Saturday Film Club #18: Streets Of Fire

Director: Walter Hill

Country of origin and year of release: US, 1984

A deeply flawed film that happens to include some interesting central performances, Streets Of Fire is the DVD you put on when you just want to watch something fast paced that you don't have to think about too much.

Starring Michael Paré as the brooding anti-hero/gun for hire Tom Cody (Clark Gable in cuban heels, as he's also been described...) and Diane Lane as his rock star ex-girlfriend Ellen Aim, Streets Of Fire has a somewhat ludicrous plot that unfolds much better on screen than it does in summary. As such, let's keep it brief: Ellen Aim is performing a sold out show in her home town. During the course of the show, a biker gang storm the venue, cause mayhem, and kidnap her. It's never really explained why, so we're left to assume that it's merely because gang leader Raven Shaddock (a magnificently creepy Willam Defoe) fancies her. 

Reeva, a young woman who has attended the ruined show, goes home and writes a letter to her brother, Tom Cody, who - it turns out - took off to join the army many years ago but, prior to that, had been dating Ellen Aim.

Tom, having not long got out of the army, returns home, breaks up a fight at Reeva's diner, annoys the local police, and chews the fat at a local dive bar with one of his old pals... Where he meets McCoy.

I don't think the writer and director of Streets Of Fire intended McCoy (Amy Madigan) to be as much of the star of the show as she appears, but they must have had something of an inkling given that they very generously gave her all the best lines. Originally the character of McCoy (effectively Tom Cody's sidekick) was going to be a black man. This changed because Madigan basically talked them into hiring her instead. It would be fair to say that the character could easily have been played by a man or a woman, and indeed by anyone from any racial background, but that the casting of a woman in the part gives the Cody/McCoy relationship dimensions that it wouldn't have had if she'd been a man. There is no sexual attraction between the pair (which is refreshing) and this is established very early on, meaning both Cody and McCoy can concentrate on what they're in town to do: Rescue Ellen Aim from Raven's clutches.

The other central character in all of this is Ellen's manager, Billy Fish, who is played as a weaselly, money grabbing figure of fun by Rick Moranis. He's basically there to be the butt of McCoy's one liners, to annoy Cody, and be there for Ellen to come back to. 

Thanks to the hard boiled characterisation, snappy dialogue, mean streets, rain, trench coats and crime element, Streets Of Fire is often talked of as being a neo noir film. This has come with hindsight, however, and back when it was released in 1984 it was tagged in the opening credits as being 'A Rock'N'Roll Fable'. Neither genre would be entirely accurate (what is a rock'n'roll fable anyway?) but it's easy to see how it would come to be seen as a neo noir, with Cody standing in for the private dick, Ellen Aim firmly in the femme fatale mode of heroine, and enough dives, grimy streets and disempowered cops to to point to as evidence. Admittedly no one had a fight with a pair of pickaxes (soundtracked magnificently by Link Ray's 'Rumble') in 1940s noir, but that's the 1980s for you. 

What's perhaps more telling though is that this film was released in 1984; Two years after Blade Runner (which also has strong noirish characteristics) and the same year as Flashdance (which, um, doesn't). It shares the same post industrial bleakness of location as Blade Runner and the sexual exploitation and violence as Flashdance while existing in its own little 80s bubble. That the soundtrack is largely by Jim Steinman also ties it firmly to the 80s but, if anything, Steinman's soundtrack adds to the heightened sense of the thing, rather than detracting from it. 

It's fun to watch this film for the Cody/McCoy relationship rather than the Cody/Aim relationship, mainly because the former seems more developed and rewarding than the latter. Diane Lane's performance as Ellen Aim has been criticised as wooden but her actual onstage performances are fine, it's when she's offstage that she seems miscast. This is strange given that it wasn't her first time playing a rock star: She'd played the fiery Corinne Burns in Ladies And Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains! two years earlier, a role that seems to have had a lot more to it than her role here as Ellen. 

Streets Of Fire is not a film that you watch expecting perfection; it's an implausibly plotted, rollicking ride with a surprisingly good soundtrack, great one liners, lots of high octane, highly choreographed fight scenes and an oddly satisfying conclusion. But it doesn't hold up well to forensic analysis in any sense.