27 months ago I posted a six-and-a-half-minute version of the legendary gang fight sequence from Geoffrey Wright‘s Romper Stomper (’92), one of the most indelible, pared-to-the-bone, punch-kick-and-wallop flicks about hate groups ever made.
It starts with six or seven skinheads (led by an astonishingly young and slender Russell Crowe) beating up on three or four Vietnamese guys in a family-owned pub. But word gets out immediately, and a large mob of furious Vietnamese youths arrive and beat the living crap out of the skinheads. Hate in and hate out. Bad guys pay. Glorious!
Hashtags are well and good but, as Woody Allen said about Nazis in that MOMA-party scene in Manhattan, baseball bats really bring the point home.
I’ve just found a longer (15 minutes), much better looking version of the same sequence. It was posted 10 months ago by “Dunerat.”
Those who’ve never seen Romper Stomper are urged to do so.
One of the reasons Geoffrey Wright‘s Romper Stomper (’92) works as well as it does — an anti-racist, anti-skinhead film that isn’t afraid to dive right into the gang mind and pretend-revel in the fevered currents — is John Clifford White‘s score.
The main theme seems to simultaneously channel skinhead rage and, at the same time, deftly satirize it. I don’t know what kind of brass instruments White used on these tracks — tuba? trombone? — but the sound and mood are perfect. Just a clever instrumentation of a melodic hook and obviously less than complex, but once you’ve heard the theme you’ll never forget it.
