I grew up in a small Virginia town where there wasn’t much
to do. That probably has something to do
with my love of movies—because the one thing by hometown did have was three different
video stores. There was Sandridge
A&H, which got most of the mainstream releases. There was The Record Shop, which had a more
eclectic—but also pretty uneven—selection.
And then there was Videos Etc.
Videos Etc. was the farthest away from my house, but it was
worth the trip for a couple of reasons.
First, the store was stocked by someone with a deep, deep love of
exploitation movies. Second, they had
50-cent Mondays. So every Monday, me and
my friend Ben would bike to Videos Etc. and rent seven movies each (seven was
the maximum allowed) at 50 cents a pop. The beauty of renting fourteen movies for
$7 was that it encouraged us to take chances on titles we might not have
checked out otherwise. If one of our
selections was a dud, well, there were still thirteen more possibilities. I hate to think of all the movies I might
NOT have been exposed to during my most impressionable years if it hadn’t been
for 50 cent Mondays. This is a
long-winded way of setting up my discovery of ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13. I couldn’t resist the cover art…
What’s the mission? Any
number of critics can tell you that Carpenter’s original plan as to fuse his
favorite western film, RIO BRAVO (1959), with George Romero’s NIGHT OF THE
LIVING DEAD (1968). In short: It’s a gritty
“siege movie.” That’s as good a setup as
any. The first act of the film establishes
the modern-horror-movie world where “there are no heroes anymore,” and then introduces
the “zombies”—L.A. gangland marauders who coldly operate as a unified force
rather than as individuals. Next,
Carpenter shifts gears and introduces a set of reluctant heroes straight out of
a Howard Hawks western.
Austin Stoker plays Ethan Bishop—a cop after John Wayne’s
character in THE SEARCHERS, but who has more in common with NIGHT OF THE LIVING
DEAD’s even-tempered hero. What makes Bishop
a hero? I’d argue it’s the same
qualities that define a classic western hero…. which is maybe not what you’re
thinking. It’s not just a matter of courage
and morality. When asked for his
definition of a “hero,” Carpenter says, “He is a character with a singleness of
purpose. Whatever his single purpose is,
whether it’s dark or light or positive, that’s where your hero is.” Ethan Bishop has a job to do—serving and
protecting the community—and he’s going to do it. Period.
He never lets little things like prejudice or resentment or fear get in
the way.
Next up is Napoleon Wilson.
If Bishop is the John Wayne hero in this urban western, Wilson is the Clint
Eastwood anti-hero. Like Leone’s
spaghetti westerner, he has “something to do with death.” Wilson is living a cursed life, in a way, but
that doesn’t make him in a bad guy.
Regardless of the challenges life throws at him, he remains a simple
man: a cynic on the surface perhaps, but a romantic idealist underneath. He’s not hard to understand. Dude just wants a cigarette. Somebody please give him a cigarette.
Which brings us to Leigh—the prototypical “Hawksian woman,”
named for Leigh Brackett, the screenwriter behind several Howard Hawks films (THE
BIG SLEEP, HATARI!, RIO BRAVO, EL DORADO and RIO LOBO). It’s tempting to assign Brackett the credit for
the strong female characters in Hawks’ work, but in fact the Hawksian woman
existed before THE BIG SLEEP. Assertive female
leads are actually more prominent in the filmmaker’s early comedies (see HIS
GIRL FRIDAY and BALL OF FIRE) than they are in his later films written by
Brackett. Hawks himself explained why to
interviewer Joseph McBride: “It just happens that kind of a woman is attractive
to me. I merely am doing somebody that I
like. And I’ve seen so many pictures
where the hero gets in the moonlight and says silly things to a girl, I’d
reverse it and let the girl do the chasing around, you know, and it works out
pretty well.”
In the same interview, Hawks summed up the “Hawksian woman”
and the Hawksian hero with one single line of dialogue each. The Hawksian woman, he said, exudes frankness
and honesty. “I’m hard to get,” she says
sarcastically, “All you have to do is ask me.”
Variations on this line appear in many of the director’s films. Likewise, the men in his films are constantly
repeating the same basic question: “Are you good enough?” Sometimes, the men and women in a Howard
Hawks movie don’t even have to say these lines out loud. They can convey their message non-verbally, through
a simple glance or—famously—through the lighting of a cigarette.
With that in mind, I decided to watch ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13
back-to-back with the Howard Hawks movie TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT—because it has a
great cigarette-lighting scene between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT was the first film of
four films that Bogie and Bacall made together, and their onscreen chemistry is
sizzling.
I’ve always loved the behind-the-scenes story about how this
partnership came to be. According to
Hollywood legend, Hawks saw a headshot of a young New York actress named Betty
Perske, and told his assistant that he’d like to do a screen test. Soon after, the naïve young woman showed up at
his office in Hollywood, suitcase in hand.
She didn’t test well—her voice was too high-pitched and she no
confidence—but she was determined. She told
Hawks, “Tell me what to do an I’ll do it.”
Hawks sent her away to work with a voice coach for a few weeks. When she came back, her voice was low and
husky. She had become Lauren Bacall.
Well, almost. Hawks offered
another makeover suggestion. At a
Hollywood party, Bacall confided in the director that she didn’t have much luck
with men. Hawks asked, “How do talk to
them?” The actress said she was as nice
as she could be. Hawks told her that was
the problem; she should try talking down to them. The actress tested the new approach on Clark
Gable. She approached him at the party
and asked, “Where’d you get that tie?”
Gable responded, “Why do you want to know?” Bacall said, “So I can tell my friends not to
shop there.” Gable took her home that night… and Hawks got an idea. In his next film, he wanted to pair Humphrey
Bogart, the most insolent man in Hollywood, with a woman who was even more
insolent. The rest is history.
John Carpenter learned many things from Howard Hawks—one of
which was to build his films around character instead of plot. TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT was actually made on a
bet. Hawks bet Ernest Hemingway that he
could make a good film out Hemingway’s worst book. Hawks won the bet—in large part because he
was actually betting on Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall (and let’s not forget
Walter Brennan). ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 is Hawksian in the sense
that the story is spare and straightforward, and the characters provide all the
nuances.
Howard Hawks once said, “All I’m doing is telling a
story. I don’t analyze it or do a lot of
thinking about it. I work on the fact
that if I like somebody and think they’re attractive, I can make them
attractive. If I think a thing’s funny,
then people laugh at it. If I think a
thing’s dramatic, the audience does. I’m
very lucky that way. I don’t stop to
analyze it.” The director’s point of
view was equally straightforward. He
said, “I try to tell my story as simply as possible, with the camera at eye
level. I just imagine the way the story
should be told, and I do it.”
Carpenter took these lessons to heart. In a 1980 interview, he said, “The secret for
me is that I get emotionally involved with the characters I’m dealing
with. How I feel about them is how I
make them out on the screen, and how I want the audience to feel.” In a 2001 interview, he said: “As a director,
if I’m watching a scene I’m interpreting it through my eyes, so where I will
put the camera is wherever I’d like it to be.
It doesn’t mean it’s right, it just means it’s mine. […] Don’t
intellectualize that—that’s the death.
Run on your instinct! Run on your
feelings! Take a chance!”
Once Carpenter shot ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, the film was supposedly
pieced together by an editor named John T. Chance. But Hawks fans (and now Carpenter fans) know
that John T. Chance is the name of John Wayne’s character in RIO BRAVO. Carpenter edited the film himself, and this
was his way of acknowledging another debt to his favorite filmmaker. The action sequences in ASSAULT are truly worthy
of any Howard Hawks western, because John Carpenter is, first and foremost, a visual storyteller. That may seem like an obvious thing to say
about a filmmaker, but I’d argue that we can’t take for granted that a
filmmaker is a visual storyteller just because he or she happens to work in a visual medium. Some directors and editors know how to coherently
construct action sequences for maximum shock and suspense; some do not. Carpenter knows because he studied RIO BRAVO
(among other films), shot by shot. Hawks
may have also taught him the usefulness of shooting in widescreen format. More screen space = greater opportunity to
establish geography = greater chance of creating suspense. Since ASSAULT, all of Carpenter’s feature
films (with the lone exception of lower-budgeted THE WARD) have been shot in
Panavision.
One final thought: I can’t write about ASSAULT ON PRECINCT
13 without saying something about the score, which expertly reinforces the
filmmaker’s basic storytelling style: simple, straightforward, and
relentless. I read somewhere that the main
theme was inspired by Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song.” Not a bad note to end on.
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