Streets of Fire.

Review #2218: Streets of Fire.

Cast: 

Michael Paré (Tom Cody), Diane Lane (Ellen Aim), Rick Moranis (Billy Fish), Amy Madigan (McCoy), Willem Dafoe (Raven Shaddock), Deborah Van Valkenburgh (Reva Cody), Richard Lawson (Ed Price), Rick Rossovich (Officer Cooley), Bill Paxton (Clyde), Lee Ving (Greer), and Stoney Jackson (Bird) Directed by Walter Hill (#1072 - 48 Hrs, #1091 - Last Man Standing, #1139 - Supernova, #1625 - The Long Riders, #1728 - Another 48 Hrs, #2217 - The Warriors)

Review: 

Paramount Pictures really liked 48 Hrs (1982), as directed by Walter Hill. He had co-written it with Larry Gross as a production that had Lawrence Gordon as one of the key producers. So, two years later, here they all are for a film again. And so, Hill wanted to make a film that he thought would be a perfect one for his teenage self that would have things he still loved even now: "custom cars, kissing in the rain, neon, trains in the night, high-speed pursuit, rumbles, rock stars, motorcycles, jokes in tough situations, leather jackets and questions of honor". Of course, in the words of Gross, Hill wanted to do a movie that basically was his "own comic book movie", which might sound a tiny bit like the inspirations for The Warriors. Casting hiccups (i.e. wanting Tom Cruise but getting beaten to the punch) and a sudden inspiration during writing...led Gross and Hill to take the success of Flashdance (1983) as a way to make the film as basically a musical, since, well, if one "stylized movie" can get going, why not this? Did I forget that one other inspiration for the type of reality depicted for the film was John Hughes? Yes, Hill not only wanted to make a movie that was something that could be great for his teenage self as a high school flick, a comic book-type film and also a musical. The film, meant to be the first of a planned trilogy (all with Pare tapped to star, naturally)...did not work out well, filing to make back its $14.5 million budget. Gross has gone on record stating that the film did have influence when it came to ones that were (in his words) "completely saturated in...iconography", such as RoboCop and Se7en, with his theory being that those films did stylization with a balance of gore that hooked the audience in ways that were not done with Streets of Fire. In 2008, Paré and Van Valkenburgh participated in Road to Hell (as directed by Albert Pyun), a sort-of follow-up.

I wish I could love it. I really do. The film is wonderfully shot by cinematographer Andy Laszlo when it comes to that weird world of another time and place that makes for a fruitfully interesting vibe and such for 93 minutes. To me, it just comes off as a more average rendition of The Warriors (1979), complete with an even less interesting idea behind its main duo because dear god, it focuses on the wrong two! I swear, one has more fun with the cheesy retort between Pare and Madigan than the attempts of trying to make me care about him and Lane (oh look, an ex-boyfriend encountering his ex-girlfriend in a rescue operation, makes one want to slip on Casablanca). Hell, according to Madigan, when she read for the film (for the part played by Van Valkenburgh), she apparently found the nomad soldier-for-hire the more interesting one. With the charm of someone seemingly ripped out of a Howard Hawks film, she steals the show away from Pare, who plays it all too cool that really only works if one is Clint Eastwood. Lane (present in a handful of films such as Coppola's two 1983 films in The Outsiders and Rumble Fish) may have a suitable presence when it comes to singing, but I think I actually found her more interested in chemistry with her lead...in A Little Romance, five years earlier. One just has to view the film around them as if it was one of those cheesy teen films where the action matters more than if the sucker gets the girl. Of course, Dafoe wearing a leather...apron (?) is far more belonging to the vibe of goofball adventure, complete with a casually weird vibe that would make a fascinating comparison with The Loveless. There is something oddly amusing about Moranis not getting to do schtick with this role, which is staid but kinda funny. It is a lean movie of pretty simple Western values that has an axe-fight in the middle of a crowd before closing its mish-mash of vibes and a song naturally named "Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young". As a whole, it is a film that looks nice and has a few moments of good-natured fun within its fable elements of rock and roll to clash with mediocre leads and stuff that only scratches the surface of being more than just "okay" entertainment. It might be among Hill's ambitious ideas for filmmaking, which therefore makes it more than just calling it one of his average productions of his heyday. 

Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.

The Warriors.

Review #2217: The Warriors.

Cast: 

Michael Beck (Swan), James Remar (Ajax), Deborah Van Valkenburgh (Mercy), Marcelino Sánchez (Rembrandt), David Harris (Cochise), Tom McKitterick (Cowboy), Brian Tyler (Snow), Dorsey Wright (Cleon), Terry Michos (Vermin), David Patrick Kelly (Luther), Roger Hill (Cyrus), Edward Sewer (Masai), Lynne Thigpen (the D.J.), and Thomas G. Waites (Fox) Directed by Walter Hill (#1072 - 48 Hrs, #1091 - Last Man Standing, #1139 - Supernova, #1625 - The Long Riders, #1728 - Another 48 Hrs)

Review: 

“Our film doesn’t say everyone is supposed to be a lawyer or a doctor or something. The movie sees gangs as a defensive alignment in order to help you survive in a harsh atmosphere.”

In 1965, Sol Yurick made a crime novel that took inspiration from Xenophon’s Anabasis involving gangs and a desperate run back to Coney Island through rival turf. He had been a social investigator within New York City's welfare department for several years prior to becoming a fulltime writer. Lawrence Gordon (once a vice president within American International Pictures before starting to produce films with Dillinger in 1973) was the one to spearhead a production as a producer, even if it would be a semi-cheap film made for Paramount Pictures with a director in Walter Hill that had two films to his name with Hard Times (1975) and The Driver (1978); at the time, only Hard Times was remotely successful. Hill delivered re-writes to the original script as done by David Shaber (the actual Yurick novel was, well, a straight-to-the point book about a gang in all of the rough-and-tumble moves). The wild road of making a film on location in New York City led to a good deal of success and turmoil in filmmaking (Waites, apparently seen as a "potential next James Dean", got into arguments with Hill about the nature of the dialogue and filmmaking that saw him get suddenly get killed off, to which he demanded to not be credited for the role). The film was rushed a bit to beat the rush of a film that came out in the same year in The Wanderers, which was a Bronx coming-of-age story involving teenagers in gangs; both movies were pretty moderate hits, but only one attracted a bit of violence within screenings (which because pundits really are as dumb as you think, they linked to the film just because someone died) that saw a brief halting of advertising by Paramount. The introduction of Hill's director's cut makes reference to the Battle of Cunaxa (in tying the run of a group of people back home) to go with other additions (comic book panels) that apparently were things that Hill could not do due to the rushed time to make the film. Your milage may vary on whether the panels add anything substantial to the film. 

There is something about filming on location that really brings out the ingenuity in a director, particularly one as interesting as Walter Hill in lean and mean adventure that really could double as a Western (Hill was once quoted as saying that every one of his films was a Western, although it wasn't until one would be amused to compare this to Hill's fourth feature with 1980's The Long Riders). It is a certain kind of capsule movie that has a look one can't just replicate when it comes to grime that works so well here for a relatively breezy 92-minute runtime that goes right in for a useful kinetic journey that just has the feeling of...being in a rush. It has the coordinated energy in its arrangement of fight sequences to go with a handful of amusing moments involving appealing people (punks probably had a field day). Beck (picked after Hill watched him star in a film called "Madman") and Van Valkenburgh have that type of wavering chemistry that could only come from people that believe they can navigate the stormy waters. Sure, you can't really define these characters more than a sentence or two, but that can go for anyone here and yet they still make it worth the trip. Remar (in just his second film role) has a chaotic energy to him that commands the screen in stupefying fervor worth appreciating. Of course, Kelly (making his film debut) does well in that worthwhile type of sadistic derangement that naturally has the most enduring bit of the whole film involving "come out to play" (emphasis on that last word, dragged out). It is a movie one catches for the exhilaration and madness, all of which gets going with that buildup in the starting sequence involving a collection of gangs and a man named Cyrus (if one looks up Anabasis, that involved a large group of Greek mercenaries hired...by someone named Cyrus the Younger, which, well, ended with Cyrus dying). It isn't a film about the social problem but instead a frenzy of coordinated chaos that is broadly crude but totally the kind of movie to slip on one night and enjoy for its clear-eyed dystopian nature that just busts loose.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.