John Carpenter’s Escape From New York is a monument to insanity, the kind of film that cannot, and should not, be taken seriously, but which if you get on board with you can have the most entertaining of rides. Here’s five reasons why I love it.
5. It’s ridiculous: Escape From New York is, frankly, ludicrous. The plot sees Donald Pleasence’s President being ejected from Air Force One in his luminous orange escape pod over New York City, which has been transformed in this post-apocalyptic future into a giant, walled-in, heavily guarded prison where America throws all its bad apples. The President is captured by The Duke (Isaac Hayes) and held for ransom. The army can’t reach him, so the only way to infiltrate the hive of gangs and criminals is to send in Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), a decorated war hero super soldier who just happens to have been recently convicted and sentenced to the island. Snake is given 24 hours to rescue the President or explosives will be detonated in his neck, so he slowly assembles a rag-tag group of convicts to help him along the way. It’s as distractingly insane as Adrienne Barbeau’s cleavage, and often it’s the kind of asinine plot that would have me rolling my eyes all over the place at its lunacy and reliance on major coincidences (Snake, the best and only man for the job, literally arrives at the outskirts of the prison wall just as the President crashes), but here there’s an appropriate tone and level to the incredulity that I can’t help but be swept along with it.
4. The world building: After some initial set-up exposition via opening text spelling out the basics of this alternative future, everything else we learn about this world comes via the extensive production design and world building. It doesn’t all make a great deal of sense – why, for instance, does The Duke drive a car with a mirror ball inside and a chandelier over each headlight? – but like I said earlier, this doesn’t need to be completely logical. What is really interesting however is the lifestyle that has been eked out within this prison. There are no guards on the island, no curfew, no locked cells and hourly patrols. The incarcerated criminals can do whatever they like, other than escape, so a hierarchical community has been set up. There are gangs and warring factions, sure, but there’s also a theatre in operation, with nightly shows for the entertainment of the other inmates, and wrestling matches against giant behemoths to punish those that have displeased The Duke. I could have used maybe even more details of life within this world, but that would have interfered with the brisk nature of the plot, so what we get will have to suffice.
3. The supporting cast: Something John Carpenter usually has an eye for (They Live not withstanding) is casting, and it says a great deal that most of the actors he worked with would often return to appear in his films again. As well as Russell as Snake, who we’ll discuss again soon, there’s a highly interesting supporting cast of character actors adding flavour to the world around him. Donald Pleasence is a quiet, downtrodden presence as the President, enduring torture and humiliation at the hands of his captors. Isaac Hayes is suitably malevolent and ferocious as The Duke, surrounded by an army of similarly interesting-looking cronies and henchmen, chief among whom is the albino surfer chicken at the top of this page, who the army encounters when initially searching for the President, but who manages to show down the entire squad by being just plain weird. Perennial character actors’ character actor Harry Dean Stanton plays the island’s most intelligent inhabitant, subtly named Brain, with Adrienne Barbeau as his plaything. She gets very little to do in the grand scheme of things other than walk around perpetually threatening to break loose from the dress she’s barely wearing, but I’m not exactly complaining over here. And back at base there’s Lee Van Cleef as Bob Hauk, the man who sent Snake in. Van Cleef, most famous for his work with Sergio Leone, gives this whole affair a thoroughly western vibe, as in fact many Carpenter films have, and here he gives Hauk just the right amount of intense dickishness to make you root for his cause, but hope he gets a smack in the mouth at the end of it too.
2. Snake Plissken: That supporting cast needs a hero to support, and what better hero is there than Snake Plissken? He’s the badass to end all badasses, the eyepatch wearing, perma-stubbled, grizzled yet expertly coiffed super soldier – the youngest ever decorated by the President – who constantly defies death at every turn, regardless of how many people are surprised he’s still alive. I may not love every collaboration between Russell and Carpenter – I won’t go into detail, but I hate pretty much everything about Big Trouble in Little China, and it all starts with Russell’s character – but for me it doesn’t get much better than in Escape From New York. Yes he’s also great in The Thing, but that’s much more on an ensemble piece that Russell slightly nudges ahead as the lead of, whereas here the film could be quite easily retitled Snake and it wouldn’t change a great deal, other than some people expecting a video game adaptation.
1. The Borg: Remember when I discussed the supporting cast like 30 seconds ago? You do? Yay! You’re paying attention! Well you may have noticed I missed out one of the actors, especially seeing as he has appeared in now three of the images on this page. Ernest “The Borg” Borgnine is hands down one of my favourite character actors in history. You might recognise him from the likes of The Dirty Dozen, The Wild Bunch, The Poseidon Adventure, The Flight of the Phoenix, a small cameo in RED or his Oscar-winning performance in Marty. Here he plays one of his lightest, friendliest characters, Cabbie, the man in New York who knows everywhere and everyone. He’s been driving his steam-modified taxi around the prison for 30 years and soon becomes Snake’s first ally on his mission. We first meet Cabbie in the aforementioned theatre as the only audience member who seems to be enjoying the lacklustre show. He’s got the biggest grin on his face, his head bobbing along with the music, and judging by the morose expressions of those around him it might be safe to assume that Cabbie perhaps isn’t quite all there, but he’s such a nice bloke that it doesn’t matter. No-one else could so cheerfully fling Molotov cocktails with quite so much gusto.
What do you love about Escape From New York? Let us know in the comments.
