Times Square: The Runaway-Girls Punk Fairy Tale

Times Square is a damaged film, and the damage is documented, and knowing about it changes what you watch. Allan Moyle made it in 1980 for Robert Stigwood, who had spent the previous three years turning Saturday Night Fever and Grease into the most profitable soundtrack operation in the business. Stigwood wanted a double LP. Getting one required songs, and songs required room, and room was made by cutting the picture — which meant cutting the relationship at the centre of it, since that was the part with no music over it. Moyle left the production. The film that came out has a superb soundtrack, a hole where its heart should be, and roughly forty minutes of the best documentary footage of 42nd Street anyone ever shot by accident.

I saw it late, on a poor transfer, and spent the first half-hour thinking it was incompetent. It is wounded, and the wound is in a specific and traceable place, and once you can see where the knife went in, the surviving film is remarkable.

The setup

Pamela Pearl, played by Trini Alvarado, is thirteen and the daughter of a city commissioner leading the campaign to clean up 42nd Street. Nicky Marotta, played by Robin Johnson, is a street kid with a guitar and no address. They meet in a hospital where both are being assessed — Pamela for her silences, Nicky for everything else — and they escape together, and they squat in an abandoned building by the water.

They call themselves the Sleez Sisters. They survive by dancing in a club, they get a champion in Tim Curry’s late-night radio DJ Johnny LaGuardia, who broadcasts their communiqués to the city, and they announce themselves by pushing televisions off a rooftop into the street below. The commissioner’s daughter is now the face of the disorder her father is running for office against. The city looks for them. Girls across the boroughs start dressing like them.

Robin Johnson

Any argument about this film starts here. Johnson was a newcomer, effectively found rather than cast, and she gives one of the great teenage performances in American cinema — a rasping, physically fearless, entirely unsentimental turn as a girl with no protection who has decided that going first is a survival strategy. She is astonishing in it, and she barely made another film, which is one of the genuine losses of the period.

The performance works because Johnson plays Nicky’s bravado as labour. You can see the effort. Every provocation costs her something, and the film’s best moments are the seconds afterwards, when the bit is over and nobody is looking and the face drops. Alvarado plays against her with real intelligence — Pamela’s arc is about acquiring a voice, and Alvarado does most of it silently, in the eyes, while Nicky does the talking for both of them.

The two of them are in love. That is the plain sense of what remains, in the way they share space and food and a bed and a self-image. It is also the material that Stigwood’s cut went after hardest, which is why the film keeps arriving at emotional beats it has not been permitted to earn. The relationship is legible in the performances and absent from the structure. Watching it is like reading a letter with words removed.

Why it works anyway: the street is real

Here is the paradox. Because the production needed 42nd Street as a location and could not afford to control it, Moyle shot in the actual thing, at the actual time, with the actual people on it. The marquees are real. The bookshops and the peep booths and the men outside them are real. The crowd is not extras.

This gives the film an evidentiary quality nothing else from the period has. The 42nd Street of 1980 was about to be legislated out of existence — the campaign that Pamela’s father is fictionally running is the campaign that really happened, and it worked, and within fifteen years the geography in this film was gone. Times Square is therefore a fairy tale shot on a crime scene, and the background of every frame is a documentary about a place in its last decade. I have written elsewhere about what the death of 42nd Street took with it, and this is the film I would put in evidence.

The other picture holding that ground is Basket Case, shot on the same pavements two years later on a fraction of the money. Run them together and you get the full stereo: Henenlotter’s monster fable and Moyle’s runaway romance, both using the Deuce because it was free, both accidentally preserving it. Neither director set out to make an archive. Both did.

The real ancestor

The film gets compared to The Warriors, which shares a city, a year or two and a mythic register — and that comparison is fine as far as it goes without explaining much, because Hill was making an epic and Moyle is making a domestic story that happens outdoors.

The true parent is William Wellman’s Wild Boys of the Road, from 1933. Depression teenagers, thrown out by families that can no longer feed them, take to the rails and build a society of their own out of scraps and loyalty, and the authorities pursue them as a public-order problem because the alternative is admitting the adults broke first. It is a Warner Brothers social-problem picture made while the problem was still happening, and it is furious about it.

Every structural bone of Times Square is in it. The runaways who become a community. The improvised home in a condemned space. The parent whose respectability depends on the child staying invisible. The state’s response to abandoned children being enforcement rather than provision. And the crucial move that both films make: the kids are in the right, and the film says so plainly. The society they build in a derelict building is more functional than the one that produced them, and the film’s sympathies are total.

Moyle’s contribution is to notice that in 1980 the runaways had a broadcast tower. Nicky’s weapon is Johnny LaGuardia’s radio show — the girls speak, the city hears, and the phenomenon spreads at the speed of the airwaves. The 1933 kids could only ride trains. That is the whole difference between the two films, and it is the same discovery the Fabulous Stains made two years later, in a film that was also butchered by a studio that wanted the record instead of the story.

Why it works: the televisions

The rooftop sequence deserves its own paragraph, because it is the moment the film’s method becomes visible.

The girls drop televisions off a building into the street. It is a stunt, it is the image the poster used, and it is the thing everyone remembers. What makes it more than a stunt is what Moyle does with the sound and the reaction. He gives you the physical event plainly — the weight going over the parapet, the fall, the impact — and then he cuts, immediately, to the coverage. The radio. The news. The commissioner being asked about it. The set is dressed with the object the girls destroyed, and within a day the destruction is content, playing on the surviving sets in every apartment in the city.

That is a genuinely sophisticated joke, and it is the same joke Shock Treatment was making across town in 1981. You cannot attack the broadcast by breaking the receiver. The broadcast eats the attack and schedules it. Nicky throws televisions off a roof and becomes a programme, and the film understands that her rebellion is being converted into ratings while she is still committing it.

The case against

The cut is a real defect and it cannot be excused by knowing its cause. The film lurches. Motivations vanish. Songs arrive to paper over excisions, and the paper is visible — a sequence will end emotionally unresolved and a Roxy Music track will carry you to the next location, and you are being managed rather than moved.

Tim Curry’s DJ is the other problem, and it is a script problem rather than a performance one. Johnny LaGuardia is an adult man broadcasting about two teenage girls, and the film cannot work out whether he is their champion, their exploiter or their audience surrogate. It keeps trying all three. There is a version of this material where that ambivalence is the subject; this version simply has not decided.

And the fairy-tale register sits awkwardly against the real street. Moyle wants myth, and the location keeps supplying fact, and the two fight.

The verdict

The soundtrack that ruined it is genuinely magnificent — the Ramones, Talking Heads, Suzi Quatro, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, XTC, the Pretenders, Roxy Music — and it is an exquisite irony that the thing that broke the film is the reason anyone remembers it. What survives is worth more than most intact pictures: Robin Johnson’s performance, a love story you have to reconstruct from the wreckage, and 42nd Street breathing in the background of every shot, months before the bulldozers were commissioned.

It has been restored and reissued, and the restoration matters, because the neon is half the argument. Chase it with Wild Boys of the Road for the bones, or with the Stains for the twin. And if you only take one thing: watch the extras. Watch the men in the background of the street shots, who did not know they were in a film, standing outside cinemas that no longer exist.

Spoilers below

The finale is a rooftop concert in Times Square. Nicky plays, and the crowd below is girls — hundreds of them, dressed as the Sleez Sisters, summoned by a radio broadcast, filling a square that the city had spent the film trying to empty of exactly these people.

Then the film separates them. Pamela goes back to her father. Nicky goes into the crowd and keeps going, alone, and the picture ends without telling us where.

It is the correct ending and it is heartbreaking for a reason the studio cut did not intend. Pamela was always going home; she had a home, and a father with a re-election campaign, and the film is honest that a commissioner’s daughter is playing at a life that Nicky has no exit from. The disorder was a season for one of them and a permanent address for the other. Nicky gave a frightened, silent girl a voice, and the voice took her back to the house she came from, and Nicky is left in the square she started in with the city still looking for her.

The last shot of Robin Johnson walking away is the whole film’s argument, and Stigwood’s cut could not remove it, because it has a song over it.