Streets of Fire Directed by Walter Hill Starring Michael Paré, Diane Lane, Rick Moranis and Amy Madigan BUY IT A L S O_.T O D A Y Blue Glow Must-see reruns of "NYPD Blue," "Buffy" Now Showing New video releases for June 2 Y E S T E R D A Y Sound Salvation By Sarah Vowell Where it's Art (06/01/98) R E C E N T_. M O V I E S Lolita Reviewed by Charles Taylor Nymphet mania: Lyne's unprovocative film and America's sexual hysteria (05/29/98) The Last Days of Disco Reviewed by Laura Miller Whit Stillman flashes back to the heyday of Studio 54 (05/28/98) Celebrated Whit By Laura Miller Salon interviews "Last Days of Disco" director Whit Stillman (05/28/98) Home Movies By Charles Taylor Depp impact: A former teen idol has become Hollywood's most versatile and moving actor (05/26/98) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Reviewed by Cintra Wilson Viva Las Vegas: Terry Gilliam's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" captures the crazy soul of Hunter Thompson's twisted masterpiece (05/22/98) BROWSE THE MOVIE ARCHIVES COLUMNS FEATURES REVIEWS INTERVIEWS

[ H O M E_.M O V I E S_.B Y_.C H A R L E S_.T A Y L O R ]________ ________R o c k_.'_n_'_.r o l l_.h e a v e n . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . WALTER HILL'S TRASHY EXTRAVAGANZA "STREETS OF FIRE" PACKS A BITTERSWEET, YOUTHFUL WALLOP There are all kinds of pop culture iconography floating around in Walter Hill's "Streets of Fire": rock stars; outlaw biker gangs; neon marquees; Dick Tracy-style police cars; diners that serve up coffee in Syracuse china; silent, tough-guy heroes; bars that are rowdy dives and bars meant for quiet, solitary drinking; leather; a battered wallet photo of someone's sweetheart; lovers' reunions; lovers' breakups; dusters; convertibles; pompadours; guns. "Streets of Fire" is nothing but iconography, an attempt to boil down 30 years of pop to its familiar essence and then contain the whole thing in a comic-strip B movie. The frequently wooden acting sometimes makes the mock-clichéd dialogue sound unintentionally hackneyed; the plot feels like it was scribbled on a popcorn box during intermission at a double feature; and unfortunately, for a movie that bills itself as a rock 'n' roll fable, the big numbers were written by Jim Steinman, the man responsible for Meat Loaf's rock-operatic horrors. You could complain that Hill's attention wasn't on directing his actors or writing dialogue when he made "Streets of Fire." That's what most critics wrote when the movie opened and bombed in the summer of 1984. But it would be beside the point. The meaning of the movie, its emotion, is in the way Hill shoots all those icons. Watching "Streets of Fire" isn't as intimate as sorting through a trunk of mementos, but it is like stumbling upon a yellowed catalog and remembering your teenage longing for the things you were so sure would make you cool. In many ways, it's just awful, and yet "Streets of Fire" is a knockout piece of pop craftsmanship. There's rock 'n' roll in the way the picture looks and in the way it moves. Hill can't simply include a shot of a teletype machine tapping out a telegram, he has to put a Bo Diddley beat chugging along behind it. The editors, Freeman Davies and Michael Ripps, cut from scene to scene with jagged edits that make the movie look as if someone has dragged a razor across the print, or like a landscape glimpsed between the cars of a hurtling locomotive. In the opening sequence, as an urban downtown fills up with kids heading for a rock show, Hill and his editors bust the action up into shots that are almost subliminal blips: A diner closes up for the night; a girl checks her makeup hurriedly in the mirror; neon signs burst into life; the audience squeezes into the theater. The sequence is all about the jittery, ritualistic excitement of going out to hear rock 'n' roll, where the right outfit and the crazy atmosphere is as important as listening to the music. It's the rock show as a place to celebrate and lose yourself, and it all builds up to the big opening number. Ellen Aim (Diane Lane) has struck it big as a rock star and now she's returning to her hard-luck urban hometown for a benefit gig. She finishes one song before Raven (Willem Dafoe) and his motorcycle gang, the Bombers, rush the stage and kidnap her. Ellen's old flame, who has the perfect name of Tom Cody (Michael Paré, who never looks fully awake), is summoned to rescue her. He takes along Ellen's manager/boyfriend Billy Fish (Rick Moranis) and McCoy (Amy Madigan), a tough-talking ex-soldier he picks up in a bar. You can break down the rest of the plot as neatly as Hill breaks down that opening sequence: rescue, reconciliation, showdown, breakup. With the pyrotechnics of Ellen's rescue from a biker bar behind him, Hill has to fall back on Ellen and Tom patching up their broken romance, and since there's no depth to the characters or the relationships, the movie loses steam. But Hill needs this section to get to the unexpected pulp melancholy waiting at the finale. Five years before "Streets of Fire," Hill made "The Warriors," his sensational B movie about a street gang fighting their way through every borough of New York City to make it back to their home turf on Coney Island. "The Warriors" was condemned for allegedly stirring up violence, though what got the audience off is Hill's use of speed and movement. The martial arts-style fight scenes are shot and edited in lightning-fast bursts that pack a kinetic charge. (A friend of mine calls "The Warriors" the greatest dance movie ever made.) "Streets of Fire" is an attempt to push that aesthetic into an even more compressed and abstract style. But in the five years between the two movies, MTV made its debut, and with dozens of bad movies aping what was going on there, critics felt free to dismiss "Streets of Fire" as a rock video -- though I'd be willing to bet that most of the critics who made that charge couldn't have named three rock videos. (The fact that most of them didn't even bother to call it a bad rock video suggested that it never occurred to them that there could be such a thing as a good one.) It's a laughable charge when you compare this tightly made movie to the rock videos of the era, which now look so primitive. I don't mean to suggest that Hill didn't have rock video's visual shorthand in mind when he made "Streets of Fire," just that he went beyond it. "Streets of Fire" takes place in a world ruled by youthful fantasies of escape, rebellion and excitement. In the daytime scenes, the cars and boarded-up storefronts all recede into the same shade of dusty gray. Everyone in the movie lives for the night. We've all seen neon reflected in wet pavement, but never in the hard, vivid tones that cinematographer Andrew Laszlo gets here. If chrome could bleed, it would look like the colors that run together in the streets of this movie. At times, the picture proceeds by subconscious links of sound and motion, as when a drum roll seems to set off a fluttering light show of neon figures. For an action movie, there's something very interior about "Streets of Fire." It feels like something you fantasized about as a kid alone in your room acting out to records, imagining yourself a combination of rock star and superhero. The music in the movie has no relation to the changes brought on by punk (except in the biker's bar sequence where the house band is L.A.'s early '80s punkabilly outfit the Blasters, who perform two terrific numbers, "One Bad Stud" and "Blue Shadows"), and not really to cheesy '80s new wave, either. The concert scenes understand the rock show as spectacle, capturing both the thrill of getting lost in a crowd, adding your voice to its gigantic roar and being on the receiving end of that roar. In one shot, we see Ellen on stage from behind as the house lights go up to reveal a wall of fans so tall it appears to be towering over her. It wouldn't be surprising if she offered herself up for sacrifice. The number she sings in the final scene is called "Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young." She and Tom had their lovers' farewell before she took the stage, and he makes his way out through the crowd, leaving both the music and her behind until he's alone on the pavement underneath the marquee that sports her name. The scene is meant to be about the moment when you leave adolescent thrills behind. That's a reductive view of pop culture. Hill shows no inkling that the meaning of rock 'n' roll can abide and deepen as you get older. (In my mid-'30s, I'm still going out to hear bands, and I find myself more ravenous than ever for new music.) But emotionally, the scene exerts a pull. It calls up the friends, enthusiasms and flames that must inevitably pass away. "Streets of Fire" starts out as a comic book and winds up as a trash movie version of "These Foolish Things," leaving you more wistful than trash has any right to. SALON | June 2, 1998 Charles Taylor's video column, Home Movies, appears in Salon every Tuesday. - - - - - - - - - - - - N O W_S H O W I N G [ New releases available June 2 ] Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil The Rainmaker Oscar and Lucinda Home Alone 3