Lucky for Some: John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13

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London’s Leicester Square has always been the heart of England’s cinema-land. With premiers, red carpets, and the full imported, tariff-free quota of Hollywood razzmatazz, it used to be quite possible to walk across the Square and see De Niro or Kate Winslet swanning around in front of a bank of photographers all trying to get the star to look their way. However, nestled in the historic Square’s environs were a brace of independent cinemas that the discerning cinema-goer felt a bit smug for knowing about.

Let them all flock to the opening of the latest Nic Cage movie, we used to think. We’re off to watch Fellini or David Lynch for a quarter of the ticket price charged by the big cinemas, and so we would head round to the poky little Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Place, just off the Square itself. It was a small cinema and, being pretty much in the heart of Chinatown, it used to feature olfactory accompaniment from the excellent Chinese restaurant next door, to add to your viewing pleasure. It was odd to smell dim sum while watching Dr. Strangelove, but probably not entirely inappropriate. A visit to that restaurant was the first and last time I ever used chopsticks, as I don’t believe that the people on the next table wanted or needed to share my noodles.

They did full Rocky Horror Picture Show nights at the Charles, something I would recommend everyone attends at least once in their lives. I am delighted to see The Charles is still going, and even happier to see that today, at the time of writing, they are showing a matinée of Gremlins, followed by A Muppet Christmas Carol (starring Sir Michael Caine, and which I will certainly be watching on Christmas Day), and finishing with It’s a Wonderful Life.

And then, as a neat bookend to The Charles, there was movie-land’s other independent cinema, situated within The Swiss Centre, at the south end of Wardour Street, and famous for its Glockenspiel clock, a quaint reminder of probably the last era of multiculturalism in London that actually benefited the people who lived there. One night at the end of the 1970s, I went to The Swiss Centre with friends to see a double-header of John Carpenter movies, the main feature being Halloween. Now, full declaration. I am very squeamish about knives in movies despite never having been stabbed myself, or even threatened with what the British police now refer to as a “bladed instrument”. Halloween, if not the first, was certainly one of the originals of what has come to be called the “slasher” genre, but it was the B-movie that stayed in my memory, Carpenter’s 1976 Assault on Precinct 13. Watching it again after some 45 years, I was no less impressed. Plus, there were no knives. It’s very much a gun flick.

Precinct 13 has one of those plot lines in which a number of disparate events come together to produce the dynamic, and the film opens with a gang of drug-dealers being wiped out by police in one of the scuzzier parts of Los Angeles, which appears to be a city which will soon only consist of scuzzy parts. A cache of guns goes missing and, after a ritual involving mixing their blood in a bowl, the remaining gang members vow revenge. At the same time, a rookie cop with the nicely evangelical, allegorical name of Ethan Bishop, is starting his first day on the job, and is detailed to oversee the closing down of a police station. This is actually located in Precinct 9 of District 13, but we won’t quibble. As he drives through a beautiful LA morning, full of confidence, Bishop’s boss reminds him over the radio that, “There are no heroes anymore, just men who follow orders”. There is often an early statement in action movies made by an authority figure, and destined to be countermanded by the end of the film.

The opening shots are accompanied by a visual timeline, always a neat cinematic device that heightens the early tension, and while both the gang and the rookie prepare for their respective days, we cut to a man driving his young daughter to what seems like an appointment with the man’s estranged wife, the girl’s mother. The fourth corner of the square that drives the film is the transfer of a prisoner, Napoleon Wilson (a nickname which is never explained), to Death Row. Wilson gets some of the film’s best lines, and the dialogue is sharp and Raymond Chandleresque. Wilson gets about the longest speech anyone gets here at over 20 words, and it certainly isn’t a monologue movie. I looked to see who wrote the script for director Carpenter’s movie. Oh. Director Carpenter. There is a sassiness about some of the lines, mixed with that gangster pathos which is very American. A tough cop on the prison bus is talking to the manacled Wilson about why he did what he did, and the doomed prisoner gives a rather Confucian reply: “When you’re in my position, days are like women. Each one is so goddam precious. But they always end up leaving you”.

The film speeds up as the Venn diagram of the storyline begins to overlap with a neat symmetry. The editing is straightforward and TV-style, an efficient job that made me want to see who edited the movie for director Carpenter. Oh. Director Carpenter. The bus carrying the triple murderer Wilson contains a sick prisoner, sick in the medical sense as well as the moral. The cop in charge says he has a cold but it sounds more like full-blown TB and they make a forced stop at the precinct station the closure of which rookie cop Bishop is detailed to supervise. All the cons are placed in holding cells while, at the same time, the vengeful gang are driving through the city, the genuine bad guy of the bunch scoping out potential black victims through his gun-sights. He is white, which brings me to one of the interesting points about Precinct 13. The hero cop is black.

Now, this was hardly a novelty. We had already had Look Who’s Coming to Dinner a full decade before Precinct 13, and the 70s were famously the decade of the “Blaxploitation movie”, with Richard Roundtree in 1971’s Shaft prompting a host of spin-offs. But the early romantic tension here is between Bishop and the secretary of the station. There is even a comic line on the subject that could have come from Mel Brooks’ (in)famous 1974 comedy Blazing Saddles. The secretary offers Bishop coffee and asks how he takes it:

“Black?”

“For over 30 years”.

But the light-heartedness dies as the plot gathers speed, and it’s a part of Carpenter’s skill in lulling his audience in order to frighten them that he sets the darkest scene of the movie in the brightest of sunshine. We see the little girl go back to an ice-cream van – where the bad dudes have just arrived – because she was given the wrong-flavored cone, and the leader of the gang guns her down in front of her father. It seems gratuitous, but it isn’t. It’s the fuse for the violence to come. Carpenter seems to have saved his gratuitous violence for the aforementioned slasher side of his movie-making.

The father chases the cold-eyed killer and guns him down in turn, then stumbles speechless into the precinct station. As the gang surround the station which now contains the man who killed their friend and leader, the father brings a curse with him, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. The electricity goes out, the gang cut the phone lines, and once the action switches to inside the station, it becomes a straight siege movie. Carpenter has set up his low-budget remake of Rio Bravo, which is exactly what he set out to do. Grappling with a $100K budget, capped because of his condition that he have total editorial control, Carpenter had wanted to remake the Howard Hawks/John Wayne 1959 classic Rio Bravo in downtown LA for a while, and the original title for Precinct 13 was The Alexander Ambush.

There are no real spoilers to risk as the movie plays out in a morally satisfying way. The second half takes place entirely inside the darkened police station, and could easily be performed as a play. Carpenter uses the device of making what should be a place of safety and refuge – a police station – into a tomb, at least for the unluckier cast members. Carpenter achieves the same effect with Halloween, which I watched again after Precinct 13 despite my aversion to the more steak-knifey aspects of the movie. The safety and security of suburban, clapperboard America becomes the stalking ground for the nutter with the knife. Carpenter knows that the familiar can be made frightening, as Spielberg went on to do. Carpenter also seems to have a thing about Venetian blinds, either having people come crashing through them or shoot them up. If you see Venetian blinds in a Carpenter movie, they will be among the first victims. What is it with people inside houses surrounded either by gunmen or armed psychotics, by the way, that makes them look out through the blinds? Ooh, shall I look out of a darkened, plain window, unseen by my assailants, or make a sort of lozenge shape in the blinds to make it easier for them to shoot me in the face? It’s an odd thing. Maybe something lurks in Carpenter’s past, a blind Venetian or something.

Watching Halloween made me realize something about Precinct 13. I didn’t recognize one actor in 1979 – being relatively new to movies – but getting on for half a century later, I still didn’t. I thought the guy playing Wilson might have been a young Alec Baldwin at first, then realized that he was shooting the people he was supposed to be shooting on set. In Halloween, at least I recognized Tony Curtis’ daughter Jamie Lee – superb in A Fish Called Wanda – and the English character actor Donald Pleasence, then best known as Bond villain Blofeld in 1967’s You Only Live Twice. Carpenter almost cast Pleasence again in his famous remake of The Thing, but told him he was too recognizable to take the role, an odd reason to give, but we pass on. Precinct 13 doesn’t need star turns, it’s an ensemble piece of unknowns and all the better for it. It’s basically a high-end made-for-TV movie which happened to have been made for the big screen.

Something else about Precinct 13 that has stayed in my head for almost half a century is the musical score. As with Halloween, it is based on a three-note motif, but while the birth of the slashers featured a haunting piano figure, Precinct 13’s score is played on a synthesizer, probably a Moog. For readers old enough to remember when vinyl was the only option available (wax cylinders were done with outside of museums even when I was born), you will know about RPM (Revolutions Per Minute). LPs, or long-players, and EPs (extended players, usually with four songs) played at 33 RPM, while singles were and still are known as “45s”. There were still 78s around when I was a kid, the first vinyl format, and my mother had a batch of old Presley 78s we used to listen to together when I was little and beginning to be fascinated by music. I remember bringing half-a-dozen of them down from the loft to take downstairs for an evening with The King and my mum. Those babies were as heavy as dinner-plates and, like dinner-plates, broke into several pieces if you were careless or unlucky enough to drop one. The theme to Precinct 13 sounds like New Order’s Blue Monday recorded on 45 but slowed to 33. Spooky, but not as much as the Halloween motif, which has been sampled many times since. I was interested enough to check out the name of the musician who composed the score for director Carpenter. Oh. Director Carpenter.

Assault on Precinct 13 is no cinematic classic, but it is a perfect example of 1970s low-budget film-making outside of the major Hollywood studios. It also interested me to have seen a film 45 years ago, when I knew almost nothing about cinema, and to watch it again when I have at least been round the houses in terms of cinematic experience, and to enjoy it even more than the first time. Also, of course, I was 15 when the movie came out and I saw it three years later, whereas many readers here will not have been born then. Watching Precinct 13 would evoke the same feeling I get watching old 40s and 50s movies.

There were at least three talented individuals with the name Carpenter in the 1970s, as nostalgic as I tend to get about that lost and lovely decade. Two of them were Karen and Richard, the vocal duo (and drummer, in her case) who produced some of the slickest and most sentimental MOR ballads of that decade, and John, who made good movies and made sure he made them himself. Go ahead, assault your senses.