Last week, I ran out to 45th Road in Long Island City, site of the Orphans’ shoot during the Summer of 1978, when Director Walter Hill was shooting the iconic cult film on the streets of NYC. For any fan of the film, the scenes with The Orphans stand out as one of the highpoints of the entire movie. There’s just so much going down… Having escaped the madness of the Conclave, The Warriors, now running for their lives, find themselves in the Tremont section of the Bronx, where a subway fire has forced them onto the home turf of The Orphans, a gang “so far down, they’re not even on the map.”
I’ve watched these scenes at least 100 times. Paul Greco plays low-rent gang leader Sully masterfully. I love how this sequence begins with a new twist on a classic Hollywood battlefield motif – where the generals or their emissaries meet on the battlefield to negotiate terms, or to set the rules for a fight. In this case, it’s Swan and Fox from The Warriors versus Sully & his first lieutenant, played by super cool Apache Ramos.
As the scene unwinds, Greco puts on the airs of a powerful, gracious leader, who grants a rival gang safe passage through his turf. Everything is going perfectly, when Mercy suddenly appears at the top of the stairs, clucking like a chicken, taunting Sully while she eyes a new Warriors vest. I found those stairs at 21-57 45th Road…
Like many teenage boys growing up from NYC, I had a thing for Mercy. I was too naïve about city life to fully grasp that she was a former prostitute, now under protection of Sully and his gang, a girl in search of, “some real action.” This was Deborah Van Valkenburgh’s big screen debut, and her performance here is one for the ages. She channels so much grit and grime in every scene, but there’s something so wistful beneath it all… the way she seems to dream of a life beyond gangs, beyond crime, beyond the subways and fires and garbage littering the streets.
My favorite Mercy scene, and one of my favorite from the entire movie, is the scene where Swan and Mercy cross paths with the white Disco dancers on the subway… there’s so much going down in Mercy’s glances, whether her own embarrassment for the dirt all over her legs and feet, or the way the Disco dancers are terrified to make eye contact with the gang members while riding the subway, and bail from the car at the first chance they get…
I’ll close this post with a cool then and now sequence from 21-57 45th Road, where The Orphan’s peered down from the site of a former Greeting Card store, now the Yand Y Barber Shop in Long Island City. And what I really love about this photo is that some hardcore Warriors fan actually got up onto the roof – and tagged the wall with a ‘W’, the Warriors tag. Rembrandt would be proud…
