What If the 1950s, But Sillier?

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 44
Walter Hill (writer-director), Streets of Fire

Glamorous rock star Ellen Aim has returned to her hometown to play a benefit gig before an adoring local crowd. But jealous biker Raven, leader of the Bombers, has other goals: his black-clad greasers rush the stage, overpower Ellen’s entourage, and carry her away like a trophy. Thousands watch helplessly, but one local woman contacts her secret weapon, her brother, the mercenary Tom Cody.

Director and co-writer Walter Hill produced this picture, an epitome of 1980s values, in the immediate wake of his runaway hit 48 Hrs. A slick package of highly choreographed fight scenes, teenage love revisited, and rock aesthetics, everyone involved anticipated another smash. It was dead on arrival, losing millions. Recent trends, however, have led critics to reevaluate this movie, reclassifying it as an ahead-of-its-time beauty of Reagan-era excess.

Tom Cody declares he doesn’t care to rescue Ellen Aim. Why get involved in local gangs and police politics? Some banter with his sister reveals Tom and Ellen were involved, years prior, but when her singing career became lucrative, they drifted apart. Tom carries a grudge. But Ellen’s nebbishy boyfriend, also her manager, offers a brick of cash, and Tom becomes interested. He buys some black-market guns and ventures into the darkest part of town.

Despite its dark premise, this movie’s defining trait is silliness. It presents all action with the depth and complexity of a Looney Tune. Its outdoor sets and streetscapes are so close-in and narrow that you never forget it’s a soundstage. Characters are exactly as deep as the plot requires, letting the script carry them from scene to scene, because they don’t have deep inner motivations; things simply happen because it’s time.

Yet somehow, we viewers feel yoked to the story’s potential. The silliness becomes downright operatic, with its tendency towards Grand Guignol and its elaborate, Tim Burton-like design. Like vintage melodrama, the characters are having enough fun that they see no reason to interrupt the proceedings. They want things to reach their inevitable conclusion because they enjoy being slick, commercial, and drenched in early-MTV sumptuousness.

In essence, this movie is a designer’s vehicle; even the rococo sets remind us we’re participating in conscious art. The nameless city’s streets have an Edward Hopper depth, very close and angular, with bare concrete under painted steel facades (which are clearly plastic and Styrofoam). Like in a dream, or myth, everything is very close together: the city’s worst street is around the corner from its best.

Ellen Aim (Diane Lane) and Tom Cody (Michael Paré) in Streets of Fire

A 1950s aesthetic pervades this film, but not deeply. Shark-fin cars and greaser boots are everywhere, but so are upswept 1980s hairdos and oversaturated music-video colors. An early title card tells us this story happens in “Another time, another place.” That time and place is clearly inside somebody’s head, because this isn’t historic; it's a Reagan-era dreamscape fueled by Top-40 skifflebop and anti-juvenile delinquent PSA’s.

Then we have the fight scenes, for which this movie was written. Unnamed characters fall off motorcycles, get whanged with sledgehammers, and tumble out of moving cars, but nobody is ever really hurt. Like I said, it’s a Looney Tune, a Bugs Bunny caper. We don’t expect realistic consequences for cartoon violence, we expect people’s heads to bounce off pavement like it’s made of rubber. Violence is slapstick, not horrific.

This pervasive silliness is underscored by the movie’s rock-and-roll soundtrack, which almost never stops. Its rockabilly vibes remind us we’re watching somebody’s nostalgic fantasy. (This is the same era when the Stray Cats and the Cramps updated Fifties vibes for a more commercial age.) This movie pines for fast guitars, slick cars, and back-alley rumbles. Like much of its era, it yearns for a simplicity that probably never really existed.

This movie plays out a Reaganite wistfulness for a simplified 1950s, divided between obvious heroes and villains. It pits calm, big-shouldered Tom Cody, the ex-soldier, against greaser Raven and his gangsters; but it also pits Tom’s demonstrative manfulness against Billy Fish, Ellen’s geeky manager and new boyfriend. Tom’s violence works, but it’s also outdated; even he admits the future belongs to people like Billy, not himself.

As stated, this movie landed with a quiet thud. This didn’t bother writer-director Hill, who was massively prolific and moved onto another project. Nearly forty years later, though, fans have reevaluated its legacy. It has more in common with mythologies like Lord of the Rings than the semi-realistic action flicks which dominated 1980s cinema, while also embodying its era’s pining for lost moral simplicity. And it’s also just silly fun.