The '80s were a wild decade.
We know your watching time is limited. And the amount of things available to watch … is not. Looking for a movie? Nearly any movie ever made? It's probably streaming somewhere. That's a lot of movies. |
Below, we're suggesting two of them, the latest of our weekly double-feature recommendations. We think the movies will pair well — with each other and with you. |
Your weekday double feature: Doomed auteur musicals |
 | | Teri Garr and Raul Julia in "One From the Heart," Francis Ford Coppola's 1982 homage to musicals.American Zoetrope/Photofest |
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'Streets of Fire' and 'One From the Heart' |
Heading into early 1980s, the director Walter Hill was on a creative hot streak to rival that any of the era's great filmmakers, a list of films that included several drum-tight genre exercises ("The Driver," "The Long Riders," "Southern Comfort") and two genuine Hollywood hits ("The Warriors" and "48 Hrs."). Like any true auteur, Hill's instinct was to gamble house money on something bizarre, unexpected and commercially doomed: a neo-noir musical set in a fictionalized, era-collapsing gangland. |
Now streaming on Netflix, "Streets of Fire" (1984) is an unquestionably flawed enterprise, wounded most deeply by Michael Paré's charmless lead performance as Tom Cody, a sensitive tough guy who goes to war against a biker gang in order to rescue his singer ex-girlfriend (Diane Lane). But there's much to savor about Hill's colorful film, including a fictionalized urban setting that mixes and matches elements from the '50s and the '80s, and a propulsive soundtrack that feels similarly of its time and out of time. And if all else fails, Hill still knows how to deliver the action goods, following Tom and a ragtag crew as they blow up gas tanks, toss greasers through storefront windows and peel through rain-slicked streets in a top-down convertible. |
Two years earlier, riding high off the ultimate success of the famously troubled production "Apocalypse Now," Francis Ford Coppola spent more than house money on his own musical "One From the Heart" (1982), which not only strained studio resources but also torpedoed his own production company. Coppola was also experimenting with form, combining the gorgeous artifice of a traditional soundstage musical with the raw melodrama of a Las Vegas couple (Teri Garr and Frederic Forrest) facing serious marital problems. Critics and audiences rejected it, but time has been kind to Coppola's big swing for the fences, which is transfixing and visionary, even as it is conspicuously off rhythm. SCOTT TOBIAS |
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