Streets of Fire (Walter Hill, 1984)

I watched Streets of Fire because I'm going through yet another hardcore Steinman phase after his recent death. He wrote the songs for the film so I foolishly assumed it would be a full-blown kitsch musical. Turns out he wrote only two songs for it and he thought the screenplay was terrible, strong words from a man taken to writing about women who offer their throats to the wolf with the red roses. "Terrible" is putting it too lightly; this unholy meld of The Wild One and Flashdance and Escape from New York is an abomination.

One need only compare it to another 1984 film, Voyage of the Rock Aliens, to discover what went wrong. Voyage is an abomination too but it's a fun one. De facto music videos are jammed into the narrative at such a frequent rate that you have little clue what the story is about. But you don't care because you get peppy numbers featuring spacemen, cute boys, and Pia Zadora in a Union Jack half shirt. Streets of Fire halts the narrative with a bunch of stillborn fight scenes of indeterminate import. The viewer is not even certain when and where the action takes place, a postmodern escape clause Hill and co-screenwriter Larry Gross allow themselves with the opening title "Another Time, Another Place." Nothing is at stake and there are no spontaneous outbursts of song to compensate. Instead, we get soundtrack silage from The Fixx, Ry Cooder, Maria McKee, Greg Phillinganes (a quintessential session musician in a solo role), Stevie Nicks (sung by Marilyn Martin), ugh. The big hit from the film, Dan Hartman's "I Can Dream About You" (actually, a damn solid song), is not sung by Hartman in the climactic scene. The Blasters appear in two scenes, sweaty and confused. Hill was obviously in way over his head with this "rock & roll fable," a barely musical musical the likes of which he wisely never attempted again. 

Even the two good aspects of the film wind up as disappointments. The first number, Steinman's "Nowhere Fast," is a peppy burner that fails to deliver on its promise of a feature-length sugar rush. And while the film doesn't end with the formation of a heterosexual couple, the optics are still present as butch McCoy (Amy Madigan) drives off with the hero Tom Cody (Michael Paré, a prettier, more vacant Sylvester Stallone). Add in a lost Willem Dafoe (looking like a fugitive from a Depeche Mode video), thankless cameos from Ed Begley Jr., Bill Paxton, E.G. Daily, Robert Townsend, and Lee Ving, and Voyage of the Rock Aliens starts to take on Criterion proportions.

Grade: D