Streets of Fire is a 1984 American action crime film directed by Walter Hill, from a screenplay by Hill and Larry Gross. Described on the poster and in the opening credits as "A Rock & Roll Fable", the film combines the culture and themes of the 1950s with the then-current 1980s. Starring Michael Paré, Diane Lane, Rick Moranis, Amy Madigan, Willem Dafoe, Deborah Van Valkenburgh, E.G. Daily, and Bill Paxton, the film follows ex-soldiers Tom Cody (Paré) and McCoy (Madigan) as they embark on a mission to rescue Cody's ex-girlfriend Ellen Aim (Lane), a rock singer who was kidnapped by Raven Shaddock (Dafoe), the leader of an outlaw motorcycle gang called the Bombers.
Streets of Fire was theatrically released in the United States on June 1, 1984, to mixed reviews from critics and was a box office failure, grossing $8.1 million against its $14.5 million production budget. The film was intended to be the first installment of a planned trilogy titled The Adventures of Tom Cody, but the project was ultimately dropped due to the film's critical and commercial performance. An unofficial sequel, Road to Hell, was released in 2008, with Paré and Van Valkenburgh reprising their roles.
Plot In Richmond, a city district in a near future dystopian time period that resembles the 1950s (labelled "another time, another place"), Ellen Aim, lead singer of the rock band Ellen Aim and the Attackers, has returned home for a concert. The Bombers, a biker gang from another part of town called the Battery, led by Raven Shaddock, crash the concert and kidnap Ellen.
Witnessing this is Reva Cody, who telegrams her brother Tom, an ex-soldier and Ellen's ex-boyfriend, asking him to come home. Upon his return, Tom defeats a small gang of greasers and takes their car. Reva tries to convince him to rescue Ellen, but he refuses. Tom then goes to a local tavern, the Blackhawk, where he meets a tomboyish mechanic and ex-soldier named McCoy and lets her stay with him and Reva. That night, Tom has a change of heart and agrees to talk to Ellen's manager and current boyfriend, Billy Fish, about rescuing her.
While Reva and McCoy go to the diner where Reva works, Tom acquires a cache of weapons, including a pump action shotgun, a revolver, and a lever action rifle. Tom meets Billy at the diner, and Billy agrees to pay him $10,000, but Tom also requires that Billy accompany him into the Battery to get Ellen, since he used to live there. McCoy also talks Tom into cutting her in for 10% in exchange for her help.
In the Battery, they go to Torchie's, a club where Billy used to book bands and where Raven has Ellen tied up in an upstairs bedroom. McCoy enters and is led upstairs by one of the Bombers, whom she knocks out before holding Raven and some of his gang members at gunpoint. Meanwhile, Tom creates a diversion outside by shooting the gas tanks on the gang's motorcycles and then rescues Ellen. Tom sends Ellen off with McCoy and Billy in the convertible, telling them to meet him at the Grant Street underpass, and blows up the gas pumps outside a bar. Raven confronts Tom and warns him that he will be coming for Ellen and for him, too. Tom escapes on the one intact motorcycle and meets up with the others.
The group is joined by "Baby Doll", a fan of Ellen's, who warns them that the police are looking for the people who were behind the attack at Torchie's. To escape, the group hijacks the tour bus of a doo-wop group called the Sorels. The bus is stopped by a police blockade. Billy tries to get rid of the corrupt police officers by bribing them, but Tom and McCoy have to resort to holding the police at gunpoint and shooting up their vehicles. The group, along with the Sorels, ditch the bus and take a train back to Richmond.
Raven meets with Ed Price, the head of the police department, and promises him no more trouble if he arranges for Tom to meet with him alone. Price plans on arresting Raven, so he tells Tom to get out of town to avoid more violence. Tom goes to the hotel where Ellen and Billy are staying to collect his reward, but he takes only McCoy's cut and throws the rest back at Billy. As Tom storms out, Ellen follows and the two embrace in the rain. After having sex, Tom and Ellen discuss the possibility of eloping.
Price, with reinforcements, is about to arrest Raven but is ambushed by an overwhelming number of Bombers. Meanwhile, Ellen is on a train with Tom and McCoy, believing that Tom is leaving with her, but he knocks out Ellen and returns to town to confront Raven. Tom and Raven duel using sledgehammers and their fists, with Tom being victorious. The defeated gang carries their leader away. Later, at a concert, the Sorels open for Ellen and her band. Tom tells Billy that Ellen needs him more than she needs Tom, and the two bid each other a cordial goodbye. Tom then says farewell to Ellen, promising that he'll always be there for her if she needs him. Ellen performs on stage, while Tom rides off with McCoy.
Cast
Production Development The concept for Streets of Fire came together during the making of 48 Hrs., and reunited director Walter Hill with screenwriter Larry Gross, and producers Lawrence Gordon and Joel Silver, all of whom worked together on that production. Gross later recalled:
Streets of Fire began in the euphoria of knowing that Paramount really liked 48 and wanted to be in business with us if they could. What happened was that after we screened that cut for Paramount, Larry looked at Walter and said, "Paramount is pregnant; let's get something and set it up right away." Walter knew what he meant—that we were in a great position here—so he said, "We can do this two ways: present an idea now and get a deal done, or write a script on spec and get a lot more money." Walter proudly considers himself a capitalist, so he suggested we do the latter. According to Hill, the film's origins 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 questions of honor".
According to Gross, Hill wanted to make a film about a comic book hero, but since he did not like "any of the comic books" he had read, he wanted it to be an original character. "He wanted to create his own 'comic book movie', without the source material actually being a comic book", said Gross, which led to the creation of Tom Cody.
Writing The four men began planning Streets of Fire while completing 48 Hrs. Gross published a diary from the shoot of 48 Hrs. which had an entry dated 12 August 1982, the night before filming on that movie started: Walter presents me with a page of notes he's prepared for a new script. It will be the first in a series of adventures of an action hero he's had it in his mind to create for a long time. The character's name is Tom Cody. And Walter has it in his head to create a franchise about him...introducing him as The Stranger. He asks me if I'm interested in writing the script with him...I ask him is the Pope Catholic? Larry [Gordon] and Joel [Silver] would be along on this ride. Suits me. During 48 Hrs., Gross said he thought that Hill had received "a bum rap on the woman question" over the years. "People think that he doesn't like women and he knows that's not true. I think that's going to be demonstrated even more clearly in his next films. He told me he's going to do this new thing: he's going to put a female character right in the center of the narrative."
Gross later said they were affected "as everyone was at the time" by the success of Flashdance and they decided during writing that the film would be a musical: We said this movie is a stylized movie, it's not so different from the world of a musical. And there were a few other things that contributed to that direction. One was the decision on Universal's part, a crazy decision, to shoot the movie almost entirely in the studio under a tarpaulin. They built this gigantic tarpaulin, and the Battery and all these other places were built as real places. The Richlands. And just so you know, this is the early ’80s and you had stylized films—like New York, New York—that were all done on set and that idea was in the air. That idea of a totally artificial universe. The point is that we had in mind one sentence inspired by George Lucas: "in a galaxy long ago", a futuristic past. That was in our heads...there's the past and there's the future, sort of. Hill thought "the audience will go with you when you set up an abstract world with teenage values and play out a drama within this. It was kind of real but it wasn't really. I always said whenever someone says fantasy they immediately think of more Disney-esque. The idea of a hard hitting drama in a fantasy world, that was kind of different at the time... I always thought of it as a musical. They kind of saw it worked in the world of an MTV video.""Interview with Walter Hill – Chapter 5" Directors Guild of America accessed 12 June 2014
Gross says he and Hill were also influenced by the teen films of John Hughes. We were in the universe of the teenage movie. Teenage reality. So we said here's what's going to be weird about the world of our movie: No one's going to be over 30. The world is a high school, essentially. And Tom Cody will be the football hero. And Willem Dafoe is the greaser. Remember: You had John Hughes at the time, and then you had Coppola making two high school movies: The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. So Walter said we’re going to make a high school movie that's also going to be a comic book and also going to be a musical. Gross says Hill did not want the film to be too violent. As a result, it was decided that no blood would be shown and none of the characters would die. "He'd say it would be inappropriate to direct this movie if there were any blood", said Gross. "We’re in the world of Cocteau, we’re in the world of Beauty and the Beast. This is a fairy tale. Now...he neglected to mention that some fairy tales are very violent."
Gross and Hill would work out their ideas in detail. Gross would do a draft and Hill would rewrite it. "He did not love creating scripts from scratch; he loved rewriting." By this stage however, Gross and Hill had worked together so closely Gross says "I began to develop a strong sense for knowing how to sound like he did."
Financing When the script was finished, they sent it to Paramount. Gross says that Jeff Berg, Hill's agent, Larry Gordon, and Michael Eisner, head of production at Paramount, "got into some kind of a fight when the script was finished. We learned later that, I believe, Eisner rejected it on the grounds that it was too similar to Indiana Jones conceptually. So they didn't pull the trigger and Berg ended up selling it to Universal."
They submitted the script to Universal executive Bob Rehme in January 1983, and by the end of the weekend, the studio had greenlit the production. This was the fastest greenlight Hill had ever received for a film, and he owed the decision to the box office success of 48 Hrs.
The title The film's title came from a song written and recorded by Bruce Springsteen on his 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town.P Negotiations with Springsteen for rights to the song delayed production several times. Originally, plans were made for the song to be featured on the film's soundtrack, to be sung by Ellen Aim at the end of the film, but when Springsteen was told that the song would be re-recorded by other vocalists, he withdrew permission for the song to be used. Jim Steinman was brought in to write the opening and closing songs, and "Streets of Fire" was replaced by "Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young". The studio claimed that they replaced Springsteen's song because it was a "downer".
Casting