Streets of Fire

Walter Hill’s Streets of Fire is 90 minutes of glorious pulp fiction. It opens with two title cards: the first reads ‘a rock‘n’roll fable,’ the second, ‘another time, another place.’ As self-mythologising goes, it’s as flinty and straightforward as the film’s characters, who are a delightful salad of movie clichés. You’ve the loner who arrives by train to clean up the town (Paré), the damsel in distress (Lane) and, best of all, Willem Dafoe as a biker villain with an inexplicable penchant for wearing PVC waders.

Hill splices America’s two most garish periods of popular culture – the 50s and the 80s – to create a neon-drenched universe that suggests a Wild West version of American Graffiti shot using the film grammar of MTV. Every line-reading is heightened, every edit is breakneck, every music cue is dialled up to eleven. If that mix weren’t heady enough, it’s also a musical.