It seems like the ‘serious’ teenage runaway movie was almost a trope circa 1980. I can think of two in particular, which featured pretty bland, terrible, melodramatic plotlines, yet contained fabulous music on their soundtracks. In this day and age, everything that could be considered ‘pop culture’ is divided and reduced to small, digestible segments of a few minutes at most. How this affects our collective attention spans, and the resultant lack of mental excercise that this creates in our younger generational cohorts, is another discussion entirely, but this means that we can just take the few minutes of brilliance and slice it out of otherwise forgetful pieces of work.
“Christiane F” is a German movie from 1980, focusing on a ‘true story’ about a runaway teenaged girl who has three addictions – the main one being heroin, but also nightclubs and David Bowie. The Thin White Duke himself even re-created some nightclub concert scenes in Berlin to give the movie some authenticity. The whole movie is very hard to sit through, but there are a few iconic moments that are fascinating to watch:
- The beginning of the movie, with the S Bahn train rolling into the station, featuring David Bowie’s “V-2 Schneider”. This song is an experimental, mostly instrumental track from “Heroes”, something of an homage to Berlin itself, and the West German ‘motorik’ motif.
- The scene where the teenage street kids (the kids of Bahnhof Zoo station) break into an underground shopping mall, running down the corridor, sliding on the floor, then breaking the glass of a kiosk and stealing the money inside, to the song “Heroes” by David Bowie. What a fantastic montage of teenage abandon. Even if this movie is overall not very entertaining, it still contains this scene, which I think is one of the finest in cinema of the time.
- “Sense of Doubt” by David Bowie, another experimental song of his, that is a perfect interstitial for the moment of hopelessness and despair that Christiane is enduring
- The re-created live scene of “Station to Station” by David Bowie. This is the part of the movie that Bowie himself re-filmed in order to provide a more intimate and authentic experience of watching him in person. You can see how young Christiane F. could become so addicted to both a singer, and a substance.
“Times Square” is an American movie, also from 1980, about teenage runaways from opposite sides of the track (poor girl / rich girl), who form a ‘punk’ band and then take Manhattan, and the world writ large, by storm with their “realness”. What was very much the opposite of real in this movie was the choice to cast Tim Curry as radio DJ “Johnny La Guardia”. With a name like that, you might expect him to feature a fascimile of an American / New York accent, but no – he just plays it straight with his standard Home Counties British accent. Case in point, the name Johnny La Guardia was probably a lazy off-the-shelf grab from the airport and mayor La Guardia (Fiorello!), and is indicative of the efforts taken to make this script into a passable movie. Tim Curry managed to ‘dial it in’ in the most epic of ways with this role – it only took him two days for him to lay out his lines, and then he was on the next Concorde back to Heathrow by the weekend.
The “Times Square” soundtrack, however, was magnificent, very much of its time, featuring a diverse array of new wave, punk, and other contemporary rock music. It managed to capture the spirit of the times musically, yet many of the songs featured were big, but not huge, so it doesn’t come off as a “greatest hits” type playlist to a modern listener. Here are some of the better picks on the soundtrack:
- “Talk of the Town” by the Pretenders, released before it was featured on their second album “Pretenders II”.
- “Same Old Scene” by Roxy Music. This song is one of their very best after their first wave glam phase, and its inclusion on the soundtrack was my first introduction to this band.
- “Down In the Park” by Gary Numan, used dramatically as an interstitial song between scenes.
- “Life During Wartime” by Talking Heads, featuring an iconic dance scene on the street.
- “Pretty Boys” by Joe Jackson
- “Walk On The Wild Side” by Lou Reed
- “Grinding Halt” by the Cure
- “Pissing In A River” by Patti Smith
What a fantastic selection of songs – and there are as many songs from bands based in New York (Talking Heads, Lou Reed, Patti Smith) as there are from the UK (Roxy Music, Gary Numan, Joe Jackson, The Cure, and the Pretenders, other than the fact that Chrissy Hynde is from Ohio). There are some original songs by the fake band, the Sleez Sisters, which are sung by the actresses themselves, but they are pretty bland and forgettable.
Here is the best moment in the entire movie – when the two girls dance to “Life During Wartime” while walking down 8th Avenue. The whole improptu aspect of their sidewalk strut is great, and provides an insight into what Times Square used to look like circa 1980.
