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The pairing of Samuel Fuller and David Goodis -- two American outsiders who found their appreciation in Europe -- had its roots prior to Fuller's swan song. Fuller had met Goodis years before and they discussed the race riots in New York that Fuller had covered during his days as a journalist. A similar set of riots becomes the backdrop against which Goodis's thirteenth novel is played. An effective precursor to Down There, Street of No Return begins with three drunks arguing about getting another bottle of booze on Philadelphia's skid row. When one of them, the quiet Whitey, goes off on his own, his pals assume he's off to get them some grog. Rather, Whitey embarks on a wild night where he's accused of murdering a cop, sees his lost love, and unravels a plot involving guns, Puerto Ricans, and a criminal mastermind named Sharkey. At the end of the night, Whitey comes back to Skid Row to rejoin the ranks and fade back into obscurity.
Adapted by Fuller and Jacques Bral, Street of No Return shares the same neon-drenched aesthetic of Gilles Behat's Savage Street and Jean-Jacques Beineix's Moon in the Gutter. Here Keith Carradine stars as Michael (the Whitey character) in a dingy fright wig that makes him look like a more disheveled version of Fuller. Michael/Whitey is one of Goodis's "fall from grace" characters. He gained his fame via his golden voice. When he fell hard for Celia (Valentina Vargas), he was asked politely to leave her alone by her possessive beau, Eddie/Sharkey (Marc de Jonge). When Michael didn't back off, he was asked more persuasively by Eddie's pals Bertha (Rebecca Potok) and Meathead (Antonio Rosario). They cut his vocal cords, ending his career. He became a shell of a man; a burnt-out, desolate man. We get several flashbacks of Michael playing guitar and singing cheesy rock ballads that contrast his current state with his strained, almost comical, voice.
The Puerto Ricans of Street of No Return have been changed to African-Americans, and Eddie's plot seems much more tenuous here as the city politics on which he plays don't seem as heated. While Bill Duke gives a terrific performance as the frazzled Lieutenant Borel, the competition between and possible corruption of his underlings isn't at the fore, as it is in Goodis's book. The other damaging change to the Goodis work is the tacked-on happy ending.