Sin City

SIN CITY seems to scream pulp on every single page. Written by Frank Miller, author of the graphic novels, SIN CITY centers on Marv, a large, not too bright, but powerful man who seeks revenge on the people who killed the woman he has a one-night-stand. Every aspect of the film is amazingly pulp, as if Miller was trying to pull out all the stops. Whether it’s how the characters are written, the locations, or the world itself, Sin City is every bit a pulp film as one can get.

Marv, although not a character who has questionable morals, is very much a pulp character. His driving force seems to be his respect for women, but he’s not a nice guy by any means. He’s an alcoholic and he’s extremely violent. He wouldn’t lay a finger on a woman, but that doesn’t mean he won’t brutally cut off someone’s arms and legs and feed them to a dog while the victim watches. At one point, he’s driving a car holding a man’s face against the road.

Also, his voice-overs are extremely dramatic, their very film noir. He speaks directly to us, the audience. He justifies every move and action in his voice over’s. All the other characters aren’t as well developed, but still bring a lot of pulp to the story. Half the characters we meet are amazingly beautiful (and often scantily clad) women who are either whores are work in a bar. It doesn’t get much sleazier than that.

The other thing to note about the script is all the locations; they lend themselves well to the story. In one scene, there’s a large windmill, in another, it’s a run-down motel, in another its bar, in another it’s Marv’s room, which is still decorated for a child. None of the locations seem to belong in the story, but it’s how Miller exploits them that they lend themselves to pulp.

The last interesting part of the script is the world that Miller creates. It’s a mix of the post-apocalyptic future and the western. The police force seems like something out of the future, they are an army for whoever runs the city; in this case it’s Cardinal Roark, who although a man of the cloth, is the most evil man in the script.

What’s also interesting is that the bars play to cowboys. Cowboys run the streets looking for bars or for whores, there’s even a scene in the bar with a girl in chaps and a lasso. And what’s more is that all these characters in this world all own revolvers of some kind. None of the weapons in the story are state of the art. It’s either a .357 or a hacksaw or a machine gun. It’s an amazingly different mix of eras, but it somehow works under the grittiness that Miller cloaks everything in.

In closing, it’s Miller’s ability to keep the viewer constantly guessing, constantly surprised by the world he creates. It’s a world that the viewer isn’t too familiar with, and we don’t know where the boundaries are, and the film just keeps pushing them and pushing them, from a man’s face being chiseled off by the street, a boy named Kevin watching with a smile as a dog eats his limbs, or when a man of the cloth proclaims that eating people brought him closer to God. It plays off our fears and exploits everything it can think of, so that there is no question that it setting is Sin City.

THE WARRIORS is most notably a pulp film. Despite it’s huge cult following and the initial reaction to the film (which caused rival gangs to see the film and then fight at the theater), it’s the fact that this cheap film, based on someone else’s work, was supposed to be an exploitation film with graphic violence and gang members as the lead protagonists that truly make this a part of pulp cinema.

THE WARRIORS, written by Walter Hill has got about as much pulp as one film can stand. First off, the film had a low budget. Almost all unknown actors were cast, and much of the filming was done on location. The crew even went as far as hiring real gangs to protect their equipment (for a small fee of 500 dollars). Sometimes, they even had to let gangs have cameos for being in their territory. In general, it was Guerilla filmmaking at it’s finest.

The story, although quite compelling, was adapted by Hill from the novel by Sol Yurick, which in turn was based on Xenophon's The Anabasis. Most pulp films are adapted, and this is no exception. Although Sol Yurick is credited with the novel, more of the film is based on Anabasis than the novel. Many have also compared the film to Homer’s The Odyssey.

The film also deals with exploitation; it basically exploits every race and both genders. And often times this exploitation is done during times of gratuitous violence. And although the film is very plot driven, it must be noted that the plot was formed around the violence and not the other way around. This film was first and foremost a gruesome story about gangs before it was about one gang’s struggle to get back to their turf.

Also, all the characters are gang members. Whether they’re the protagonists or the antagonists, they’re still all gang members. This makes it just a little hard for an audience to identify with them, at least in the sense of what is right and wrong. Most pulp films will have characters whose morals are in question, and this film is a great example of that. Throughout the entire script, they’re running from the cops and gangs and trashing places, they don’t care about society at all. But that’s not the point, at no point in the film do the protagonists get into a moral situation, and so it doesn’t really matter what their morals are.

THE WARRIORS is a very rare kind of pulp cinema. It was cheap, it stole source material, it exploits everyone, is brutally violent, and all of the protagonists you’d want in jail if you ever crossed paths with them, yet the film was and still is very successful and popular. It’s a film that gains more and more fans through late night cable premiers than anything, which can’t be said for all films in this genre.