Mean Streets
Made in 27 days on a very modest budget, Mean Streets is arguably Martin Scorsese's first significant film. A hit at the 1973 New York Film Festival, important popular critics like Pauline Kael and Vincent Canby were taken with its freshness and rough, documentary quality, comparing it to French New Wave films like Godard's Breathless (1959), Truffaut's 400 Blows (1959), or American John Cassavetes' intimate, improvisational Faces (1968) and Husbands (1970). Critic Joseph Kanton even saw the film as part of an indigenous American New Wave which, along with films like George Lucas' American Grafitti (1973), Ralph Bakshi's Heavy Traffic (1973), and Lamont Johnson's The Last American Hero (1973), brought a new "energy and originality" to the American cinema.
Scorsese, however, claims that the film's visual quality, both documentary-like and expressionistic at the same time, derives as much from budgetary limitations as it does from aesthetic choices. Whatever the source of the film's style, it was greeted as a breath of stylistic fresh air, and as a breakthrough film for a promising young director who eventually became one of the most significant American filmmakers of his generation.
Like much of Scorsese's early work, Mean Streets is about "the neighborhood." Scorsese argues that, " Mean Streets was an attempt to put myself and my old friends on the screen, to show how we lived, what life was like in Little Italy. It was really an anthropological or a sociological tract." As in many Scorsese films, Catholicism and the Italian-American experience are at the heart of his thinking, and the film can be seen as a continuation of his earlier Who's That Knocking at My Door (1969), with some real life experiences and family legends added in.
Mean Streets is also the first of Scorsese's three gangster films, the others being GoodFellas (1990) and Casino (1995), and he has argued that he meant it as a homage to the Warner's gangster cycle of the 1930s and 1940s. Like many filmmakers of his generation, Scorsese is in love with the cinema, and his films, including Mean Streets, are filled with references and homages to his own favorite films like John Ford's The Searchers (1956). Mean Streets is also the first pairing of actors Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, a paring which would culminate in Scorsese's brilliant and controversial Taxi Driver in 1976.
The plot of Mean Streets is a loosely woven series of episodes in the life of Charlie Cappa, Jr. (Keitel), a small time gangster who works for his uncle Giovanni, a powerful and respected Mafia don. Charlie is a street kid who is caught between his childhood friends and his demanding uncle, and he is obsessed with religion, guilt, and the need to do penance—but not the simple penance prescribed by the church. As Charlie says, "You don't make up for your sins in the church. You do it in the streets." A born peacemaker, Charlie is a good, but rather ineffectual man—a saint, Scorsese argues—who lives on the margins in a world of violent gangsters and smalltime thugs.
His struggle to survive is set against a sound track composed of rock and roll songs popular in his time. This use of popular music is a significant Scorsese stylistic flourish. Unlike other films where the use of rock and roll has become a cliche, Scorsese carefully chooses the songs for their thematic and atmospheric relevance to both plot and character development.
Mean Streets is set in a small, self-contained society, a closed world where the rules of behavior are strictly enforced. Charlie's main problem is his relationship with Johnny Boy (De Niro), a free spirit who violates social convention with humorous abandon. Johnny Boy is an obsessive, over-the-top gambler who owes everyone in the neighborhood money—money which he never pays back. This leads him into conflict with both Giovanni and Michael (Richard Romanus), a small time loan shark who ultimately takes his revenge on both Charlie and Johnny Boy. In some sense Johnny Boy is Charlie's ultimate penance and in the end Charlie cannot redeem him—or himself. But the lively Johnny Boy also has the joy of life so lacking in the conventional and obsessed Charlie. It is exactly this complexity ofcharacter development and storyline that makes Mean Streets a classic Scorsese film.
Further Reading:
Bliss, Michael. Martin Scorsese and Michael Cimino. Metuchen, New Jersey, Scarecrow Press, 1985.
Kelly, Mary Pat. Martin Scorsese: A Journey. New York, Thunder'sMouth Press, 1991.
——. Martin Scorsese: The First Decade. Pleasantville, New York, Redgrave Publishing Co., 1980.
Keyser, Les. Martin Scorsese. New York, Twayne Publishers, 1992.
Kolker, Robert. A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman. 2nd edition. New York, Oxford University Press, 1988.
Lourdeaux, Leo. Italian and Irish Filmmakers in America. Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1990.
Thompson, David, and Ian Christie, editors. Scorsese on Scorsese. London, Faber and Faber, 1989.
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