Streets of Fire

After the team of director/writer Walter Hill, co-writer Larry Gross, and producers Lawrence Gordon and Joel Silver scored an unexpectedly huge hit with the Nick Nolte/Eddie Murphy buddy cop comedy 48 Hrs, they figured they now had a blank check from Universal Pictures and set out to make the ultimate teenage Rock 'n' Roll movie. The results are more like if someone tried to mount an "edgy" stage-musical production of American Graffiti. The teenage fantasy these then-middle-aged guys conjured up includes rock and doo-wop bands, motorcycles, car chases, fist fights, cool girls, and tough guys in leather jackets stickin' it to the cops. The mix of 1950s and 1980s aesthetics in this picture is positively schizophrenic and looked pretty silly coming out the same year as the authentically punk rock picture Repo Man and the more genuinely youth-oriented pop-rock dance drama Footloose.

Hill described the story as "The Queen of the Hop gets kidnapped by the Leader of the Pack, and Soldier Boy comes to rescue her." If that's all they ever wrote down on paper, I would not be surprised. Streets of Fire was shot on a covered studio backlot like Blade Runner but without the skills of a cinematographer like Jordan Cronenweth, so it looks like everything is playing out on the same single city block. Everything feels slowed down and stiff since the car and motorcycle scenes are staged in a space that is clearly insufficient for vehicles to build up any speed.

The film features an eclectic cast of actors who either don't register much or feel miscast. Former child star Diane Lane, who memorably played a punk rocker in the 1982 film Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, stars as a new wave rocker here. Lane looks great on stage as the lead singer of Ellen Aim and the Attackers, but once she's kidnapped, she amounts to a big zero in the story, not even a decent damsel in distress. Michael Paré, from Eddie and the Cruisers, brings no charisma to the film's ostensible hero, Tom Cody, Ellen's former flame. The gifted comic Rick Moranis is miscast as Ellen's winey wealthy manager and current boyfriend, who hires Tom to rescue Ellen. The striking Willem Dafoe looks like he road straight into this movie from his debut feature, The Loveless, which he shot in 1981, but the character never feels threatening nor especially cool. Only Amy Madigan's character, McCoy, is interesting. The role was originally written for an overweight guy, but Madigan makes the part far more interesting by playing it as a tough-talking diesel-dyke. Lots of other great faces dot the landscape of this picture—Bill Paxton, Lee Ving, Rick Rossovich, E.G. Daily, Deborah Van Valkenburgh, Stoney Jackson, Mykelti Williamson, Grand Bush, Robert Townsend—but every time one of them comes on screen and you get excited about what they might do, they disappear into the dark.

Billed as a "Rock 'n' Roll Fable," the music is also a mixed bag. Jimmy Iovine produced five of the songs on the soundtrack, with the great power-balled craftsman Jim Steinman (fresh off his successes with Meat Loaf and Bonnie Tyler) penning two of the The Attackers hits. I don’t know if Lane did her own vocals in Fabulous Stains—, I've always assumed it was her—but here, her vocals are provided by Face to Face lead singer Laurie Sargent and Steinman go-to vocalist Holly Sherwood. As enjoyable as the songs are, they're not especially hard or tough. It's kind of funny that a picture meant to be so cool and dark is most well remembered for the soft-rock radio staple "I Can Dream About You (If I Can't Hold You Tonight)" by Dan Hartman.

This is a quintessential style-over-substance movie, which has never been my favorite kind of picture. However, many of my contemporaries adore this film, so I needed to give it another chance as part of my 1984 series. I've tried to get through it on three prior occasions, on VHS, Laserdisc, and a 70mm late-night screening, but I fell asleep each time. I'm sure Hill would not consider watching this film completely sober in the afternoon as the ideal way to experience his opus, but those were the only conditions in which I was able to make it all the way through.