Escape from New York (1981) on Netflix
In 1997, Manhattan is a walled maximum security prison. When Air Force One goes down inside it, bank robber Snake Plissken is offered a pardon to go in after the President.
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- Rotten Tomatoes86%
Trailer
Plot summary
Crime in the United States has climbed so high that Manhattan Island has been turned into the country's only maximum security prison, sealed behind a wall with its bridges mined, and its convicts left to run the streets. When Air Force One is hijacked and the President is dropped into the city, Commissioner Bob Hauk sends rescue teams in from outside. Snake Plissken, a former Special Forces soldier convicted of a Federal Reserve Depository robbery, is brought to the colony and offered a pardon if he retrieves the President in time for a peace summit. To guarantee he tries, Hauk has micro-explosives injected into Snake's neck, timed to kill him in under a day. Snake goes in alone, and the Duke of New York holds the President.
Cast
- John Strobelas Cronenberg
Show all 20 cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Escape from New York (1981)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- AVCO Embassy Pictures wanted Charles Bronson, Tommy Lee Jones or Chuck Norris as Snake Plissken, but Carpenter held out for Kurt Russell, refusing Bronson because he was too old and because he worried he could lose directorial control to an experienced actor; Russell suggested the character should wear an eyepatch.
- John Carpenter wrote the screenplay in 1976, in the aftermath of Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal: "The whole feeling of the nation was one of real cynicism about the president." No studio wanted to make it because, he said, it was too violent, too scary and too weird.
- A 2015 ruling by the French Tribunal de Paris found that Lockout had plagiarized Escape from New York and Escape from L.A. John Carpenter was awarded 20,000 euros, co-writer Nick Castle 10,000 and rights holder StudioCanal 50,000; Luc Besson's appeal was rejected in July 2016 and total damages rose to 450,000.
- To find a city that could pass for a ruined New York, the team sent location manager Barry Bernardi "on a sort of all-expense-paid trip across the country looking for the worst city in America", producer Debra Hill remembered; he suggested East St. Louis, Illinois, where entire neighborhoods had burned out in a massive 1976 fire.
- Alves found an old bridge to serve as the film's "69th St. Bridge": the filmmaker purchased the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge from the government for one dollar and gave it back for the same amount once production was completed, so that they would have no liability, although Carpenter said he had no memory of the transaction.
- Cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson credited the film as an influence on his 1984 novel Neuromancer, singling out the moment when the Warden says to Snake, "You flew the Gullfire over Leningrad, didn't you?" - a throwaway line that for him worked like the best science fiction.
- The gladiatorial fight to the death between Snake and Slag, played by professional wrestler Ox Baker, was filmed in the Grand Hall at St. Louis Union Station. Russell called that day a nightmare, saying Baker threw a trash can in his face about five times.
- The production was the first film company in history allowed to shoot on Liberty Island at the Statue of Liberty at night, and had the whole island to itself; the permission was not easy to get, because there had been a bombing there three months earlier.
