpenter and Nick Castle, the running time is 99 minutes.