ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK @ 45

In the distant future of 1997 Manhattan Island has become America's prison. It's a massive Alcatraz surrounded by skyhigh walls all around it and lethal chopper patrols around the clock. That is where the hijacked Airforce One crashes as the president is on his way to avert a nuclear holocaust. Oops! Not to worry, war hero turned career criminal Snake Plissken is on hand to glide in, retreive the pres and his McGuffin cassette tape that will put an end to the simmering conflict. Oh, and just in case he thinks about his own escape, he's injected with a couple of lethal pellets that can only be neutralised by the folks in charge. He has less than twenty-four hours to do this before the pellets dissolve and the summit meeting ends in war. No pressure.

The deal is extortinate. The times are tough and urgent but this deal has the ring of privilege. We see nothing of the world beyond the penal system and the sense that legal presumption has morphed from innocence to guilt. If you're caught, it's the island. What kind of society is being suggested, here?

John Carpenter had already suggested a twisted public responsibility in his previous film The Fog. The possibility that the ancestry could rise in pain against injustice is an enjoyable fable. What Carpenter saw in the America of 1981 was a wave of authoritarianism in the guise of economic rationalism. It was the start of two terms of Reagan and another of Bush. Over a decade of sweeping problems under the carpet and calling it justice. The society outside the prison of Manhattan is only different from the gangster-led rule of force within it by the price of the suits of those calling the shots. I've always imagined it as a kind of rigid '50s utopianism masking runaway capitalism.

Carpenter's first attempts at the screenplay were not in response to Reagan but Nixon and the swelling cynicism that rose in self protection in the community. Who would bother trusting politicians? Donald Pleasance's President John Harker is played with all the tight lipped narcissism that a post-Nixon chief might express. He is a weasel who knows how to be nice and for how long.

Kurt Russell is given Snake Plissken which allowed him a launch pad away from his child star status. His matchstick chewing, eye patched leathery hide feels effortlessly donned. His serpentine hissing intimidating. Remember how Heath Ledger went from nice guy with muscle to the most memorable Joker to date? Same thing. Russell turned up toned to the last millimetre with a lion's mane and way with heavy personal artillery. 

Against him, the grinning villain of countless spaghetti westerns, Lee Van Cleef presides over the operation without a beat's difference from those roles. Nor needs he to, Carpenter is happy to continue his exploration of the western through whatever other genre he chooses. The meeting between his Hauk and Plissken is one of those scenes you can replay like a favourite song.

On the island, The Duke of New York oversees. A granite Isaac Hayes, surrounded by Kinskyish punks and leering rags of humans, his chandelier-toting Cadillac proceeds through the streets like the entourage of a Byzantine monarch. Down at the trash fire street level, the information rich Cabbie and the slippery Brain deal with the day to day, offering essential services or knowledge in exchange for preservation. The world building with bizarre vaudeville shows and iron-age lethal sparring as well as gangs of the darkly insane in streets bright with car fires, is still impressive.

Carpenter, as usual, provides an action packed middle act that will lead to a white knuckle finale, this time careful to further expose the president and deliver a joke that works every time you see it again.

While it might get set up as a schlock bam bam movie, Escape From New York with its committed performances, commentary on the desperate unfairness of a brutal capitalism, ends up a wrenching and sincere gut punch at the worst Carpenter feared. It plays as a grim warning with its brooding score (one of Carpenter's very best) and desolate setting. The great city is a prison, the empire somewhere over there where you aren't allowed. We didn't get any of this by 1997 but we never have to. All we need to do is know that this is something we don't want now or ever. But we have to remember that.