Street Girls (1975) Review
3/10
A man arrives in a college town looking for his daughter, who stopped writing. He works through the people who knew her, each of whom sends him further into the same small economy, and what he finds is worse than not finding her. The 3 is for a film with a workable structure, no resources, and no interest in the daughter as a person. The search is conducted entirely from the father’s position and the young woman at the center is a destination instead of a character.
This one annoyed me more than a bad movie usually does, because I can see the good film sitting inside it.
The skeleton is sound and the setting is a gift. Then the filmmakers point all of it at the father and treat his daughter like an address he’s trying to find. I spent most of the running time wanting somebody behind the camera to care about her as much as the plot claims he does.
Carol Case plays her and made nothing else of note. That’s the other reason the part is empty. A role written thin and cast without resources produces a figure the film can’t recover even when it finally arrives at her. There’s one scene where she’s alone and it’s the film’s best few seconds. She’s sitting on a bed doing nothing in particular, the camera holds, and for about ten seconds the picture is about a person instead of about a search. What makes it worth a paragraph is the credit list. Barry Levinson co-wrote it, Michael Miller directed, and both went on to heavy careers, and this is the kind of film those careers start in.
The Search Structure Works
The film’s shape is a chain of encounters, each of which supplies one piece of information and one further name, and the structure is sound.
The landlady sequence is the best executed of them. She wants rent that’s owed, has no interest in the daughter, and the information Sven gets out of her is a side effect of a conversation about money that she’s winning.
I like the landlady more than anybody else in the picture. She’s the one character with her own agenda, she’s winning the conversation, and for a couple of minutes the film feels alive. That scene tells me the writers knew how to do this, and it makes the rest of the film more irritating.
Sven works through a boyfriend, a landlady, a bar, a dealer and a club, and the film escalates by having each person be slightly further into the trade than the last.
That’s the standard construction of this kind of story and it’s used competently here. Nobody knows everything, each person knows the next person, and the father’s progress is a function of how much unpleasantness he’ll accept. The best version of the idea is the moment he realizes the people he’s questioning aren’t withholding. They don’t know where she is, haven’t thought about her, and the film establishes that she’s vanished into something that doesn’t keep records.
That’s the film’s single best idea and it arrives about halfway. A search assumes somebody is hiding something, and this one arrives at the conclusion that nobody is hiding anything and she’s simply stopped being anybody’s concern.
A chain-of-encounters search is the most reliable structure available for a missing-person story, and it works because each stage is a small complete scene. The requirement is escalation in the informant and not in the information. Each person should be further inside the thing than the last. Let the informants not know. A chain where everybody is concealing something is a conspiracy, and a chain where nobody has thought about her is a world.
The father’s progress measured by what he’s willing to accept is a better engine than his cleverness. Investigation as endurance is more truthful than investigation as deduction.
The Daughter Is Absent
Angela is described, discussed, remembered and eventually located, and she’s almost no material of her own until the final reel.
That absence is defensible as a technique and isn’t what’s happening here. A film can withhold a character to make a search about the searcher, and this one withholds her because it wasn’t interested.
The evidence is the last twenty minutes. When the film finally reaches her, she has nothing to say, no position to hold, and no account of how she got where she is beyond a sequence of events. That’s where I gave up on it. The film spends its whole length looking for a person and finds a blank when it gets there.
Compare what the same structure does when it cares. The mother’s kitchen scene in 8MM on this page is eight minutes about somebody absent and it establishes an entire person, and this film has a whole final act and establishes nobody.
What the film needed was a scene where she explains nothing and the audience understands anyway. A gesture, a routine, something she does without thinking, and the picture has ninety minutes and never finds one.
Eugene, Oregon
The location is the film’s one distinctive choice and the film doesn’t know what it has.
A small college town with a transient student population, a limited number of bars, and an economy that’s visible in its entirety. That’s a considerably more interesting setting for this material than a city. The implication available is that everybody in this town knows what’s happening and the scale makes it unavoidable. In New York a district absorbs people and in a town of this size the same trade is operating in a handful of buildings everybody drives past.
The film never states it and the location keeps suggesting it. A pizza place, a laundromat, a campus, and the same four or five people appearing in each. That’s an argument the picture assembled by accident.
The film also uses the size of the place against the father. He keeps encountering the same people, which in a city would read as coincidence and here reads as the town being small enough that nobody could have failed to know.
The campus is the sharpest part of that. Students walking past the same buildings, a parallel population of the same age doing something entirely different, and the film puts both in frame repeatedly without comment.
The Eugene material is the part that frustrates me most.
The same faces keep turning up at the pizza place and the laundromat, the campus sits right there in the frame, and the film has a real argument about small towns handed to it on a plate. I’d have built the whole last act around that. The picture shrugs and moves on.
A small setting for a story usually told in a large one is the cheapest available originality. The same events in a town where everybody is visible mean something different. The film has to notice. This one shot the setting and never drew the conclusion the setting was offering. Scale changes moral arithmetic. Anonymity is a feature of cities and its absence is a feature of towns, and a story about concealment plays differently in each. If your setting keeps implying something, that’s your theme arriving without an invitation. Take it.
Who Was in the Room
Barry Levinson co-wrote this in 1975. He’d write And Justice for All in 1979, then Diner in 1982, then Rain Man in 1988.
Michael Miller directed and went on to Jackson County Jail, a considerably better film, and then a long career in television including a great deal of respectable work.
The cast is largely unknown and stayed that way, with the exception of Christopher Joy and a very young Paul Pompian in a production role. Nobody in front of the camera built anything on this.
That distribution is the normal outcome. Films like this occasionally launch the people who wrote and directed them and almost never launch the people in them. That’s a fact about who the credit accrues to. Michael Miller’s Jackson County Jail arrived a year later with Yvette Mimieux and is a considerably better film using the same economics. That suggests the problem here was the material instead of the constraints.
Levinson has said very little about it publicly. That’s its own kind of answer. A director with an Academy Award has no particular reason to discuss a 1975 drive-in picture he co-wrote for money.
Why It Is on the Page
It’s the earliest film on this list by five years and the oldest version of the premise the page is built around. What that position shows is that the cycle didn’t begin in the eighties. The economics were in place by the mid-seventies, the drive-in market was the destination, and the premise was already being repeated before the films this page mostly covers were made.
That market is also the reason the film exists in the shape it does. Eighty-odd minutes, a hook describable on a poster, no stars, and a running time that fits a double bill, and very nearly every structural decision in the finished picture follows directly from those four requirements.
The other thing it establishes is the shape of the decline. This film has a father and a search, Angel has a schoolgirl and a tagline, and the intervening decade removed the framing device that let the earlier films claim a subject. I don’t think any of that makes Street Girls the better film. A category gets more honest about what it’s selling as the years go by, and the honesty doesn’t improve anything.
Ms. 45 is the counterexample on this page and it arrives in the middle of the decline. That means the pattern is a tendency instead of a rule. A category getting worse doesn’t prevent somebody making one good film inside it.
Find the earliest example of the thing you’re writing about. It usually has a framing device that later examples abandoned, and the device tells you what the material needed permission for. Here the permission is a father, and a decade later nobody needed one. A category becoming more direct about its appeal is a market signal instead of a creative development. The early version is frequently more interesting because it was still pretending. Eugene also had a functioning alternative press and a large transient student population in the mid-seventies, and the film’s choice of city was reportedly practical instead of thematic. That makes the argument it assembles accidental. Chronology is the cheapest analytical tool available and almost nobody uses it. Line the works up by date and the pattern is usually visible without any further argument.
Should you watch Street Girls?
No, except as a starting point. I give it a 3 for the search structure, the landlady, and an Oregon college town that keeps suggesting an argument the film never bothers to make. Everything else lets me down. The daughter at the center has nothing to say when the picture finally reaches her, and somebody made that choice on the page. Barry Levinson’s name on a 1975 drive-in credit is the main reason anybody will look it up, and I find that a little sad.
