Bad Time for a Transfer

A voiceless horde of hoods descend on a vulnerable police station in John Carpenter's 1973 film Assault on Precinct 13. Among other things, what a cool movie. Carpenter's deliberate attempt to imitate Howard Hawks comes off beautifully, largely because of Carpenter's own distinctive, macho style which fully blossomed in The Thing and They Live.

Austin Stoker plays Ethan Bishop, a police lieutenant on his first assignment at a supposedly easy job. The precinct is in the process of closing down and transferring to a new location so there's minimal staff and supplies and the power's going to be shut off.

Meanwhile, we hear news stories about violent youth gangs terrorising L.A. and we meet some of them, silently cutting themselves in a shabby living room. They rarely speak and they seem to exist in infinite numbers so it's easy to be reminded of Carpenter's other influence for this, Night of the Living Dead. It's really chilling. The implication of a horde of humans who don't seem human is that you likely don't seem human to them. This is emphasised when one of them, without hesitation or visible remorse, shoots and kills a little girl played by Kim Richards.

It all comes down to that police precinct where Lieutenant Bishop and two beautiful clerks (Laurie Zimmer and Nancy Loomis) are forced to team up with a couple of convicts. One of them, a guy named Napoleon Wilson, played by Darwin Joston, has got to be one of the coolest characters in the history of cinema. Joston's performance would've fit in a great Western from twenty years earlier. He has this aura of grim acceptance of inevitable doom at every step, punctuating a running gag in which, whatever he's initially asked, he inevitably replies with the question, "Got a smoke?"

Assault on Precinct 13 is available on The Criterion Channel this month as part of a playlist of movies with synthesised soundtracks. Of course his one was composed by Carpenter himself and it's one of his most memorable.

X Sonnet #1850

Negation blinks beyond the wooden glass.
Distempered guests dispose of turkey clubs.
The same detritus filled the guilty mass.
Persuasive candles lure the godless cubs.
An owl carried light through pines and firs.
A rapid beat disturbs the course of day.
But time beneath the rain incessant blurs.
Constricting chains restrain the human way.
Decreasing shells reduce the gun to scrap.
Remorseless hordes would fain invade the fort.
With rotten walls, the structure marred the map.
The stranger seeks another des'prate port.
With safety scrapped, the flares become the light.
The dark compels the very air to fight.