SOURCE: Crist, Judith. “A Masterful Lumet.” Saturday Review 8, no. 8 (August 1981): 61.

In the following excerpt, Crist describes Escape from New York as a “juvenile action-adventure” film.

John Carpenter, the young filmmaker whose reputation rests on his having made Halloween for ＄300,000, then grossing ＄18.5 million therewith, used bits and pieces of St. Louis, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, along with miniatures and some actual shooting at the Statue of Liberty for his third film, Escape from New York, Carpenter and his screenplay collaborator, Nick Castle, have come up with an interesting starting point: In 1997 crime has reached a point in this country where Manhattan Island has been turned into a high-walled federal maximum security penitentiary; in it the prisoners are left to their own devices, without guards, but the waters around the island are mined, as are the bridges, while security is maintained from Liberty Island.

Given the situation, Carpenter's invention has...