Reel Brooklyn: The Warriors, Coney Island

Reel Brooklyn is a monthly column chronicling the definitive history of Brooklyn on-screen, one film—and neighborhood—at a time.
A pulp legend onto itself, Walter Hill’s 1979 The Warriors begins and ends under the Coney Island Wonder Wheel, but this isn’t the Coney of Morris Engel’s Little Fugitive (1953), when the resort town itself and its sky-high distractions epitomized the postwar leisure life America had earned with its worry and suffering and loss, as w