“On the streets, a child is born, with battle lines already drawn”
– George Benson, Lalo Schifrin & Gale Garnett
The lyrics play over the closing credits and there’s not much more to be said.
Boulevard Nights is a dark and gritty tale of barrio life in Los Angeles in the 1970s.
The film centers around two brothers, Raymond and Chuco Avila (Richard Yniguez and Danny De La Paz). Raymond is older, wiser and on the verge of getting out of barrio life and starting a life of his own. Chuco is younger, angrier and the center point of the story.
The film is directed by Michael Pressman who has an enormous amount of directing credits (mostly TV), but got his start directing films.
While he’s made some excellent television… his feature list isn’t remotely memorable. Daniel Nakano won awards for this screenplay, but I can’t imagine why. Although it may look a lot better on paper than it did on film. Also, who knows what Pressman and co-writer Michael Scheff did to it after they got their hands on it.
The fact that Nakano wound up on the writing team for American Me isn’t remotely surprising. I’d be interested in seeing the original script. Something tells me it would be a LOT better than what the final product looked like.
The intent of this film is much much better than the execution.
It’s low budget and the production values aren’t great. Although the Warner Archive Blu-ray is a solid upgrade from previous home video releases, I’m actually surprised that the studio put that kind of investment into this particular film. I am sure there are barrio tales from before this film, but it seems like it was the source of inspiration for a lot of the defining films of the genre.
American Me and Colors are infinitely better barrio films. However, upon reflection, I probably appreciate them a little more now that I’ve seen Boulevard Nights. American Me is an incredibly hard watch because of the realistic brutality of it. It feels authentic and guts you from the beginning to the end. Colors is more Hollywood, but is extremely powerful in portraying the futility of gang life. Also, if you look at both cast lists, it’s basically a who’s who of awesomely talented performers.
Boulevard Nights just doesn’t have the talent to be the film it wanted to be and the entire film feels like a low budget movie of the week. Yniguez has a ton of credits, mostly TV and you will immediately recognize him as a 70s, 80s, 90s that guy from numerous series. De La Paz went on to play Big Puppet in American Me and you can see he seriously matured between roles. Boulevard Nights was his first feature credit and he’s had a long, if unspectacular, career since.
There is no other character of note. NONE. This is a huge failing. I mean, there is a car shop manager, the boys’ mother, a girlfriend and a bunch of amorphous “bad guys” from a different barrio. None of them have any real development. They want us to care about the characters and their lives, but they don’t really even give us anything more than cursory development around the brothers. It’s just not well made at all.
On the technical side, there’s not much to look at either.
Every color is muted, which isn’t a huge surprise because of when it was shot. The editing is poor. The lighting during critical moments is terrible. I understand a lot of the key plot points take place at night, but there are ways to light a night scene so the viewers can have a clue what’s going on. There are a couple of good visuals of period cars with tricked out suspensions bouncing, but those are literally the best lit and framed scenes in the film.
The rest is amateurish at best.
To be fair, literally no one that was involved in this film was particularly experienced at the time, so I guess it shouldn’t surprise us it looks like a low budget student film. Still, it’s a little bizarre that a studio would take an award winning script and turn out such a sub-par product. Maybe is was just what they did in the 70s. I don’t really know. What I do know, is this could have been a lot more and when we look at the evolution of barrio films, maybe the best thing that could be said about Boulevard Nights is it paved the way for some truly great films.
If you’re a fan of more modern gang films like American Me, Colors, Boyz in the Hood, Straight Out of Brooklyn, etc, then you will probably enjoy this and see scenes that like inspired those films.
If not, don’t bother. It isn’t worth the hour and forty minutes.
Included is the film’s theatrical trailer.
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