D: John Flynn. P: William S. Gilmore Jr, Jerry Bruckheimer. W: Thomas Michael Donnelly. Ph: Ric Waite. M: Dominic Frontiere. St: Jan Michael Vincent (Tom Gamble), Theresa Saldana (Marsha Bernstein), Danny Aiello (Carmine), Rudy Ramos (Angel Cruz), Art Carney (Abe)
Made
at a time when the vigilante sub-genre resembled nothing so much as an urban
spin on the western, this is a middling example of the type from a director who
had trodden similar ground with greater assurance in 1977’s Rolling Thunder.
When
Tom, a merchant seaman, is suspended for ill-discipline, he finds himself
marooned in New York, a city he disparages. While pestering a shipping agent to
find him a berth, he takes an apartment in a rundown neighbourhood on the Lower
East Side. Despite sullenly insisting he’s “just passing through”, he forms
attachments to some of his neighbours – a streetwise kid and a punch-drunk
ex-boxer; Italian-American Carmine; storekeeper Abe; most significantly, the
inquisitive Marsha Bernstein, with whom he strikes up a romance.
It
quickly becomes apparent that a local gang, the Souls, holds sway here,
strutting through the streets while residents watch fearfully from their
apartments. Tom stands up to them and becomes a target, and thus a hero to his
new friends, whose blandishments he continually resists – “I don’t belong here.
I just want to mind my own business.” He leaves when a ship becomes available
but, inevitably, he doesn’t get very far before he is compelled to turn back and
make a decisive stand.
The
take-back-the-streets scenario was a popular one at the turn of the Eighties – nourished
by crime statistics and sensational headlines, and chiming, consciously or
otherwise, with the town-taming rhetoric of Newark activist-politician Anthony
Imperiale and cowboy president Ronald Reagan. Ordinary people joined forces against
the punks in Boardwalk (1979), We’re Fighting Back (1981) – inspired by
New York’s Guardian Angels – Death
Vengeance (1982) and Vigilante
(1983), and were impelled in Death Wish 3
(1985) by an expert in the field, Charles Bronson’s Paul Kersey.
The
protagonist of Defiance falls
somewhere between the concerned-citizen and action-hero archetypes. The
different facets of Tom’s character – pugnacious yet sensitive (he paints
pictures of ships); self-determined yet clubbable – never quite coalesce. Tom’s
vacillation may have been intended to suggest internal turmoil, but it plays
more like a device to stretch out the story – partly a consequence of lax
writing and partly Vincent’s somewhat limited emotional range; otherwise the
role is a snug fit for an actor who was at his best when toughing it out.
As
the leader of the gang, Ramos – a one-time regular on The High Chaparral; later star of a one-man play about Geronimo – gives
a mannered performance, all slow, deliberate movements, while his underlings
are generic rent-a-yobs. But there is fine sketch work from the likes of Aiello,
Carney and especially Saldana, who bring a pleasing sense of colour and
vitality to their roles. There are notable bit parts for 6ft 6in Lenny Montana,
the mob enforcer-turned-actor best known as Luca Brasi in The Godfather, here playing a brain-scrambled former prizefighter
who makes a tragic rooftop ‘comeback’ against the Souls; and two actors who went
on to play street trash in Vigilante:
Frank Pesce, one of Carmine’s cronies here, was a drug dealer in the later film;
and Don Blakely, who left an indelibly loathsome impression as the child-murdering Prago in Lustig’s
grimy masterpiece.
Flynn’s
film is mild in comparison with its contemporaries. It has a low body count –
there are more bruises than bullet holes – and is more restrained in its (obligatory)
denunciation of legal failings, with patrol cops more apt to arrest protesting
victims of crime than to bust the perpetrators themselves. The moral issues surrounding
vigilantism are eschewed; the portrayal of urban thuggery strictly one-dimensional.
(There is no overt racial profiling, however – the gang has mixed ethnicity.) Much
like the westerns it resembles, the film instead asks questions of individual conscience
– for how long can Tom deny his Shane-like destiny? – and collective
responsibility – can the locals be roused from their state of fear? The answers
are no less obvious for the delay in their delivery, Flynn prolonging
uncertainty to create a flicker of tension as the showdown looms.
Shot
in a gritty, verité style by Ric Waite (The
Long Riders; 48 Hours) on grungy
locations, Defiance lacks surprises on
its way to an improbably upbeat conclusion, but as an ode to the kind of hard-bitten
civic pride that can flower even in the most squalid environments, its message
is relayed clearly enough. Kevin Grant
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