Streetwalkin’ (1985) Review
5/10
A young woman arrives in New York from New Jersey with her younger brother, is recruited within a day, and by the end of the first act has decided to leave the man she works for. He objects violently. The rest is a night.
The 5 is for a competently shot cheap film with one good performance in it, twenty minutes of ensemble material worth the time, and no interest in its own subject beyond the chase. The premise is the district, the plot is a pursuit, and the two have almost nothing to do with each other.
The biggest problem with Streetwalkin’ is how little curiosity it has. It sets up a whole working world on those blocks and then treats it as scenery for a man shouting down stairwells. I didn’t hate it. I mostly resented the hour it wasted after a first act that promised something better. It also runs eighty-five minutes. That’s the correct length for what it is, and it’s the one production decision in the whole film that nobody sitting through it could reasonably find very much fault with at all.
What makes it worth a paragraph is Melissa Leo, who’s doing something real inside a film that had no use for it, and who wouldn’t get another lead for a very long time.
She won an Academy Award twenty-five years after this, for The Fighter, and has since worked continuously in serious material. The gap between the two is the whole shape of a certain kind of career.
Melissa Leo
Cookie is nineteen, has a fourteen-year-old brother she’s responsible for, and arrived with nothing, and the actor playing her decided to take the part seriously. What Leo does is refuse the tone. The role as written is a victim in a pursuit, and the performance is a young woman making a series of practical assessments about a situation, and the two things are visibly in conflict throughout. The best material is early and small. She negotiates a rate, works out where to sleep, calculates what her brother needs, and the film treats all of that as setup and she treats it as the character. Leo is the reason I’d tell anyone to sit through this. I love watching her count money and weigh options while the film keeps trying to turn her into a scream. She plays a person, and the movie around her wants a target.
The bus station is where the film establishes all of it at once. She arrives with a bag and a fourteen-year-old, has a small amount of money, and the first twenty minutes are a series of practical problems solved in the order they arrive.
She was twenty-four, had done some television, and would spend the next eight years in small parts before Homicide. A performance like this in a film like this is a fact about the industry instead of about her.
A performer can play the character the script didn’t write, and the conflict is visible. That’s a useful diagnostic for your own drafts, because it shows you where the writing is thinner than the material. If an actor keeps finding something you didn’t put there, the thing they’re finding was the book.
Practical calculation is characterization. Somebody working out a rate, a place to sleep and what a dependant needs tells the reader more than any statement of intent.
Give your protagonist somebody to be responsible for and every decision acquires a second consideration.
The Structure Is One Chase
The film establishes its situation in about twenty minutes and is then a pursuit for an hour, and the pursuit is the entire back two-thirds. That’s a legitimate shape and it requires variation. A chase sustained for an hour needs changing terrain, changing stakes and periodic reversals, and this one has a small number of locations and repeats them. There’s a sequence in a parked car, one on a rooftop, one in a stairwell and one in a diner, and the film returns to at least two of those more than once with nothing changed about the situation.
The rooftop comes back twice with nothing changed about the circumstances, and that’s where my patience ran out. A location revisited should have picked up something between visits. This one is simply available again, and I could feel the production schedule behind every return trip. What it lacks is escalation. The pursuer is equally dangerous in the first confrontation and the last, the protagonist is no better resourced at the end than the beginning, and the film substitutes duration for development. The villain is also the film’s weakest element. Dale Midkiff plays him at maximum volume from his first scene, which removes any capacity to escalate, and the performance has one setting for ninety minutes. Compare what Nighthawks on this page does with a pursuit in the same city. The stakes change, the rules change, the protagonist has to become something different, and the film is only ninety-nine minutes.
The Ensemble
The film surrounds its lead with a group of women working the same blocks, and a better picture was available in them. Each is given a characteristic and a scene. One is older and has a plan, one is using, one is new, and the material establishing them is the most interesting twenty minutes in the film.
The conversations between them are also the only place the picture is curious about its subject. Rates, police, safety arrangements, who watches whose corner, and the practical mechanics of the work discussed by people doing it. One conversation covers what to do about somebody who doesn’t pay, and it’s the most interesting ninety seconds in the film. Four women working out an enforcement problem they have no access to any institution about.
All of it is abandoned when the chase begins, and it’s the worst choice in the film.
The ensemble becomes a set of people the pursuer moves through. Those four women talking shop were the best film in the building, and somebody decided a man running up stairs was more interesting. I’d have thrown out half the chase to keep them.
Julie Newmar appears in a small part and is the other recognizable name, fifteen years after Catwoman. That places her in the same position Tyrrell and Calhoun occupy in Angel. A cheap film with a performer from an earlier era somewhere in the cast is an extremely common arrangement, and it was how a great many careers were extended.
Antonio Fargas is also in it, six years after Starsky and Hutch, and the part is a pimp written with no interiority whatsoever. He’s menacing, is competent, and the film gives him nothing to want beyond the plot’s requirements.
An ensemble established and then converted into obstacles is the most common waste in cheap thrillers. The establishing scenes are usually the best writing in the film. If your supporting characters exist so the hero can encounter them during a pursuit, they’re terrain instead of people, and the reader can tell which you wrote them as. Practical shop talk is the fastest way to make a working world credible. Rates, schedules, arrangements and who covers for whom.
Notice which twenty minutes of your own draft are the most interesting. That’s frequently the book you should be writing.
Concorde and the Method
Roger Corman’s Concorde Pictures made this after New World was sold, and the production method is the same one that produced Angel. Three weeks, New York exteriors, a small cast, a premise that could be described in one line, and a budget that required all of the above. The result is competent and interchangeable. The location work is again the incidental asset. Mid-eighties New York exteriors, shot fast with available light. That produces the same documentary quality Ms. 45 has for the same reasons.
The winter helps as well. It was shot cold, everybody is in heavy coats, breath is visible, and the discomfort of the locations reads as production value the budget didn’t pay for.
Joan Freeman directed and co-wrote it. That’s a fact worth recording. A woman directing a film about this subject in this category in 1985 is unusual, and the ensemble material is probably why the film has any interest in the women at all.
The ensemble scenes are where that’s visible. Somebody decided the women should talk to each other about the practicalities of the job, and nothing in the commercial brief required that decision.
I give Freeman real credit here. Those scenes feel like somebody fighting for a better movie inside a cheaper one, and I wish she’d won more of those fights.
What the Category Was For
This page has five films with very nearly the same premise made within a decade, and the consistency is the interesting thing instead of any individual entry. The commercial fact is that a film about this subject could be made for very little, marketed on one image, and distributed reliably to drive-ins, grindhouses and the emerging video market. That market paid for the premise and not for anything done with it. That’s why five films share it and none of them is good.
What the exercise shows is that bad work can entirely occupy a subject. Anybody wanting to make a serious film about this in 1985 was operating in a category the audience had already been taught to read a particular way.
Ms. 45 is on this page and is the exception, and the reason is that Ferrara was making an argument and the others were filling an order.
That distinction is available in every category and it’s usually visible in the first twenty minutes. A film with an argument spends its opening establishing a position and a film filling an order spends it establishing a premise. Freeman went on to direct Satisfaction and then largely worked in television. That’s the standard trajectory and is worth recording. A woman who directed one interesting film inside this system didn’t get offered a second.
The volume of bad work occupying a subject can spoil it. Readers arrive with expectations set by everything else in the category, and a serious book has to defeat those before it can start. That’s a real cost and it’s the reason some subjects are effectively closed for a generation.
Argument versus order is the whole distinction. One writer had something to say about a district and the others had a distribution deal.
When five works share a premise within a decade, look at who was paying. The answer explains the pattern better than any analysis of the individual works.
Should you watch Streetwalkin’?
Yes, for Melissa Leo and the women on the corner, as long as you know what you’re getting. A competently shot three-week production with a good performance fighting the script, twenty minutes of ensemble material that suggests a better film, and an hour of chase that repeats itself because duration was cheaper than development.
A 5 is where it ends up after I weigh twenty good minutes against an hour of chase. Leo, Freeman’s ensemble scenes and those cold New York exteriors win the points, and Midkiff’s one-volume shouting and that twice-visited rooftop take back just as many. It’s more frustrating than a flatly bad film would be, because the better movie is sitting right there in the first act and the people making it walked away from it.
