Steve McQueen Blog-a-thon: The Getaway

BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post is part of the Steve McQueen Blog-a-thon being coordinated by Jason Bellamy over at The Cooler.
By the time he made The Getaway (1972), Steven McQueen was in desperate need of a commercially successful film. His last three were box office flops, especially his last one, Junior Bonner (1972). Incidentally, Sam Peckinpah, who directed both films, was also in a need of a hit and saw this project as a way to show Hollywood that he could make a box-office hit. In doing so, the director once again was forced to compromise his vision for someone else’s – in this case, McQueen who did everything in his power to make The Getaway his ticket back into the elite, A-list club of major Hollywood players.

Carter “Doc” McCoy (Steve McQueen) is a career criminal just released from prison after serving time for armed robbery. The opening credits play over a montage of the repetitive grind of life in prison for Doc as symbolized by the monotonous clacking of the machinery he works with during his time spent there. We get glimpses of his daily routine and the things he does to try and pass the time but they do little to ease his frustrations. With the help of his beautiful wife Carol (Ali MacGraw), who has sex with local corrupt politician Benyon (Ben Johnson), Doc is released early for “good behavior.”

Carol and Doc are reunited and they celebrate by going to a park, an idyllic setting where they spontaneously decide to go for a swim. Doc revels in his freedom. He and Carol seem happy. They share a rare, tender moment together at home when she comforts him and he confesses to her how prison has changed him. He’s even apprehensive about making love with her because so much time has passed but she is loving and patient with him. The next morning we see them briefly experiencing domestic bliss as Doc makes breakfast for Carol. There’s an incredible intimacy displayed during these scenes and McQueen conveys an astonishing amount of vulnerability. This is the first and only time we’ll see them this carefree. It’s fleeting as the rest of the film will see Doc in professional criminal mode.

Indebted to Benyon, Doc meets with him about a potential job. Ben Johnson plays his character with the smug confidence of a man who knows that he has power over others. As Benyon tells Doc at one point during their meeting, “You run the job, but I run the show.” Benyon orders Doc to rob a bank that has over $500,000. He assigns him two accomplices, Rudy Butler (Al Lettieri) and Frank Johnson (Bo Hopkins). One look at these two hired goons and you know that they can’t be trusted. Doc is a smart guy and realizes this as well but what choice does he have?

In a nice attention to detail, we see Doc and his crew thoroughly plan and prepare for the job. Both he and Carol check out the bank in order to see how many employees it has, what kind of security they have, the local police presence, and so on. It becomes readily apparent that Doc leaves nothing to chance. He’s efficient and well-prepared. However, despite all of his meticulous planning, the heist does not go smoothly and a bank guard and Jackson are killed. Not surprisingly, this sequence allows Peckinpah to cut loose with some of his trademark slow motion mayhem, including a fantastic bit where Doc plows through the front porch of a house with his getaway car. Peckinpah’s films are always a marvel of editing and this one is no different. During the bank heist, he uses editing to ratchet up the tension. Because of the rhythm of the editing he employs in this sequence, you intuitively anticipate that something bad will happen at any given moment and when it does, it almost comes as a relief akin to a release valve.

Doc and Carol rendezvous with Butler and the latter foolishly tries to double-cross the former. Doc shoots Butler and leaves him for dead. The rest of the film plays out their attempts to escape for the border and safe haven in El Rey, Mexico, and also Butler’s pursuit for revenge.

Steven McQueen brings his trademark cool and intensity to the role of Doc and is not afraid to play a relatively unlikable character. We don’t know what Doc was like before his prison stretch, only how he behaves once he gets out. McQueen plays him as someone who doesn’t suffer fools gladly. I find it interesting that two of his strongest performances came from back-to-back Peckinpah films: Junior Bonner and The Getaway. The former featured a very nuanced, introspective performance from McQueen, while this one is all on the surface as he plays an irredeemable criminal.

Ali MacGraw faced a lot of criticism back in the day for being a lightweight actress out of her depth in this film but she does a good job, especially in the scene where Carol exacts retribution on Benyon and then in the follow-up scene where she tearfully confronts Doc about what she had to do in order to get him out of prison. He lashes out at her, repeatedly slapping Carol, reducing her to tears in a truly uncomfortable moment. Peckinpah is never afraid to expose raw emotions. Doc knows how to switch his emotions on and off at will but Carol doesn’t work that way. MacGraw does a nice job of portraying a woman that feels out of her depth in a world filled with hardened criminals and this mirrored the actress’ own experience making a film she clearly was not comfortable doing in the company of people that intimidated her.

When you have someone iconic like Steve McQueen as your protagonist, you better have someone who can match him as the antagonist. Peckinpah found that in Al Lettieri who plays the ruthless Rudy Butler. The actor brings an uneasy intensity to his sociopathic character. Butler only cares about the money and getting revenge while also delighting in tormenting a couple he takes hostage along the way. There’s a seedy ugliness to the scenes where takes advantage of a veterinarian (Jack Dodson) and his wife (Sally Struthers) that would be taken up another notch in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974).

For some time prior to The Getaway, McQueen had been encouraging his publicist David Foster to become a film producer. Foster’s first attempt was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) with McQueen starring alongside Paul Newman but 20th Century Fox did not want Foster as part of the deal. The project fell apart and while McQueen was making Le Mans (1971), Foster acquired the rights to Jim Thompson’s crime novel The Getaway. Foster sent McQueen a copy of the book and urged him to do it. The actor was looking for a good/bad guy role and saw these qualities in Doc. McQueen admired Humphrey Bogart since he was a child and patterned his performance from Bogart in High Sierra (1941).

Foster began to look for a director and Peter Bogdanovich was brought to his attention. He and McQueen screened Bogdanovich’s soon-to-be-released The Last Picture Show (1971) and loved it. They met with the director and a deal was made. However, Warner Brothers approached Bogdanovich with an offer to direct What’s Up Doc? (1972) with Barbra Streisand but with the stipulation that he would have to start right away. The director wanted to do both films but the studio refused. When McQueen found out, he was very upset and told Bogdanovich that he was going to get someone else to direct The Getaway. Foster and McQueen hired Jim Thompson to adapt his own book into a screenplay which he spent four months writing. However, they did not like the ending where Carol and Doc “descend into a nightmarish physical and spiritual hell” in Mexico and fired him from the project.

McQueen had just worked with Peckinpah on Junior Bonner and enjoyed the experience. He recommended the director to Foster who then approached Peckinpah. He agreed to do it. The filmmaker had read the novel when it was originally published and had even talked to Thompson about making it into a film when he was starting out as a director. Foster and McQueen then met with screenwriter Walter Hill and hired him to adapt Thompson’s novel. Peckinpah read the screenplay and Hill remembers that he didn’t change much: “We made it nonperiod and we added a little more action.” After Junior Bonner, Peckinpah wanted to make Emperor of the North Pole (1973), a story set during the Depression about a railroad conductor obsessed with keeping hobos off his train. Foster made a deal with Paramount Pictures’ production chief Robert Evans who would allow Peckinpah to do his personal project if he would helm The Getaway.

For the role of Carol, Peckinpah wanted to cast Stella Stevens whom he worked with on The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970) with Angie Dickinson or Dyan Cannon as possible alternatives. Foster suggested Ali MacGraw, a much in-demand actress after the smash-hit Love Story (1970). At the time, she was married to Evans who wanted her to get away from being typecast in preppy roles and set up a meeting with Foster, McQueen and Peckinpah to talk about the film. According to Foster, she was scared of McQueen and Peckinpah because they had a reputation for being “wild, two-fisted beer-guzzlers.” When McQueen met MacGraw there was a very strong, instant attraction between the two. She was unsure about the project because of her attraction to him. She said, “He was recently separated, and free, and I was scared of my overwhelming attraction to him.”

For the role of Rudy Butler, Peckinpah wanted Jack Palance but could not afford his salary. Impressed by his performance in Panic in Needle Park (1971), Walter Hill recommended Richard Bright. He had worked with McQueen 14 years ago but did not have the physique that McQueen pictured for Butler. Peckinpah got along famously with Bright and ended up casting him in a smaller role of a small-time grifter that tries to steal the bank heist loot. Al Lettieri was brought to Peckinpah’s attention by producer Al Ruddy who was working with the actor on The Godfather (1972). Ruddy showed the director footage of Lettieri and Peckinpah knew that he wanted him to play Butler. Like Peckinpah, Lettieri was a heavy drinker and this caused problems during filming due to his unpredictable behavior. The director, on the other hand, drank all day but did not appear drunk.

A potential roadblock arose in the form of a conflict between Paramount and the film’s budget. Peckinpah was dismissed from Emperor and was told that Paramount was not making The Getaway either. McQueen’s agent had 30 days to set up a deal with another studio or Paramount would own the rights. Fortunately, his agent was inundated with offers and went with the First Artists group because McQueen would receive no upfront salary, just 10% of the gross for the first dollar taken in on the film – very profitable if it was a box-office hit.

Principal photography began on February 7, 1972 in Huntsville, Texas. Peckinpah shot the opening prison scenes at the local penitentiary with McQueen surrounded by actual convicts. During the course of filming, McQueen and MacGraw fell in love. Naturally, Foster was worried that their relationship was going to have a negative impact on the production by causing a potential scandal with the media ruining the reputation of the film.

McQueen and Peckinpah got into occasional heated arguments during filming. The director recalled one such incident: “Steve and I had been discussing some point on which we disagreed, so he picked up this bottle of champagne and threw it at me. I saw it coming and ducked and Steve just laughed.” Despite these disagreements, McQueen had his moments of brilliance. He had a natural aptitude with props, especially the guns he used in the film. Hill remembered, “you can see Steve’s military training in his films. He was so brisk and confident in the way he handled the guns.” It was McQueen’s idea to have Doc shoot up two squad cars in the scene where his character holds two police officers at gunpoint.

MacGraw got her start as a model and her inexperience as an actress manifested itself on the set where she struggled with the role. According to Foster, Peckinpah and MacGraw got along quite well but she was not happy with her own performance. She said, “I looked at what I had done in it, I hated my own performance. I liked the picture, but I despised my own work.”

Under his contract with First Artists, McQueen had final cut on The Getaway and when Peckinpah found out he was very upset. Richard Bright said that McQueen chose takes that “made him look good” and Peckinpah felt that he played it safe: “He chose all these Playboy shots of himself. He’s playing it safe with these pretty-boy shots.” McQueen also used his clout to replace Jerry Fielding’s completed score with one by Quincy Jones.

There were two preview screenings, a lackluster one in San Francisco, and a more enthusiastic one held in San Jose. However, critics were less than jazzed with The Getaway. Roger Ebert gave the film two out of four stars and called it, “a big, glossy, impersonal mechanical toy.” Time magazine described McQueen as having “primarily a deep-frozen presence,” and called MacGraw’s screen presence “abrasive. As a talent, she is embarrassing.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “The action and the violence of The Getaway are supported by no particular themes whatsoever. The movie just unravels.” After everything was said and done, The Getaway was the second highest grossing film of the year, making $18 million domestically and $35 million worldwide. McQueen was back on top and a major Hollywood player once again.

Peckinpah never forgets what kind of film The Getaway is – a crime thriller – but still manages to inject his trademark stylistic flourishes and thematic preoccupations while still fulfilling all the necessary conventions of the genre, especially in the exciting, bullet-ridden climax. The Getaway may have been a paycheck film for Peckinpah but he still found ways to make it his own despite McQueen’s tinkering.

The Warriors

When The Warriors came out in 1979 it was a modestly budgeted film made by an up-and-coming director named Walter Hill and featured a then-unknown cast. With its nightmarish vision of New York City, the film certainly wasn’t going to be used in any of the city’s tourism ads extolling the virtues of the metropolis. Like many films from the 1970s, New York is presented as a dirty, dangerous place filled with jaded, cynical people (see Taxi Driver and The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three). The Warriors performed decently at the box office but reports of gang-related violence at a few screenings caused the studio to panic and downplay promotional advertisements. But the film had left its mark and over the years it has quietly cultivated a loyal following thanks mainly to regular screenings on television and the occasional midnight showing at repertory theaters.

The film’s premise is pure B-movie hokum. New York City is dominated by gangs that hail from the various boroughs. One man named Cyrus (Roger Hill) dreams of uniting all of these different groups into a 60,000-strong army that will run the city and answer to no one, not the police and not organized crime. To this end, he convinces representatives from 100 gangs to gather in Van Cortlandt Park. However, much like Malcolm X before him, Cyrus’ call for revolution is shattered when he is killed by an assassin, a grinning maniac named Luther (David Patrick Kelly) from the Rogues. With their leader missing in action thanks to the ensuing chaos, Swan (Michael Beck) takes over a gang known as the Warriors. They find themselves trapped in Manhattan, framed for Cyrus’ death. They must fight their way back to their turf on Coney Island and go through several territories of other gangs out for their blood. It’s a chase movie broken up by several exciting fight scenes and commented on by a late night disc jockey (Lynne Thigpen) like a Greek chorus as she spins tunes that offer clues for what awaits the Warriors next. It is this simple yet effective set-up that makes the film work so well.

The tension between the Warriors’ stoic war chief Swan and cocky gang member Ajax (James Remar) is nicely done and gives an edgy quality to their group dynamic. Swan is the archetypal Hill protagonist: a laconic man of action and of few words, much like Ryan O’Neal’s no-nonsense wheelman in The Driver (1978) and Michael Pare’s soldier of fortune in Streets of Fire (1984). With a few notable exceptions, the Warriors are a pretty indistinguishable lot. You’ve got the inexperienced guy, the not-so smart guy, the tough guy, etc. Only Michael Beck and James Remar really stand out and it’s no surprise that they were the two actors that went on to illustrious careers, especially Remar who has had a diverse career that includes Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and Sex and the City. That being said, the actors playing the rest of the Warriors do just enough to invest you in their plight so that you care about what happens to them.

Deborah Van Valkenburgh plays Mercy, a woman the Warriors cross paths with during their run-in with the Orphans. She is tough and oozes attitude and sexual appeal. She’s one of Hill’s quintessential smart, tough-talking women, like Amy Madigan’s soldier in Streets of Fire and Annette O’Toole’s long-suffering girlfriend to Nick Nolte’s cop in 48 Hrs (1982). There’s a telling scene near the end of the film where two couples get on the subway and sit across from a tired, disheveled and bruised Swan and Mercy. They are all roughly the same age but they couldn’t be more different. The two couples have just come from a prom and are a laughing and smiling while our badass heroes look exhausted but defiant having survived a tumultuous night.

The push and pull dynamic between Swan and Ajax enhances the relentless urgency that kicks in once the Warriors are on the run, fighting their way back home. Hill is only interested in constantly propelling the narrative forward as our heroes run the gauntlet of gangs. The closer they get, the tougher the gangs are that they have to face. And they are a colorful assortment, some are rather lame, like the Orphans whose uniform consists of nothing more than a plain t-shirt and blue jeans, and some look really cool, like the Baseball Furies, a bizarre-looking gang dressed up in Yankee pinstripes and oddly-colored face-paint. You would think that they would look ridiculous but there is something about them, maybe it’s their lack of speaking, that is creepy.

Hill directs the action sequences in a clean, straight-forward style so that there is never any confusion about who’s fighting who and where. He uses editing to help convey the kinetic action in these scenes so that they’re always exciting to watch. The film’s score features ominous electronic rock music comparable to what John Carpenter was also doing at the time (see Assault on Precinct 13 and Halloween). The pulsating score matches the rhythm of the editing. The music also enhances the tough, street vibe as it chugs along much like the subway that runs through the city delivering our heroes to safety.

The genesis for The Warriors came about when producer Lawrence Gordon sent director Walter Hill the screenplay along with a copy of Sol Yurick’s novel. Hill was drawn to the “extreme narrative simplicity and stripped down quality of the script.” As written, it was a realistic take on street gangs but Hill was obsessed with comic books and wanted to divide the film into chapters and then have each chapter “come to life starting with a splash panel.” Gordon and Hill were originally planning to make a western but when the financing on the project fell through, they took The Warriors to Paramount Pictures because the studio was interested in making youth films at the time.

Gordon and Hill did extensive casting in New York City. Originally, in Yurick’s book there are no white characters but, according to the director, the studio did not want an all-black cast for “commercial reasons.” Hill had screened an independent film called Madman (1978) for Sigourney Weaver whom he ended up casting in Alien (1979). The film also featured Michael Beck as the male lead. Hill was so impressed by his performance in Madman that he cast Beck in The Warriors. In order to depict the many fights in the film realistically, Hill had stunt coordinator Craig R. Baxley put the cast through stunt school.

Hill shot the entire film in New York City with some interiors done at Astoria Studios. The shooting schedule consisted of shooting from sun down to sun up. It wasn’t the easiest shoot. For example, while shooting in the Bronx, bricks were tossed at the crew. One of the cast members remembered filming a scene on Avenue A being canceled because there was a double homicide nearby. For the big gang summit at the beginning of the film, Hill wanted real gang members in the scene and they also had off-duty police officers in the crowd so that there would be no trouble. Actual gang members wanted to challenge some of the cast members but were dealt with by production security. The production fell behind schedule and went over budget.

Originally, at the climactic Coney Island confrontation at the end of the film, David Patrick Kelly wanted to use two dead pigeons for his now famous line but Hill did not think they would work. Instead, Kelly used bottles and improvised his famous line, “Waaaaarriors, come out to plaaaaaay!” This came from a man the actor knew in downtown New York that would make fun of him.

Hill was unable to realize his comic book look due to the low budget and tight post-production schedule because of a fixed release date in order to get it out in theaters before a rival gang picture called The Wanderers (1979). It opened on February 9, 1979 without advance screenings or a decent promotional campaign. People tend to forget the notorious reputation the film had back in the day. The next weekend it was linked to accounts of vandalism and three killings – two in Southern California and one in Boston. As a result, Paramount removed ads from radio and television entirely and display ads in newspapers were reduced to the film's title, rating and participating theaters. In reaction, 200 theaters in the United States added security people to curb any potential trouble. In addition, theater owners were relieved of their contractual obligations if they did not want to show the film, and amazingly Paramount offered to pay costs for additional security and damages due to vandalism.

After things calmed down somewhat, the studio expanded the display ads to take advantage of reviews from reputable critics like The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, who gave it a rave review. She wrote, “The Warriors is a real moviemaker’s movie: it has in visual terms the kind of impact that ’Rock Around the Clock’ did behind the titles of Blackboard Jungle. The Warriors is like visual rock.” However, the film was panned by many critics. The Washington Post’s Gary Arnold felt that, "none of Hill's dynamism will save The Warriors from impressing most neutral observers as a ghastly folly.” In his review for Newsweek, David Ansen wrote, “another problem arises when the gang members open their mouths: their banal dialogue is jarringly at odds with Hill's hyperbolic visual scheme.” Time magazine’s Frank Rich wrote, “Unfortunately, sheer visual zip is not enough to carry the film; it drags from one scuffle to the next ... But The Warriors is not lively enough to be cheap fun or thoughtful enough to be serious". Yurick expressed his disappointment in the film version and speculated that it scared some people because "it appeals to the fear of a demonic uprising by lumpen youth", and appealed to many teenagers because it "hits a series of collective fantasies.”

I’m still on the fence about the comic book panel framing device imposed by Hill for the Ultimate Director’s Cut DVD. The new tweaks to the film are obvious right from the get-go as the director narrates an opening scrawl featuring parallels to some nonsense about what we are about to see with Greek mythology. Some of the scene transitions are now done in a more overt, comic book style a la panels featuring stylized frames from the film. I understand that this was Hill’s intention all along, acting as a homage to his love of comic books as a kid but it undercuts the nightmarish vibe of The Warriors that made it so powerful in the first place. This is glaringly apparent at the end when the triumphant Warriors stand on the beach at Coney Island as Joe Walsh’s “In the City” plays and the stylized comic book panel motif ruins the poignancy of the moment.

The Warriors is set almost entirely at night and presents the city as a dark, foreboding labyrinth fraught with danger that lurks around every corner and in every alley as the Warriors not only evade the cops but also rival gangs that hold them responsible for killing Cyrus. John Carpenter would take this dystopic vision to the next logical level with Escape from New York (1981) by re-imagining the city as a walled-in prison guarded by an army. Even though Hill claims this to be a comic book-like film, it really doesn’t feel or look like one despite his recent tinkering. The gritty setting, the ominous music and the constant danger that our heroes are in doesn’t evoke a comic book vibe at all. And this is what fans of The Warriors like about it.

The Class of '84 Blogathon: Streets of Fire

NOTE: This article was originally posted on September of last year but I am dusting it off for Joe Valdez's excellent Blogathon celebrating cinema in 1984 over at one of my favorite blogs This Distracted Globe!

Walter Hill makes pure, unabashed genre films and Streets of Fire (1984) is one of the best examples from his career. The film was a pet project that he was able to realize after the success of 48 Hrs. (1983). He came right from making that film into Streets utilizing much of the same crew. Based on the commercial and critical success of his previous film, Universal Studios put up a significant amount of money and promoted it as a big summer event film. Streets of Fire promptly flopped both at the box office and with critics but has since developed a dedicated cult following.

The plot is an old chestnut that we’ve seen a million time before: “the Leader of the Pack steals the Queen of the Hop and Soldier Boy comes home to do something about it,” is how Hill summed it up in the film’s production notes. Local girl Ellen Aim (Diane Lane) returns home to put on a concert now that she’s a famous rock star. Hill conveys the fantastic energy and excitement of a live concert and Jim Steinman’s song, “Nowhere Fast” perfectly captures the youthful energy of rock ‘n’ roll but with his trademark operatic flourishes. Lane looks and acts every bit the iconic rock start she is supposed to be. At one point, towards the end of the song she spins around with wild abandon like she’s lost in the music and it is hard not to get caught up in the energy of her performance. However, this emotional spell is broken when Raven (Willem Dafoe) and the Bombers, his motorcycle gang, come storming in like a nightmarish version of Marlon Brando and his gang in The Wild One (1953). All hell breaks loose as the locals are terrorized by the bikers and in the ensuing chaos they kidnap Ellen while the police do little to stop them.

Reva (Deborah Van Valkenburgh) writes to her brother, Tom Cody (Michael Pare), an ex-soldier, to come home and rescue his ex-flame, Ellen. He arrives on a train with Ry Cooder’s bluesy music accompanying him as if to signify that he’s an old school protagonist – the strong silent type, a man of action as he quickly demonstrates when he efficiently dispatches a group of punks known as The Road Masters when they try to mess up Reva’s diner. It’s a drop dead cool introduction for Cody as he slaps around their leader and then makes short work of his buddies. They are no match for him and there is a fantastic energy to this sequence, scored to Cooder’s music. Hill breaks things up by occasionally freeze framing the action as a credit appears on-screen, which is very Sam Peckinpah-esque (Hill worked with Peckinpah writing the screenplay for The Getaway) It is an excellent marriage of editing and music. By the end of the opening credits, Hill has done a great job of establishing the film’s premise and introducing the hero, the damsel in distress, and the bad guy who has kidnapped her.

Tom goes to a bar and meets a fellow ex-soldier named McCoy (Amy Madigan) who shows off her toughness by punching out the bartender, played by Bill Paxton in a memorable cameo complete with a gravity-defying pompadour. Apparently, he’s an old buddy of Cody’s and gives McCoy a hard time at every opportunity. This role came early in Paxton’s career when he was a scene-stealing character actor with memorable turns in Aliens (1986) and Near Dark (1987). Clocking him gives Amy Madigan’s character a nice introduction as a tough-talking, hard-hitting soldier looking for work. Madigan originally read for one of the other parts and told Hill and producer Joel Silver that she wanted to play the role of McCoy, which, she remembers, “was written to be played by an overweight male who was a good soldier and really needed a job. It could still be strong and have a woman do it without rewriting the part.” Hill liked the idea and cast her in the role. McCoy is an atypical sidekick. She’s definitely not interested in Cody romantically and casually brushes off his equally blasé overture as if they wanted to get it out of the way and get down to the business of rescuing Ellen. Madigan gets some good zingers in during the course of the film – usually at the expense of Ellen’s surly manager, Billy Fish (Rick Moranis) who takes an instant dislike to McCoy. She is not a goofy sidekick by any means.

McCoy convinces Cody that she can help him out, much to the chagrin of Billy. Genial comedian Rick Moranis is cast wonderfully against type as the no-nonsense manager. He’s only concerned about getting Ellen back because she’s his ticket to the big time. It is strictly business between him and Cody. Billy also takes an instant dislike to McCoy and vice versa. It’s fun to watch them trade acerbic insults back and forth but like any good Hill protagonists, they put their differences aside and get the job done. Fish takes them to the Battery, an industrial hell-hole where the Bombers hang out. The rest of the film plays out Cody’s rescue mission and the fallout from it.

The cars and clothes in this film are a mix of 1940s and 1950s styles and Hill juxtaposes them with Jim Steinman’s ‘80s music and all sorts of snazzy neon decorating the stage Ellen performs on. It all works towards establishing a mythical place, tying into the opening tag that announces the film as “a rock and roll fable,” taking place in “another time, another place.” The look of Streets of Fire is something else – a wonderfully atmospheric retro noir look that Sin City (2005) tried to replicate years later with CGI but nothing beats the real thing.

After the success of 48 Hrs., Hill reunited with producers Lawrence Gordon and Joel Silver and screenwriter Larry Gross. According to the director, impetus for Streets of Fire came out of a desire to make what he thought was a perfect film when he was a teenager and put in all of the things that he thought were “great then and which I still have great affection for: custom cars, kissing in the rain, neon, trains in the night, high-speed pursuit, rumbles, rock stars, motorcycles, jokes in tough situations, leather jackets and question of honor.” Planning for the film began while they were making 48 Hrs. and soon after its completion, Gross and Hill worked on the screenplay, writing ten pages a day. When they were finished, the two men submitted the script to Universal Studios in January 1983 and within the span of a weekend were given the go-ahead to make the film.

The film’s title came from a song written and recorded by Bruce Springsteen on his album Darkness on the Edge of Town. Originally, plans were made for the song to be featured on soundtrack, to be sung by Ellen Aim at the end of the film. Negotiations with the musician for the rights delayed production several times. However, when Springsteen was told that his song would be re-recorded by other vocalists, he withdrew permission for the song to be used and it was replaced by “Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young.” The studio, in an attempt to save face, claimed that they replaced Springsteen’s song because it was a downer.

At one point, McCoy says to Cody, “Are we gonna do it or we gonna talk about it?” This could be the credo of Hill’s protagonists. They would rather do the job and be done with it than have to talk about it. They are all about action, whether it’s Swan and his gang in The Warriors (1979) or Ryan O’Neal’s wheelman in The Driver (1978), or Bruce Willis’ hired gun in Last Man Standing (1996). They are super efficient, no-nonsense professionals who get the job done.

Hill described the film as a “big movie without a big name star.” He wanted to cast a young group of relative unknowns and heard about Michael Pare from the same agent who recommended Eddie Murphy to him for 48 Hrs. After creating the character of Tom Cody rewrote the script “around his personality and motivating force: ‘I take it wherever I can find it,’” the director said in an interview. Pare does a decent job portraying one of Hill’s trademark laconic protagonists – a man of few words who lets his actions define his character. Pare goes for the Clint Eastwood stoicism but doesn’t quite have his effortless intensity and toughness. He’s a little too good-looking with a sleepy look but he’s okay considering that this was only his third film and first big studio one. For Cody, Hill wanted to cast an unknown with a toughness mixed with an innocent quality and found it in Pare.

It’s really a shame about Pare. He was being groomed for the big time with Eddie and the Cruisers (1983) and Streets of Fire, but both films were critical and commercial failures, eventually becoming cult films. That didn’t help Pare’s career as he was relegated to low budget, direct-to-video hell. In Streets, Hill wisely limits Pare’s dialogue and lets his matinée idol good looks and knack for physical action do all the work. It also helps that he and Diane Lane have excellent chemistry together. You can see it in his eyes. When he’s with her, his tough guy stare softens a little and gradually the ice between them melts, culminating in a passionate kiss in the rain as they finally drop their defenses, their long-standing disagreements, and admit their true feelings for each other.

Diane Lane had already done more than ten films by the time she appeared in Streets of Fire and described her character, at the time, as, “the first glamorous role I’ve had.” She looks beautiful and inhabits her rock star character with complete conviction thanks to essaying a punk rock musician previously in Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains (1981). She has all the moves down cold as an iconic rock star and looks great on stage. Lane has that retro look and she would have been a big star in Hollywood films made during the ‘40s. Hill originally wrote Ellen Aim as a 28-year-old woman but Lane auditioned for the role when she was 18. He was reluctant to cast her because he felt that she was too young but he met her in New York City and she auditioned in black leather pants, a black mesh top, and high-heeled boots, feigning confidence. Based on this, Hill cast her in the role. In addition, he was so impressed with her work on the film that he wrote additional scenes for her during the shoot.

When Raven and Cody finally meet, they exchange tough guy pleasantries and set up a future showdown. Willem Dafoe looks like he just walked off the set of The Loveless (1982) and I always wondered if Hill was a fan of the cult film oddity that marked the auspicious directorial debut of Kathryn Bigelow. Raven is a cartoonish bad guy complete with some kind of fetish gear overalls and vampirish pallor. In some respects it is a one-note warm-up for his truly evil and deliciously complex baddie in To Live and Die in L.A. (1985). The final showdown between Raven and Cody, which took nine days to shoot, is appropriately introduced musically by Ry Cooder’s ominous cover of Link Wray’s classic, “Rumble.” Their confrontation is a contemporary riff on the old western showdown between two gunslingers, except that Raven and Cody slug it out with large hammers that are normally used to break rocks. Then, they settle things the old fashion way: they beat the crap out of each other. Guess who prevails?

A lot of wonderful character actors early in their careers pop in this film. Ed Begley Jr. has a peculiar cameo as a quirky bum who gives Cody a tip as to where Ellen is being held. At one point, Cody and his group cross paths with the Sorels, doo-wop group that features a young Mykel T. Williamson and Robert Townsend. At the end of the film they sing “I Can Dream About You,” which was actually done by Dan Hartman, and proved to be the most successful song from the film, becoming a Billboard Top 10 hit in 1984. However, Winston Ford actually sang the version that is used in the film with Hartman performing the version on the soundtrack album. Lee Ving, lead singer of the punk band Fear has a memorable minor role as Raven’s right-hand man. He gets to do the tough guy thing and definitely looks the part of a badass biker. Cult rockabilly band The Blasters are quite fittingly the house band at Torchies, a scuzzy biker bar where the Bombers hang out and ogle a fishnet-clad go-go dancer played by Marine Jahan, Jennifer Beals’ dance double in Flashdance (1983).

Filming began in Chicago in April 1983 and continued for 45 days at various Los Angeles locations, including two weeks at a soap factory in Wilmington, California with additional filming taking place at Universal Studios. Some scenes, like the Strip District and Battery sequences, neon tubing was painted because its light was too bright. In some cases, penlights were used to fill in where professional lighting equipment was too strong. In the Richmond District, the environment’s look is “very soft; the colors don’t call attention to themselves,” cinematographer Andrew Laszlo said in an interview. In the Battery, the light is “contrasting and harsh, with vivid colors,” he said at the time. For the Parkside District, Argyle prints and plaids were used. For part of the train sequence, it was filmed in Chicago’s Kimball-Lawrence CTA yard, and on Lower Wacker Drive. Production designer John Vallone erected a special train car on Universal’s backlot to complete the sequence.

The ten days of filming in Chicago were exteriors at night on locations that included platforms of elevated subway lines and the depth of Lower Wacker Drive. For Hill, the subways and their look was vital to the world of the film and represented one of three modes of transportation with the other two being cars and motorcycles. While shooting in the city, the production was plagued by bad weather that included rain, hail and snow and a combination of all three.

A gigantic tarp covered six city blocks of Universal’s famous New York City backlots to double for the Richmond District setting and completely covering them so that night scenes could be filmed during the day. The tarp measured 1,240 feet long by 220 feet wide over both sets. This presented unusual problems. The sound of the tarp flapping in the wind interfered with the actors’ dialogue. Also, birds nested in the tarp and provided additional noise. The heat beneath the tarp in the summer heat often went above 100 degrees.

The exterior of the Richmond Theater, where Ellen sings at the beginning of the film was shot on the backlot with the interior done in the Wiltern Theater in L.A. for two weeks. Famous music producer Jimmy Iovine was brought in to work on five of the songs for the film and the soundtrack album. For Ellen’s singing voice, he combined the voices of Laurie Sargent and Holly Sherwood. Ellen’s band the Attackers were an actual band known as Face to Face – bandmates of Sargent. In addition to Iovine, Jim Steinman wrote two songs that bookend the entire film – “Nowhere Fast.,” and “Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young.” In the action sequence, like when Tom terrorizes the Battery, Hill edits in time with Cooder’s propulsive music. The two have had a long-standing collaborative relationship over the years and this is one of their early ones but already they comfortably compliment each other. This sequence was filmed in Wilmington, California with two huge gas tanks to provide the necessary explosions.

Hill and Universal were so confident that they had a hit on their hands that Streets of Fire was to be the first of a proposed trilogy called, “The Adventures of Tom Cody,” with subsequent sequels to be called The Far City and Cody’s Return. However, the film fared badly at the box office. It opened in 1,150 theaters on June 1, 1984 and grossed a $2.4 million in its opening weekend. After ten days, it had only made $4.5 million. In relation, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock had made $24.8 million in the same time. Streets of Fire went on to make a paltry $8 million in North America, well below its $14.5 million budget.

Streets of Fire received mostly negative reviews from critics at the time. In her review for the New York Times, Janet Maslin criticized the film’s screenplay as being misogynistic and “problematically crude.” Gary Arnold, in his review for the Washington Post, wrote that “as romantic leads, Pare and Lane are pretty much a washout,” and that “most of the action climaxes are treated as such throwaways that you begin to wonder if they bored the director.” Jay Scott, in his review for the Globe and Mail newspaper wrote, “when Streets of Fire is speeding like Mercury on methedrine, the rush left in its wake cancels out questions of content. But the minute the momentum slows, it’s another story – a story about a movie with no story at all.” However, Roger Ebert praised the film’s dialogue. He wrote, “the language is strange, too: It’s tough, but not with 1984 toughness. It sounds like the way really mean guys would have talked in the late 1950s, only with a few words different – as if this world evolved a slightly different language.” Shortly after the film’s release, Pare said in an interview, “Everyone liked it, and then all of a sudden they didn’t like it. I was already worried about whether I should do the sequel or not.”

Hill created a genre film that celebrates the clichés that make the action film work: the stoic hero, the despicable bad guy, and the beautiful damsel in distress. The world he creates is a mythical place that is a mishmash of styles from various decades. Streets of Fire is very much of its time when the fashion and style of the ‘50s made a comeback in the early ‘80s. So, the film is populated with classic cars from the era and architecture from the 1930 and ‘40s and yet Ellen’s clothes that she wears on stage and the music she plays is pure ‘80s mixed with Jim Steinman’s rock opera of the 1970s. As the song that ends the film – “Tonight Is What It Means to be Young” – illustrates, Streets of Fire is all about youthful energy and the power that rock ‘n’ roll has the ability to give hope and love in widesweeping melodramatic fashion.

Streets of Fire is a film that unapologetically wears its emotions on its sleeve. You have to appreciate a film that has the balls to let it all hang out like that. In a nice twist, the guy does not get the girl at the end of the film. Ellen is going places with her music and Cody is not the kind of guy to carry her guitar, as he puts it. But they are clearly still in love and he tells her that he’ll be there if she needs him. Ellen takes to the stage and sings an emotional song to end the film. Offstage, Cody gives her this look that is absolutely heartbreaking and clearly indicates how he feels about her and how hard it is for him to leave her again, but he doesn’t belong in her world. Cody leaves with McCoy to go looking for what we assume will be more adventures. Sadly, the commercial and critical failure of Streets of Fire killed of the possibility of sequels. Or did it?

In an intriguing twist, filmmaker Albert Pyun is currently working on an unofficial sequel to Hill’s film, entitled Road to Hell with Pare and Deborah Van Valkenburgh reprising their roles from the original film. In addition, Buffy the Vampire Slayer alum, Clare Kramer has also been cast. Pyun has said that his film is about Pare playing, “An ex-soldier and now hunted killer ... stranded when his jeep breaks down in the desert, on the road to Edge City. Edge City is where people who have crossed the line of darkness go to have their souls reborn. Cody is hunting for his lost love, the rock star Ellen Aim, believing she is the key to his redemption.” The filmmaker has also described this new one as more of a horror film. In addition, two Steinman songs were reportedly licensed for the film. This is certainly exciting news for fans of the film and if you want to check out more about it, go here.

In addition, there are a couple of fan sites dedicated to the film. This one is in Russian and here's another in English. Also, Charles Taylor wrote a really nice piece on the film for Salon.com. Check out the House of Self-Indulgence for a really wonderful appreciation of the film. Finally, here is a featurette that should be included on a Special Edition DVD should Universal ever decide to do one: