Walter Hill's
Streets of FireFirst of all, Walter Hill in general is in a special category for me, just plain simple. Major WH fan speaking. One part Western the other part Action-Crime-Noir revivalist, his movies are hard boiled and often graceless works of attitude where male heroes speak roughly (or little at all) and women saunter. But like many a filmmakers who came out of the 1970s he too is an homage artist in his own way.
The Warriors from 1979 was already his first foray into a kind of graphic comic world of that era's urban gangland psyche, but rolling into the following decade thronged with Lucasberg's B-serialized Star Wars and Indiana Jones, W.D. Richter's take on Doc Savage via
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai and John Carpenter going all yellow peril/wuxia sorcery with
Big Trouble in Little China, Hill would likewise embrace the pulpβand that pulp was the 1984 'Rock'n'Roll Fable' as tag-lined on the very poster.
Streets of Fire is also perhaps Hill's most innocent film, with a PG rating rare among his portfolio. No one dies in the film surprisingly while the language is mild. It's for kids, teenagers specifically. It's the ultimate date movie offering in equal measure what young guys and gals desire on a Saturday night outing sans any heavy investment: guns, motorcycles and street fights -- music, glamor and romance. Heroes, villains, damsels, sidekicks etc. are drafted statements right from the start and brassy dialogue is of such that cuts right to the point of pushing the plot forward while still illustrating whatever the character speaking it. Two aspects of the film in particular strike a relation with the Star Wars Prequels, the first being its world-building. The story is set in an alternate timeline that splices together 1950s rockabilly with a contemporary dimension of 1980s zeroed in on the burgeoning zeitgeist of an MTV pop-video culture; in the fictional city of Richmond (think: vintage steel mill St. Louise, L-train Chicago and Motown Detroit all meshed into one) is where the action takes place loosely to the meter of a diegetic musical. The second link to Lucas' space opera melodrama is, well, the melodrama, for
Streets of Fire encapsulates the stuff of unabashed drive-in romance replete with longing looks, wounded feelings and the naked expressions of such through the film's own idiomatic, street-level purple prose.
Other broad-yet-potent commonalities may include:
- opening fairy tale text:
A long time ago in a galaxy far far away... /
Another time, another place...- fictional metropolis coded with "graffiti" distinctly American
- a planetary queen / rock queen as the macguffin
- accumulating motley crew of disparate characters
- hindered transports and waylay stations
- revved engines and speeder bikes
- seedy nightclubs
- sledge hammer duel in place of lightsabers
- dare I say, a cult following or niche fanbase?