Those who follow the careers of great contemporary filmmakers often encounter an interesting phenomenon—the quality of their work is often in inverse proportion to the size of the budget, especially when that budget comes from big Hollywood studios. One of the best illustrations of this phenomenon is John Carpenter, one of the most talented members of the 1970s "New Hollywood" generation, whose almost cultish reputation nearly sank due to a series of disappointments and failures in the 1980s and 1990s. Carpenter's best films are those made in the earlier stage of his career, usually with very small budgets and a cast of unknowns. Those Spartan conditions, as in many other cases, proved to be fertile ground for creativity, and Carpenter was praised as a truly innovative and talented filmmaker who produced some of the best pieces of genre cinema in the 1970s. Assault on Precinct 13, the 1976 action thriller written and directed by Carpenter, belongs to that group. Although it happens to be a quintessential film in Carpenter's career and one of the best examples of 1970s genre cinema, it didn't spawn sequels like Halloween, so it is relatively (and unjustly) obscured compared with some other titles.
The plot is set in Anderson, a rough Los Angeles neighbourhood ravaged by crime and increasingly organised, well-armed youth gangs. Six members of one such gang are killed in a police ambush, and their surviving fellows swear revenge. It is Saturday afternoon, and the newly promoted police Lieutenant Bishop (played by Austin Stoker) is given the rather routine assignment of overseeing the closing down of Anderson police station, now manned only by a desk sergeant (played by Henry Brandon) and two secretaries—Leigh (played by Laurie Zimmer) and Julie (played by Nancy Kaye). The series of events around the station, however, is going to make this assignment anything but routine. First, the bus carrying prisoners, including death-row inmate Napoleon Wilson (played by Darwin Joston), is forced to stop at the police station and temporarily hold the prisoners in the station's cells. Meanwhile, another drama unfolds when a young girl, Kathy Lawson (played by Kim Richards), gets senselessly shot by gangbangers, and her grief-stricken father (played by Martin West) immediately takes revenge, leading to car chases, shootouts, and him finally trying to take refuge in the run-down station. Before Bishop and anyone in the station can make sense of Lawson's incoherent ramblings, the power and phone lines are cut and the station gets sprayed with bullets, resulting in the massacre of policemen and prisoners alike. Only six people survive—Bishop, Leigh, Julie, Lawson, Wilson, and his fellow inmate Wells (played by Tony Burton)—and they soon realise that they are surrounded by dozens of well-armed young thugs determined to finish them off no matter the cost. Bishop reluctantly agrees to uncuff and arm Wilson and Wells, and they all manage to fend off the initial assault. However, this victory is only temporary—they can't call for help, their ammunition is low, and it seems they aren't going to withstand this siege for long.
There are plenty of critics and film scholars who tend to describe Assault on Precinct 13 simply as a modern-day version of Rio Bravo combined with a more than obvious homage to another low-budget cult classic, Romero's Night of the Living Dead. However, after almost a quarter of a century, the real importance of this film is not in the films that inspired it; its importance is best seen in the films it inspired in later years. This is especially true when we realise that Cameron's Aliens and McTiernan's Die Hard—two of the best and most influential action films of the 1980s—owe a lot to Carpenter's low-budget wonder of the 1970s. Cameron's film, like Assault on Precinct 13, features a motley crew of individuals forced to withstand a siege by hordes of a relentless enemy; the hero of McTiernan's action masterpiece, like the heroes in Carpenter's film, is forced to fight villains alone due to the failure of law enforcement and all the civilised mechanisms we take for granted. But the real irony is that Carpenter's film was made with only a ridiculously small fraction of the money we usually associate with action spectacles. However, those $100,000 were turned to the film's advantage—most of the film takes place in the dark, in run-down and sinister locations, which creates an atmosphere of great suspense, claustrophobia, and anxiety. Carpenter (who edited the film under the alias John T. Chance) contributes to this atmosphere by applying another of his trademark talents—a monotonous synthesiser musical score used to great effect, with the same monotonous passages creating suspense in one scene, then working as an ironic comment in another.
The lack of budget also forced Carpenter to shrink the length of this film to his trademark format of 90 minutes; that didn't prevent him from achieving sharp and effective characterisation. But most of the contribution in that area came from actors who really excelled in one (and for many of them, the only) opportunity to play really big roles. Austin Stoker as Lieutenant Bishop is more than capable in the role of the leader and nominal hero, but the real star of this film is Darwin Joston. His role of Napoleon Wilson as a desperate anti-hero still bound by honour in some ways resembles the much better-known character of "Snake" Plissken in Escape from New York; Joston is quite good in this role, with his Joe Average image providing a lot of realism to this film; we could hardly see this film in the same light with some of Hollywood's pretty boys playing world-weary blue-collar anti-heroes. Laurie Zimmer as the chief leading lady is also very good; her transformation from a sexy secretary who flirts with Bishop to a tough action heroine is quite believable thanks to a minimalistic approach; in many ways, it could be argued that the female action-star image of Sigourney Weaver and her blue-collar Ripley heroine of the Alien series owes a lot to Laurie Zimmer's role as Leigh. The other actors didn't need to excel as much, especially those playing the menacing, always silent, and zombie-looking gangbangers.
Carpenter is reportedly planning to remake Assault on Precinct 13, and one of the motives for that (apart from the obvious need to revamp his dwindling career by reminding people of past glory) is the fact that this film is a product of its time. Assault on Precinct 13 resembles many great dystopian films of the late 1970s and early 1980s (Hill's The Warriors, Miller's Mad Max, and Carpenter's own Escape from New York) by being set in the vague area between the present and the future, both bleak and marked by the gradual but unmistakable decline of Western civilisation and its institutions. In almost all such films, this decline is manifested through the collapse of law enforcement and new barbarians in the form of biker/youth gangs taking over the streets and roads. Unlike some other filmmakers, Carpenter in this film offers something of an explanation for this phenomenon; in his view, societal collapse is a consequence of leftist/liberal policies of the 1970s welfare state and the diminished role of individual responsibility in such a society. All those societies experienced new forms of social pathology in the increased use of illegal drugs and alarming crime rates; but the most spectacular, especially in Western Europe, was the phenomenon of nihilist youth engaged in leftist terrorism. In such societies, criminal acts aren't consequences of individual choice: they stem from "objective" circumstances, and criminals can be "reformed" if there is a benevolent State (in this film embodied in the character of liberal-minded Special Officer Starker, played by Charles Cyphers) which should solve their problems. Carpenter, on the other hand, stresses the importance of individualism—even a convicted killer like Wilson, who acts as an individual, is a better alternative for American society than hordes of impersonal and inhuman killers who have assumed a collective identity. This rather right-wing notion is stressed with some not-so-subtle details that give a flavour of almost Reagan-esque Cold War anti-Communism to this film—the most notable of them all is the Latino gang leader (played by Gilbert de la Pena) looking a lot like Che Guevara.
However, despite the ideological context of this film being somewhat outdated, Assault on Precinct 13 is still considered to be one of the prime examples of 1970s action genre, a movie that, like many others, makes us somewhat nostalgic towards the times when the future looked bleak.
RATING: 9/10 (++++)
(Note: The text in its original form was posted in Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies.reviews on March 5th 2001)
==
Blog in Croatian https://draxblog.com
Blog in English https://draxreview.wordpress.com/
Cent profile https://beta.cent.co/@drax
Minds profile https://www.minds.com/drax_rp_nc
Brave browser: https://brave.com/dra011
BTC donations: 1EWxiMiP6iiG9rger3NuUSd6HByaxQWafG
ETH donations: 0xB305F144323b99e6f8b1d66f5D7DE78B498C32A7
Movie URL: https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/17814-assault-on-precinct-13?language=en-US
Critic: AAA
