The Savage Nomads, Black Spades, Harlem Turks, Screaming Phantoms, Golden Guineas — these were “the armies of the night,” as an iconic 1970s film described them.
Block by block, they controlled much of New York, especially the South Bronx, nicknamed “Fort Apache” by the locals — a wasteland of poverty, drugs and ruined tenements.
Shan Nicholson’s documentary “Rubble Kings” tells their story, the late ’60s to late ’70s epoch in New York history when a disaffected, no-hope generation turned to street gangs as a means of organizing their society.
Interviewing the middle-aged survivors of those years, academics and politicians, using archival TV news footage and animation, Nicholson creates an entertaining and even upbeat history lesson about a dark corner of New York history.
He is helped, especially in the film’s opening, by every living eyewitness summoning up the same image.
“It was like that movie, ‘The Warriors.'” “Remember that scene from ‘The Warriors’? That really went down.”
Walter Hill’s 1979 street gang classic, based on Sol Yurick’s 1965 novel, provides context and clips, as one and all proclaim the fictional film — with its bizarre and colorful gangs, hand-to-hand violence and Us vs. “Them” peacemaking interrupted by an assassin — wasn’t far from reality.
“It was a time of social and cultural reckoning,” John Leguizamo narrates. Bad urban planning (Robert Moses, who chose highways over urban neighborhoods, is demonized again) and other conditions created areas where gangs popped up, in imitation of the infamous motorcycle gangs that preceded them. They were filled with kids wearing “colors,” their gang’s “coat of arms,” violent groups with brutal initiation rituals and savage punishment for anyone violating their turf.
Nicholson zeroes in on the Ghetto Brothers, founded by Benji Melendez and two siblings, whose founder now says “It wasn’t supposed to be a gang” and who were held in high regard by other city gangs as mediators, peace-makers, people who moved beyond violence and power over turf into something more positive and political.
Nicholson doesn’t ignore the violence so much as downplay it in his larger narrative. He’s trying to get to what these gangs morphed into — the earliest rappers, DJs and break dancers, an ’80s generation that expressed itself in different ways.
It’s an over-simplification and something of an overreach for a 67 minute film. But “Rubble Kings” is more interesting as cultural mythology than straight history.
And those who know this history only through a famous feature film released as that era was ending turn out to be much better informed than we’d have ever dreamed.
As the man says, “That really went down.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, with profanity, discussions of violence

Cast: Benji Melendez, Carlos Suarez, Kool Herc, Ed Koch, narrated by John Leguizamo
Credits: Directed by Shan Nicholson. A Goldcrest release.

Running time: 1:07