Streets of Fire

It all started with this tweet from my former colleague, movie blogger/podcaster, and writer, Jen:

If you live within moderately easy travel distance of this and you don't go see STREETS OF FIRE in 70mm, I will never, ever forgive you https://t.co/3ZzFwkWLbv

— Jen Myers (@antiheroine) August 8, 2022

Between not wanting to earn the opprobrium of Jen, and the fact that our friends had recently watched the film on a Watch Party that we’d missed, I really wanted to see this. All the better that it was being screened in a 70mm print. Additionally, as Lauren has reached her third trimester, going to do things where one sits/has access to food/has access to bathroom is a key. With some planning and some patience, yours truly, and his very pregnant wife, made the two-train tango to Astoria. We built in plenty of buffer time and were able to grab dinner at sports bar, outside, off of Steinway Drive before heading to the Museum of the Moving Image.¹

It was entirely worth it. We loved this movie.

Set in what seems to be under-the-El post-apocalyptic Chicago (Lake and Clark?), society seems to have latched onto the best decade in pre-apocalypse America: the 1950’s (keep in mind this was made in 1984). So everything is 1950’s tech (dented percolator samovar in the diner), 1950’s uniforms, and 1950’s cars (Studebakers and Mercurys) but dingy and broken down. It’s like after an apocalyptic war, someone found prints of “The Wild One” and “Rebel Without a Cause” and said: “That’s it, this was our best. Let’s approximate that aesthetic.” The movie only occasionally nods to the fact that we’re in a post-apocalyptic universe: Tyvek sheet greenhouses and a hint to soldiers fighting “the war” (that seems to have no conceivable end), but we’re meant to swallow the world whole, and we do.

In the musical opening, we’re introduced to the world as Ellen Aim (a very young, Fabulous Stains-adjacent Diane Lane) and her band the Attackers put on a show at her home theatre. The opening song gets the screen and on-screen audiences rocking and rolling into accepting this world. At the end of the first number, a glowingly menacing chopper-gang leader, Raven (glorious Willem DaFoe) abducts Ellen, shoots up the town, creates mischief, and steals Helen of Troy~ Ellen away.

A fan in the audience aghast. A brother/ex-soldier. A telegram. A train. A solitary man with a suitcase alights on a darkened platform.

Knight errant big brother Tom Cody returns to his stomping grounds, teaches some minor thugs to be nicer, runs crosswise with the local cops, and is set in motion to retrieve Ellen, who just so happens to be his ex, with the help of her present manager/boyfriend and a fellow soldier-for-hire called McCoy.

For fans of Walter Hill’s 1979 dystopic masterpiece The Warriors (me), we know where this Walter Hill™ plot will go: a trek across a brokedown urban landscape and back (if they can keep their skins along the way). And it does. Vehicle are stolen, vehicles are ditched, the proud are humbled, and E.C. Daily (yes, Tommy Pickles) are encountered.

But what makes Streets so much more than a rehash of The Warriors is the music. Much of the plot is told …. in song! At moments, we cut back to the initial stage performance of Ellen and the songs are our key for understanding emotional currents to which we’re only just now tuning in in media res. The film sports two epic rockers for fans of epic rock like Bonnie Tyler and Meatloaf (me, again) “Nowhere Fast” and “Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young.” Both of these feature a strong gallop tempo, operatic progressions, and strong vocal work.

Oh, and quick note, hats off to Diane Lane for selling her lip sync to “Fire Inc.’s” vocals so well.

As we left, the crowd was completely smiles and “Wow, that was so good.” Unfortunately, 1984 wasn’t so kind to the film. It bombed. Apparently it was supposed to be the first of a trilogy around our gunslinger without a name, Tom Cody. I suppose in additional installments we’d have learned more about the apocalypse, the forever war, and their world. While I certainly would have liked more lore, what’s there is tantalizing enough for me to create a backstory from just a few clues (much like a From Software video game).

Seeing it in large format was a real treat too. Handsome Michael Paré is more handsome (Lauren: So good-looking he can wear that outfit and still be handsome). Gorgeous Diane Lane is gorgeous.² The city is gritty and dingy. DaFoe is glowering and menacing and by God, so young (although him shirtless in Tyvek overalls sent the Mrs. into a giggling fit).

So, all told, big thanks to Jen to pushing us to go to the show. Perhaps something like that was too inventive and too new at the time. But I can dream (about you).

Footnotes

1. Astoria has had a long relationship with the film industry. Kaufman studios, around the corner from the Museum of the Moving Image is Sesame Street
2. Lane’s adorable scar beside her right eyebrow proves Ovid right: that the face with the scar is the more bewitching. Seeing stars who were still allowed to be human was an interesting comment on how unrealistic our beauty standards are enforced to be by film.