Streetwalkin’ (1985) Review

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 3 is for a competently shot cheap film with one genuinely good performance in it 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.

It also runs eighty-five minutes, which is the correct length for what it is, and it is 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 is doing something real inside a film that had no use for it, and who would not 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 is responsible for, arrived with nothing, and is played by somebody who decided to take the part seriously.

What Leo does is refuse the register. 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.

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.

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 is 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 is 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 returns twice with nothing changed about the circumstances, which is the clearest evidence of the problem. A location revisited should have acquired something between visits, and this one is simply available again.

What it lacks specifically 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 pursuer 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 this is where a better picture was available.

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 does not pay, and it is 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. The ensemble becomes a set of people the pursuer moves through, which is a waste of the one thing the film had built.

Julie Newmar appears in a small part and is the other recognizable name, fifteen years after Catwoman, which 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 a specific and 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 is menacing, is competent, and the film gives him nothing to want beyond the plot’s requirements.

Concorde and the Method

This was made under Roger Corman’s Concorde Pictures 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, which 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 did not pay for.

Joan Freeman directed and co-wrote it, which is 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 is 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.

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, which is why five films share it and none of them is good.

What the exercise demonstrates is that a subject can be entirely occupied by bad work. 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 is 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, which is the standard trajectory and is worth recording. A woman who directed one interesting film inside this system did not get offered a second.

Should you watch Streetwalkin’?

Only for Melissa Leo. A competently shot three-week production with a genuinely 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.

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