ROME – The resounding success of 48 hoursin 1982, had three great merits: it gave shape to the filmic grammar of the genre buddy cop made Eddie Murphy’s star explode and shortly thereafter, with Beverly Hills Cop – A cop in Beverly Hills, will reach consecration, but above all it allowed Walter Hill to give shape to the film he had dreamed of making all his life. Why Streets of fire, from 1984, is not simply a small (s)cult from the Eighties. It is the wish that comes true with the magic of cinema, of what the teenager Walter Hill imagined as the perfect film. A film in which to insert all those things that he thought were: «Fantastic then, but for which I still have a great affection: customized cars, neon lights, kisses in the rain, night trains, and rock stars, motorcycles, chases, leather jackets and matters of honor».
Together with Larry Gross, Lawrence Gordon, Joel Silver, Hill began to think about drafting the concept during the making of 48 hours. The day before the start of filming something that everyone knew for sure would be really important, Gross began writing what turned out to be a logbook full of curiosities and anecdotes. On August 12, 1982, the night before filming began, he wrote the following words: «Walter today presented me with a page of notes he prepared for a potential new script. It will be the first in a series of action hero adventures that he has been meaning to create for a long time. The character’s name is Tom Cody and Walter plans to create a franchise about him by presenting him as The stranger. He asks me if I’m interested in writing it with him, I ask him, is the Pope Catholic?».
The success of 48 hours he did the rest. That take of nearly $80 million allowed Hill to propose Streets of fire to any executive. Hill believed in it a lot. A bit like the previous one The Warriors of the Night, he imagined it as a comic book in film form full of rock-pop melodies that rage in every sequence, strong values, a great female character alongside the hero who is all in one piece but with a heart of gold, an evil villain to the bone and a real drama inscribed within an abstract world. Suspended in time, Streets of fire, poised between reality and dream, anachronisms and modernity, past and present, and a narrative that flows quickly in rhythm and intentions. But also in the development, in the plot, in the dry lines of dialogue, in the typified and two-dimensional characterizations. A work, Streets of fireadolescent in construction, but with a fascinating naivety.
The dream of Walter Hill’s life is the full testimony of the narrative colors of his cinematic time. There is the typical video clip aesthetic of Flashdance and of the MTV Generation, the flavor of adventure for kids halfway between Spielberg and Coppola and the romantic one à la Hughes, but without ever pushing the accelerator all the way down. There is no explicit violence in Streets of fire. Hill’s is a musical fairy tale made up of good and bad, motorcyclists and lone riflemen, and princesses to be saved who in the dystopian Richmond, land of conquest of the Bombers, are rockers with melodious voices and a mesmerizing stage presence. That of a formidable Diane Lane who remembers the character of Ellen Aim as: «The first fascinating role I had» and who at the audition with Hill showed up in leather trousers, a fishnet top, and high-heeled boots, outlasting the competition from Daryl Hannah.
Hill was so impressed by Lane that he wrote more scenes for her to increase her running time. And on the other hand, a large part of the forty-year legacy of that Streets of fire which saw US theaters go dark on June 1, 1984, rests entirely on his musical performances. Sequences to which Hill entrusted the opening and closing of the story: Nowhere Fast And Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young. But the real piece of the soundtrack capable of truly capturing the collective imagination of its time – and not only – is undoubtedly I Can Dream About You which in Hill’s stage illusion we see sung by The Sorels but which in reality was written and performed by Dan Hartman. Against all odds, however, when Hill and Gross completed the script, despite the great interest shown by Paramount after the success of 48 hoursnothing happened.
Jeff Berg, Hill’s agent, was rejected by Paramount’s then head of production, Michael Eisner, because he deemed the subject too similar to Indiana Jones in conceptual terms. An excuse like any other probably. Enough, however, to push Berg to propose Streets of Fire to Universal Pictures where he found the favor and intentions of Bob Rehme. They were so bewitched executives of Universal from Hill’s story to give the green light to production within a couple of days by allocating a substantial budget of 14 and a half million dollars. A choice that unfortunately did not find favor with the public. Despite positive test screenings, in fact, at the box office Streets of fire (streaming on Apple TV+ and Prime Video) had little success, grossing just over $8 million. A commercial flop – it’s true – but not entirely in artistic terms.
Of course, plans for a hypothetical trilogy about Tom Cody (Michael Paré) were canceled (The Far City And Cody’s Return the provisional titles of the next two scripts) but as often happened during his career, also Streets of fire it has been rehabilitated by critics-and-audiences over the next few decades. Not at that moment though. That flop, in fact, prevented Hill from being able to direct another long-desired and sought-after project. The film adaptation of the comic adventures of Dick Tracy for which Universal had originally hired John Landis and which Hill – brought in as a replacement – abandoned in the early stages of pre-production after a budget dispute with the executives and the interpreter-prince Warren Beatty. Five years later Beatty himself will direct it, but that’s a whole different story…
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- VIDEO | Here for the Nowhere Fast music clip:
