Vigilante

Eddie Marino works at a factory in New York. He has a family, an order, and he keeps out of fights. A street gang attacks his wife and son. The boy dies. Eddie goes to the police, a case is opened, and the court lets the accused go; the bargaining between judge, prosecutor and lawyers does the work. Eddie shouts in the courtroom and serves thirty days. When he comes out he goes to his workmates. They are already doing something: they go around the neighbourhood on their own and ask nobody. Until now Eddie had stayed out of it. William Lustig directs. Robert Forster, Fred Williamson, Richard Bright and Rutanya Alda are in the cast. It is an American production. Lustig had made Maniac in the same period, and the two productions set his street aesthetic. It was shot in real locations in New York on a low budget; the city as it then was passes straight into the image. The matter it treats is what to do when justice does not work; the film gives an answer and does not question it. The narrative stays inside the revenge shape but does not put Eddie in the right from the start; the prison section changes the character. Fred Williamson's character is the narrative's ideological spokesman and his speeches carry the film's argument. Its limit is viewpoint; offering violence as a solution is uncomfortable today and the narrative is not subtle. Who it is for: viewers who like American street films of the eighties and the revenge genre. Who it is not for: the violence is explicit, the political view crude, and the script simple.