With a knockout of a premise and an ample supply of firepower, Assault on Precinct 13 heralded the arrival of a promising, workmanlike genre director in John Carpenter. The action-thriller slipped in an out of U.S. theaters in 1976 with little fanfare, but quickly achieved cult status across the Atlantic and helped set the stage for Carpenter’s big-time breakthrough two years later with Halloween.
Only a few years out of USC’s film school at the time he made Assault, Carpenter packed plenty of movie-geek references into his shoestring $100,000 budget. The picture itself is a re-jiggering of Rio Bravo, the classic John Wayne western directed by Carpenter’s role model, Howard Hawks. Like that 1959 masterpiece, Assault on Precinct 13 deals with a resolute lawman and a ragtag band of allies under siege by bad guys. Carpenter clues in the audience during the opening credits that identify the film editor as “John T. Chance,” the name of Wayne’s heroic sheriff in Rio Bravo. But while Assault on Precinct 13 shares the rugged, self-assured archetypes of a Hawks western, it owes nearly as much to exploitation flicks and the claustrophobic intensity of George A. Romero‘s Night of the Living Dead.
Foreshadowing the nightmarish Manhattan that Carpenter would conjure up years later in Escape from New York, Assault paints a devastated Los Angeles in the death grip of gang terror. In the opening minutes, we hear a radio news report in which the police commissioner all but admits that street hoods are on the verge of taking over the city.
In this sun-baked hellhole, Lt. Ethan Bishop (Austin Stoker) has the seemingly dull task of babysitting an inner-city police station that is in the process of moving. The Anderson precinct (not the 13th precinct, as the film title is the invention of the movie’s distributor) is down to a skeleton staff for the weekend. Bishop anticipates a night hanging out with the station’s clerks, played by Laurie Zimmer and Nancy Loomis.
No such luck. A multiethnic (and disconcertingly silent) gang dubbed Street Thunder guns down a little girl (Escape to Witch Mountain‘s Kim Richards) holding an ice cream cone, a shock that sufficiently lets moviegoers know that nothing is off limits here. The girl’s father (Martin West) scurries after the thugs in a vain attempt at revenge, but eventually seeks refuge in the mostly shuttered Anderson station.
Gang members surround the building. As the phone lines have already been disconnected by the phone company, the only help available to Bishop and the clerks are two prisoners – one of whom, Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston), is a notorious cold-blooded killer.
From this setup, writer-director Carpenter fashions a tense, old-fashioned thriller. Assault on Precinct 13 begins at a low simmer, introducing the key characters whose fates will converge at the nearly deserted police statio. It has an agreeable directness. The presentation is lean, with exposition and characterization handled in clean strokes. The gradual buildup is bolstered by an equally effective synthesizer-based music score composed by Carpenter himself, who has said his chief inspirations were Led Zeppelin‘s “Immigrant Song” and the score to Dirty Harry.
Carpenter’s storytelling is better than his writing. The dialogue is often clunky, especially the fortune-cookie aphorisms that weigh down Joston’s performance. Still, even this shortcoming feels endearingly old-school western with its stoic male camaraderie and tough-guy banter. Zimmer, whose smoky eyes and sultry demeanor are reminiscent of Big Sleep-era Lauren Bacall, fills the role of the quintessential Hawks woman: sexy but strong enough to hang with the boys.
Interestingly, Assault on Precinct 13 foretold where Carpenter would go as a filmmaker. The character of Napoleon Wilson would essentially reappear as Snake Plisskin in Escape from New York. A year after Escape, Carpenter would again pay tribute to Hawks in his outstanding remake of 1951’s The Thing from Another World (which Hawks produced and mainly, directed). And Carpenter would tinker with his own Assault premise in 2001’s Ghosts of Mars
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 