Times Square (1980) Review
6/10
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 real subject, two good performances and visible damage. The version that exists has had a central relationship cut out of it. That means large portions of the running time are operating on material the audience can’t see.
I’m torn on this one. The two girls and the streets pull me in, and then the film keeps stopping for another song or cutting away from the one thing it’s really about, and I come out of it frustrated on the movie’s behalf. A 6 feels right for a picture I’d defend in pieces more than as a whole.
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 parlors and about two dozen bars, and the film shot in all of it. The camera is at street level throughout. Marquees, ticket booths, the 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 the same 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. That means the film contains two vanished places instead of one.
That footage is now the film’s primary value and it wasn’t 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, and I find the street footage in this film more moving than anything in its plot because of it.
Shoot the thing that’s disappearing and the work acquires a value nobody planned. This is available in writing at almost no cost, and the material is whatever is ordinary around you now. The mistake is assuming the ordinary isn’t worth recording because it’s ordinary.
Present a disreputable place as a place with residents. A district with workers, a diner and a record shop is more truthful and more damning than one presented as a condition.
Street-level and eye-level. An aerial shot of a district is a statement about it and a pavement shot is a description of it.
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 drives 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’s 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 isn’t shown. That’s its own kind of damage and is different from a film that’s 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. That explains the running time given to musical sequences and the film’s willingness to stop for them.
The performances carry a love story in every look and gesture, and I’m angry that whoever chose the record over the relationship wrecked the best thing Moyle had.
Robin Johnson
A seventeen-year-old with no professional experience who was found in a Brooklyn school plays Nicky, and the performance is the best reason the film has a following.
The voice is the first thing. It’s 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’s 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 doesn’t romanticize.
She made almost nothing afterward. That’s a familiar outcome and a real loss. A performance this specific from somebody with no training is the sort of thing a career is normally built on. Johnson is the reason I’d sit through this again. She never asks for the audience’s affection, and that raw, shouted voice moves me in a way polished teenage performances almost never do.
An untrained performer with the right physical quality can do something training removes. The corresponding literary version is a voice that doesn’t sound like other published prose. The risk is that it works once and can’t be repeated. That’s what happened here.
Let the more sympathetic character be the duller one. Pamela is reasonable and Nicky is impossible, and the audience attaches to the second. That’s honest about how attachment works.
Don’t romanticize recklessness. The film shows what Nicky’s behavior costs other people. That’s what stops the character being an attitude.
The Music
The soundtrack is among the best of the period and its job 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’s a real 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. That 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. That’s 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 don’t support. The problem is partly the cut. The film can’t resolve a relationship the cut has removed, so it resolves the family plot instead. That was never the subject. The picture loses me completely when it retreats into the father’s plot, because he was never interesting. A politician running on a morality platform whose own daughter is living in the district he’s campaigning against is a good irony and it’s not a story, and the film spends most of 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 hasn’t 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, the shape of that is still present, and the reason for it has been cut out. I find that ending sad for all the wrong reasons.
Removing a relationship from a finished work doesn’t remove its function. The scenes that depended on it still behave as though it exists, and readers detect the absence without being able to name it. That’s the most common damage in edited work and it’s close to unrepairable after the fact.
Resolve the plot you’ve been telling. If your ending settles a subplot because the main line has become unavailable, the audience will feel the substitution. A following has to be shown forming at the level of individuals. A crowd that assembles because the plot requires a crowd is a number and not an audience.
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, and a soundtrack as good as any from that decade are all worth your time. The 6 is what’s left after the production cut the heart out of it, and I resent that cut more than anything the people on screen do.
