Times Square (1980) Review

A politician’s daughter with a heart condition and a violent girl who has been in institutions meet in a psychiatric assessment unit, walk out, and set up in an abandoned pier building. One of them starts a radio following by phoning a DJ.

The 6 is for a film with a genuine subject, two good performances and visible damage. The version that exists has had a central relationship cut out of it, which means large portions of the running time are operating on material the audience cannot see.

What it has that nothing else does is footage. This was shot on 42nd Street in 1979, in the actual arcades, theaters and doorways, eleven years before any of it was removed, and the location work is the reason to watch it.

The Place

Forty-second Street in 1979 was a functioning economy of pornographic theaters, arcades, three-card operations, massage parlours and about two dozen bars, and the film shot in all of it.

The camera is at street level throughout. Marquees, ticket booths, the specific density of signage, people working doorways, and a quality of light that came from a mile of neon and has no modern equivalent.

The film also catches the district at a specific hour repeatedly. Late evening, before the crowds and after the offices, when the marquees are lit and the pavements are half empty, and that particular emptiness is the thing no reconstruction has ever managed.

What the film is honest about is that this was somebody’s neighborhood. There are people working, a diner, a record shop, and the picture presents the district as a place with residents and not as a moral condition.

Nicky’s squat is the clearest version of that. An abandoned pier building with a mattress, a record player and a view of the water, made habitable by two people with nothing, and the film films it as somewhere to live.

The pier itself is gone as well. That stretch of the Hudson waterfront was derelict when this was shot, was cleared in the eighties, and is now a park, which means the film contains two vanished places instead of one.

That footage is now the film’s primary value and it was not the intention. The cleanup began in the late eighties, was complete by the mid-nineties, and almost nothing in these frames survives.

What replaced it is also part of the record. The district was rebuilt around a Disney theater and a set of retail tenancies, which is a specific answer to the question of what a city does with a place like this.

What Was Cut

Allan Moyle shot a film in which the two girls fall in love, and the released version has that removed.

The consequence is structural and obvious. Nicky and Pamela’s relationship is the engine of the plot, is referred to constantly by the behavior on screen, and has no statement of what it is anywhere in the picture.

Specific evidence survives in the cut. A scene where one paints the other’s face, a jealousy sequence involving a man, a rooftop conversation, and a farewell that is played at the pitch of a romance and is presented as a friendship.

Moyle has discussed this publicly since and left the production during post. What remains is a film whose emotional logic requires something the audience is not shown, which is a specific kind of damage and is different from a film that is simply bad.

Robert Stigwood produced it, having made Saturday Night Fever and Grease, and the reported intention was a soundtrack vehicle. A studio wanting a record and a director wanting a love story between two girls in 1980 is a conflict with only one possible outcome.

The soundtrack was also released as a double album and was the commercial object the production was organized around, which explains the running time given to musical sequences and the film’s willingness to stop for them.

Robin Johnson

Nicky is played by a seventeen-year-old with no professional experience who was found in a Brooklyn school, and the performance is the best reason the film has a following.

The voice is the first thing. It is unusually deep, unusually rough, and belongs to somebody who has been shouting, and it makes every line she delivers sound like it cost her something.

The physical performance is the other half. Johnson moves like somebody who expects to be pushed, occupies a doorway instead of a room, and the film repeatedly places her against architecture that is much larger than she is.

What she does with the part is refuse to be sympathetic. Nicky is aggressive, unreliable, funny, steals from people who help her, and is physically reckless in a way the film does not romanticize.

She made almost nothing afterward, which is a familiar outcome and a genuine loss. A performance this specific from somebody with no training is the sort of thing a career is normally built on.

The Music

The soundtrack is one of the best of the period and it is doing a specific job, which is to establish that these two girls are inside a cultural moment instead of observing one.

The Ramones, Suzi Quatro, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Roxy Music, XTC and Gary Numan, and the selections are contemporary instead of nostalgic because the film was made while all of it was current.

Johnson also performs, and the two original songs are better than they need to be. Damn Dog is the one people remember and it is a genuine piece of writing instead of a prop.

Trini Alvarado has the harder and less rewarded half of the pairing. Pamela is the one with somewhere to go back to, which means every scene requires her to be choosing this, and she was thirteen when it was shot.

The radio structure is the film’s best mechanism. A DJ playing requests, taking calls, and gradually turning two runaways into a local phenomenon, which is how a following really forms and is rarely shown.

Tim Curry plays the DJ and the part is more ambiguous than the film admits. Johnny LaGuardia is exploiting two teenage girls for content while also being the only adult who takes them seriously, and the picture never resolves which of those is doing more work.

Curry was also a year past Rocky Horror and is playing almost entirely against that, with no theatricality anywhere in it. Johnny is a working broadcaster with a shift to fill and a commercial instinct about what will get him an audience.

The Ending Does Not Work

The last act delivers a rooftop performance, a crowd, a reconciliation with a father and a resolution that the preceding eighty minutes do not support.

The problem is partly the cut. A relationship that has been removed cannot be resolved, so the film resolves the family plot instead, which was never the subject.

The father is the plot the film retreats into and he was never interesting. A politician running on a morality platform whose own daughter is living in the district he is campaigning against is a good irony and it is not a story, and the film spends most of its last reel discovering that fact and the film spends its last reel discovering that.

The crowd sequence is also unearned. A following established through a radio show becomes a physical audience on a roof, and the film has not done the work of showing anybody deciding to go there.

The correct version of that sequence is visible in the film’s own radio structure. A phone-in, a request, somebody telling somebody else, and the crowd assembling because the film has shown the mechanism by which a following really spreads.

What the film wanted is visible underneath. The two girls end the picture separated by a decision one of them makes, and the shape of that is still present, and the reason for it has been cut out.

Should you watch Times Square?

Yes, for the footage and for Robin Johnson. Forty-second Street as it was in 1979 filmed at street level, a seventeen-year-old with no training giving a performance nobody could repeat, one of the decade’s best soundtracks, and a relationship cut out of the middle of it.

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