Mean Streets (1973)Starring: Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro, David Proval, Richard Romanus, Amy Robinson
This week in Screens, Images, Ideas is our last week looking at the New Hollywood, so of course we had to finish with a Scorsese. In previous years the course has watched Taxi Driver, but this year we changed it up a bit and went back to where it all started with Mean Streets.
Charlie (Keitel) is a small-time hood growing up in New York's Little Italy. He works for his uncle, making collections and reclaiming debts. He's a good soul, probably too good to succeed in his line of work. A devout Catholic, Charlie struggles to reconcile his faith with his life. He's in love with Teresa (Robinson), though the relationship is kept quiet as his uncle disapproves of her due to her epilepsy. Charlie feels duty bound to protect her cousin, and his friend, the near psychotic trouble-maker Johnny Boy (De Niro). Johnny Boy has been running up debts all over town and disrespecting the wrong people.
Mean Streets was Scorsese's third feature film, but it was the film that really announced his arrival. It didn't make a noticeable splash at the box-office, but it is only in the last decade that Scorsese has really become a bankable director. But it did make critics and those in the industry notice him. Mean Streets was a very personal story for Scorsese, with it largely being inspired by his adolescence growing up in Little Italy. Charlie is largely seen to be an autobiographical character for Scorsese, in terms of his struggle to reconcile his devout Catholicism and the reality of his life in Little Italy. In the part of Little Italy that Scorsese grew up in, the people who got the most respect were the wise guys and the priests, so as he grew up he had to decide which he was going to be. As he was a short kid with asthma, he decided he probably wouldn't have made a great gangster and instead enrolled in Seminary school (thankfully he pulled out after a year or two and went to film school). It seems odd, because in the lives of most people you don't imagine there being a fork in the road where you have to choose between a life of organised crime and a life of organised religion, you expect them to be total polar opposites. But in Italian-American New York these two worlds co-existed, and that uncomfortable duality would go on to inform much of Scorsese's work. Two of the primary themes that run through Scorsese's oeuvre are organised crime (Goodfellas, Casino, Gangs of New York, The Departed) and spirituality (The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun), with Mean Streets straddling both.
Originally the film was going to be titled 'Season of the Witch' but film critic Jay Cocks suggested Scorsese change it to Mean Streets, which comes from a Raymond Chandler quote:
"Down these mean streets a man must go, who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid... He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man, and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."While the original Chandler quote refers to the hard-boiled detective of his crime fiction, I think it resonates nicely with the character of Charlie, with the film ostensibly being about his struggles to be a man of honour on the mean streets.
In my blog on Goodfellas I talked about how Scorsese provided the other side of the gangster equation to Coppola's Godfather films. It was Mean Streets that started this. It was released only one year after The Godfather, and while it played to a much smaller audience than Coppola's films, critics in particular were keen to make the comparison. While Coppola's gangsters had monarchies and compounds, wore suits and brushed shoulders with senators, Scorsese's hoods in Mean Streets are losers, small time thugs hanging out in bars and pool halls and hustling for $10 notes.
As well as being Scorsese's calling card, Mean Streets really launched the career of Robert De Niro. Mean Streets was the start of the Scorsese/De Niro partnership which would produce numerous great films over the following twenty years. Scorsese first spotted De Niro in a couple of Brian DePalma's films, Greetings and Hi, Mom!. De Niro delivers an absolutely electric performance in this film as the trouble-maker Johnny Boy. There is something so raw and uncontrolled about his character that you are just waiting for him to blow up. It is a really amazing performance, a real scene stealer, and it really kick started his career. It was apparently off the basis of his performance as Johnny Boy that Francis Ford Coppola cast him as the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II. This amazes me because Vito Corleone and Johnny Boy are such polar opposite characters. Johnny Boy is a bit unhinged and ready to go off whereas Vito Corleone is so calm, composed and restrained, while equally dangerous. Obviously Coppola recognised a talent rather than just a character and it paid off, with De Niro winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance as the young Don (an amazing achievement when you consider he performed the entire role in the Sicilian language, a language that he does not speak).
Mean Streets has a really interesting soundtrack. It is quite a strange combination of 1960s rock 'n' roll (including Scorsese's standard quota of Rolling Stones tunes) and traditional Italian operas and classical music. I've already said that this was a personal film for Scorsese, and the soundtrack reflects just that. The soundtrack of Mean Streets is the soundtrack of Scorsese's youth. He said that when he thinks about that place and that time what he hears is the combination of the rock 'n' roll music that he and his friends listened to and the traditional Italian music of his parents.
Almost forty years after it's release we can look back on Mean Streets and read so much into it, seeing connections between it and his later films with De Niro, his later gangster films and his later religious explorations, and as a result the film takes on an extra level of significance. But in its own right, Mean Streets is very much the film of a young man still learning his craft. While it shows his incredible potential, Mean Streets is flawed film. It lacks a real flow and any sort of narrative drive, which tends to frustrate some viewers. It isn't as polished or refined as some of his later work, but it is an incredibly raw example of his talent, and that of De Niro. Very much worth watching, though it is frustratingly unavailable on Region 4 DVD so you will have to look overseas.
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