We’ve seen a fair amount of poster art from John Solie. This effort looks a little different for him, a bit less polished maybe. It’s a striking piece anyway, set at the intersection of Love Street and John Street, made for the urban drama Street Girls, which premiered today in 1976 and starred Carol Case. The first thing to note about this film is that it was co-scripted by eventual multiple Oscar winner Barry Levinson. He was influenced by Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, clearly, but Street Girls‘ closest cinematic relative actually came three years later in Paul Schrader’s 1979 thriller Hardcore. The vibe is identical, and the plot, about a smalltown father trying to save his sexually exploited daughter, is similar. What isn’t similar are important elements such as budget, technical values, and acting.
Street Girls is about the aformentioned forlorn father, but most of the plot early on focuses on the daughter, played by Case, who’s dancing at a strip dive called the Step Down a Go-Go, is sexually involved with one of the other women, and has been been targeted by bad guy Paul Pompian for conversion to drug addiction and prostitution. Dad mostly blunders oaflike around the city—in this case Eugene, Oregon—but eventually runs into the right people to help him find his litle girl, if only he can convince them. If that happens it’s possible Case won’t be turned out, but it’s a fraught race against a determined pimp.
Street Girls is an example of what it means to be a novice in Hollywood. No matter the nature of a production you must commit to doing your best, or your career will be short. Case gives about as committed a performance as you’ll see. It doesn’t work completely, though we suspect more time could have drawn out a better result. But that’s always the rub—time derives from budget, as does the ability to make quality hires across the board before the cameras even roll. It’s nice that Levinson rose to be a superstar director, but it isn’t neccessarily that he was the only one here with talent. He would have benefitted from other factors, including pure luck. Watching this, we thought it would have been nice if mainstream success had found Case too. Instead, Street Girls was her only film.
