Part of Arkadin’s ongoing series showcasing movies filmed in St. Louis, featuring a new short by local filmmaker Mike Gualdoni highlighting STL locations used in the film

Set in the crime-ridden future world of 1997, in which Manhattan Island has been converted into a massive open-air prison, John Carpenter’s muscular sci-fi/action classic (celebrating its 40th anniversary!) made an action star of Kurt Russell and further confirmed Carpenter’s place as a bitterly iconoclastic and politically trenchant genre stylist. With an eye patch, full-torso tattoo, and permanent sneer, Russell plays one of the great anti-heroes in cinema, Snake Plissken, an ex-Special Forces soldier convicted of robbing the Federal Reserve, who’s offered a full pardon if he can rescue the kidnapped President of the United States (Donald Pleasance). Snake encounters a rouges’ gallery of criminal friends and foes, played by a stacked cast of character actors including Ernest Borgnine, Lee Van Cleef, Isaac Hayes, Harry Dean Stanton, and Adrienne Barbeau. Of course, there was only one city on Earth that could so effectively stand in for the hollowed-out, nearly post-apocalyptic carceral version of New York of Carpenter’s imagination: our hometown of St. Louis, which had recently been ravaged by a 1976 fire that destroyed several city blocks. The film will be preceded by a brand-new short by Mike Gualdoni that takes a look at the locations featured in the film.