So what’ve you got for us today?

Chris:

I went with Streets of Fire by Walter Hill. I first saw it on Canal+ (French TV channel) when I was a kid and I rediscovered it much later. My film knowledge was made through Canal+ and the local video-rental. I’d watch all the horror that would come on Saturday nights and we’d rent the Friday the 13^th movies at the video store. I grew up on these ‘pop-corn’ flicks. What ended up sticking were these oddball movies like The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, big-budget movie flops fuelled a pretty hefty dose of ambition.

Streets of Fire was released in 1984 and was made possible by the success of Walter Hill’s previous film 48 Hrs starring Eddie Murphy. Some see Streets of Fire as some sort of spiritual successor to The Warriors. It’s one of those movies that I consistently re-watch and am fascinated by. The setting is what makes the film really special. It’s set in a parallel universe, another dimension where the Eighties draw heavily from Fifties culture. You’ve got neons and Eighties fashion alongside Rockabilly culture, old vintage cars and an overall Wild Ones inspired atmosphere. It’s almost post-apocalyptic, too.

There are a lot of cool stylistic choices. There isn’t a drop of blood in the movie. The film is pretty violent and you’ve got people fighting with weapons but it’s still a Rock n’ roll fable, a fairy tale. No one really dies in the movie. The film was initially set to launch a trilogy but it flopped.

It’s basically retrofuturism set in the Eighties.

Exactly. It’s Fifties culture set against an Eighties backdrop. I often call it a Synthwave movie because it basically has the same relationship to the past that Synthwave fans have with Eighties culture, only this movie was doing it nearly forty years ago. It’s a fascinating blend of film noir, westerns and loads of different elements. There’s even a bit of Casablanca in there, with the whole storyline between the protagonist Tom Cody and his old lover.

The plot is ridiculously simple: a bicycle gang has kidnapped a girl and her ex is called upon to save her. It’s basically the plot to Super Mario. What really takes the film to new heights is the film’s soundtrack. The female lead is a singer plays in a band called Ellen Aim and the Attackers and the songs in the movie were done by a band called Fire Inc and composed by Jim Steinman, the kind of Wagnerian Rock. He’s the guy behind Meal Loaf’s Bat out of Hell and I’d do anything for Love as well as Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart and Holding out for a Hero. He writes Wagnerian Rock, which is basically pure power. His music pumps you up like crazy. The movie kicks off at a concert, set to an adrenaline-filled track called ‘Going Nowhere Fast’. It’s absolutely massive.

The Final Fight video games are actually directly inspired by Streets of Fire. The suspenders-wearing character Cody is directly inspired by Michael Paré’s character of the same name. The first episode of the Bubblegum Crisis anime also starts off with a homage to Streets of Fire and mimics the opening sequence at the concert with a performance by Priss and the Replicants.

Have you any news for the Synth Squad? Any updates?

Chris: We’ve had some cancelled interviews right before the lockdown. Right now we’re trying to get back into phoner interviews with artists. Our homepage is also currently migrating, but we’re still putting out our Sunday Selection and Tracks of the Day.

Pete: We started out doing phoner interviews but ended up focusing on face-to-face interviews. We really enjoyed the possibilities that it offered. We were more focused on covering events and face-to-face interviews, but now…

Chris: [Laughs]

Pete: We could still cover live-streamed sets, I guess… We’ll see.

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So what’ve you got for us today?

Pete Trautmann:

I’m going with Rambo III. I must’ve been nine or ten years old when I first saw it and it sparked my life-long interest in Stallone’s film career. It was typically the kind of films that would come on Sundays on Ciné Dimanche on TF1 (French TV) after a more family-friendly film. I’d tape those films and watch them on Wednesday since we didn’t have class on Wednesday mornings. I’d be alone at home, my parents were at work and I was allowed to watch what I had taped, they were pretty lenient in that regard.

Rambo is alongside the colonel Samuel Trautman, the dialogue is lighthearted and the film is filled with one-liners that stick with you when you’re a kid. For example, there’s this famous scene where Trautman is being interrogated by the Russian colonel Zaysen, who asks him where the American missiles are, to which he responds “in your ass!”. Apparently that’s where the French expression comes from (note: the French version “dans ton cul” is a very commonly used response).

You’ve got all facets of Rambo in the third movie. You also see Rambo suffer and deal with pain, namely with the scene where he cauterises his open wound with gunpowder. Stallone is a real badass in this one. The Trautman-Rambo duo is simply amazing, too. Even when they’re surrounded by choppers and Spetsnaz commando officers, they’re spitting one-liners at one another.

Like a lot of his Hollywood action movie-star peers, Stallone got a pretty hefty ego readjustment around that era, too. Few people dared to work with them, because you could be sure that half of the movie production would be on set before shooting because of disagreements with the script, the shots and whatnot. They weren’t the kind to take hints from anyone. But Rambo III came right after the box-office failure that was Over the Top, a redneck road movie where Stallone tries to reconnect with his son by taking him on a road trip as a trucker. The film was a disaster and they lost loads of money. Stallone was also going through a divorce with his second wife and had to pay out millions of dollars. Given that Rambo: First Blood Part II was the biggest box-office hit of 1985, the studios are obsessed with the idea of topping that success. The film cost 63 million dollars but only earned 100 million.

What is it that draws you to Stallone, in particular?

There are a number of things that came with time. When I was little, I was into the big buff action side of things. Stallone stood alone and would wreck everything around him, especially in the Rambo movies. There could be 125 guys shooting at him and they’d all miss him, whereas he’d kill them all with only three shots. In Rambo III he kills 72 out of the 125 guys that die in the movie.

Then there’s also the fact that we were served a ton of Stallone movies in the Nineties. There’d be a new movie of his every other year. I really liked the fact that his movies told so many different stories. He was a NASCAR driver in Driven, a mountain climber in Cliffhanger and an old school cop in a non-violent future in Demolition Man.

I saw the Rocky and Rambo movies in reverse order but I’d always stop before the first movies because I used to think they were boring movies when I was a kid. There were fewer fights and more dialogue. You eventually grow older and open your mind up, though [Laughs]. When I was a teenager, I discovered how great of an actor he was and saw his films in a new light. That’s when I found out First Blood, which I initially thought to be a pro-war movie, was really a critique of the Viet-Nam war and the way war veterans were carelessly reintroduced into society and left to become social pariahs.

It’s pretty interesting to note that these sequels wouldn’t have been possible, had they not taken liberties from the source material.

That’s right. I actually re-read the 1972 novel recently. Rambo actually dies at the end of it. However, producers Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna of Carolco Pictures couldn’t just kill off the character in the movie. What’s pretty interesting is that they also got David Morell, the author of the original First Blood novel, to write the novels to Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rambo III, based off the movie scripts. It was a pretty common practice at the time. The books were part of the movie merchandising and would be released at the same time as the movie, with the poster as the front cover. The books more or less followed the same plotline, with some changes. In the Rambo III novelization, they added a female doctor character who treats the wounded Afghan soldiers, whom Rambo and Trautman need to protect and escort to safety.

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