STREETS OF GOLD. Directed by Joe Roth; written by Heywood Gould, Richard Price and Tom Cole; produced by Joe Roth and Harry Ufland for Twentieth Century Fox. Starring Klaus Maria Brandauer, Adrian Pasdar and Wesley Snipes. Rated R (some vulgar language and boxing-ring violence).
More reviews by —
TITLE:
RATING:
"I coulda been a contender!" laments Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront (1954). And so could Alek (Brandauer) have been. He was cheated out of glory through no fault of his own, however. Simply an accident of having been born the wrong ethnic group (Jewish) in the wrong country (USSR).
But while the quotation above reminds us that there were boxing movies (with ill-spoken stars) before the Rocky series, Streets of Gold assures us that there are—and will be—boxing movies after it, too. (Of course, how will we know when the Rocky series is over?)
This current effort puts a few new twists on the Rocky formula. But it's ultimately not original enough to be more than just an entertaining little variation on the same old theme.
The characters in Streets of Gold are its most memorable feature, especially Alek. At the beginning, he's down and out in Brooklyn, with little self-respect, no future and only a few fellow emigre friends and his own bitter memories to console him.
A character like this could easily get lost in pathos and melodrama. But Brandauer makes Alek too interesting for that to happen. Anyone who saw Out of Africa knows Brandauer is an actor to be taken seriously. And he is terrific here.
Alek always looks a little sloppy even when he's in a suit. And he's more than a little paunchy and disreputable-looking. But we're in his corner from the opening scene.
The work that rescues Alek from his sorry condition is training two young fighters. The relationship between the kids (Pasdar and Snipes) themselves is disappointingly sketchy, since they're well-played and could have been full-dimensional characters.
But add Alek to the duo and the personality dynamics are almost always interesting. Perhaps anything that works well in Streets of Gold just has to be connected with Brandaur.
Fortunately, he's in almost every scene. My favorite section details Alek's and Timmy's training regimen. I've never been much of a fan of boxing, but in this part of the movie I can appreciate some of the sport's appeal.
It is complicated, after all, and not just a lot of punching and bashing. Specialized skills and a lot of hard work are required for success, and this aspect of boxing is uppermost until the end of Streets of Gold. The climactic fight scenes, though, contain all the predictable slow-motion, sweat- and blood-flinging shots of men pounding each other senseless.
Streets of Gold isn't as much about being an expatriate as, say, Moscow on the Hudson is. It does give a pretty good picture of the down side of being a stranger in a strange land, thanks largely to Brandauer's sensitive performance.
Moscow is the better movie, but Streets of Gold does have the advantage of a more straightforward storyline. And it doesn't get bogged down for lack of plot. The problem is, its plot is just too predictable.
December 3, 1986