D2D entry #62: Street Girls (1975, Michael Miller)
(Featured in 42nd Street #2.)
I know in some quarters that Paul Schrader’s Hardcore gets a tough rap for Schrader’s perceived moralism. But look at it this way - it could be a lot worse, and this flick is living proof. Street Girls is a collision between a social-problem telemovie (one of those “Christina S.: Portrait of a Teenage Junkie Whore” deals) and a scuzzy sexploitation feature, and while it precedes the Schrader film by four years, it can’t help to come off today like the wretched moral-compass-free version of that film; ten minutes in the company of this thing and you’ll be hankering for a dose of lapsed-Calvinist guilt. Really, it’s a combination of two genres that sound like they’d complement each other (and did for decades on the old-school exploitation/roadshow circuit) but, in the incapable hands of Michael Miller, decidedly don’t. Miller’s idea of gritty realism is flat, gray boredom, like the aftermath of a heroin jag, and the enervated tone leeches all interest out of the more exploitable elements. To pull off a balancing act like this requires an exacting touch, a sense of passion and a willingness to go full-tilt nutters when need be. (Ideally, think of Bo Vibenius’s Thriller: A Cruel Picture, an imperfect slab of rage that nonetheless strikes an admirable balance between gutbucket sleaze, social anger and delicate artistry.) All Miller’s got is his heavy hands, one of which wants to make a movie where girls shake their tits while the other wants to make a melodrama about wayward girls; this dissonance crushes the life, the point, anything useful out of the film. If Street Girls wasn’t also the film debut of Barry Levinson (who co-wrote the script), it likely would have been lost to the tide of history; as it stands, it’s only available via a cheap public-domain DVD, with a no-buck presentation that feels appropriately scummy, like something you’d scrape off the bottom of your shoe. It deserves no better.
