70s Crime Cinema: Mean Streets

Martin Scorsese’s breakthrough film is still a joy to watch, even as its age begins to show.

One of its decade’s most influential films, 1973′s Mean Streets launched the careers of stars Robert DeNiro and Harvey Keitel while pushing then relatively unknown director and co-writer Martin Scorsese into the critical limelight. The film also sparked the Scorsese-DeNiro partnership, a long and fruitful collaboration which eventually created such important works as Taxi Driver (1976), The King of Comedy (1980), Raging Bull (1982) and Goodfellas (1990), among others, over the next three decades. If Mean Streets’ many sins are largely the result of youthful exuberance, it’s nonetheless impossible not to appreciate the film if only too see so many of the great director’s themes and tropes in their nascent forms.

Scorsese began work on the project after fellow director John Cassavetes (Faces) advised him to make movies based on personal experience and conviction. Working with frequent script collaborator Mardik Martin, he based the loose, episodic screenplay on his own deeply religious childhood in New York’s Little Italy, fusing elements of religious doubt and conviction with an unsentimental portrayal of the stifling influence of the mafia, a stranglehold that ran through almost all walks of neighborhood life. The quartet of young men at its center – played by Keitel, DeNiro, Richard Romanus and David Proval  – circle the edges of the criminal lifestyle, spending their days in a cycle of gambling, drinking, and low-level theft that never quite seems to bring enough money or satisfaction.

Only the quiet and principled Charlie (Keitel) seems capable of  imagining a more worthwhile existence, but that same wonder has led him into a moment of spiritual crisis. His passionate Catholicism on the wane, he takes solace in an illicit affair with his childhood friend Johnny Boy’s (DeNiro) cousin Teresa (Amy Robinson), an epileptic outcast from her family and a kindred lonely soul. She’s getting out, to an apartment Uptown, and wants Charlie to come with her. But after years of collecting bets for his uncle Giovanni (Cesare Danova), Charlie finds himself on the brink of managing a troubled restaurant, a move that might at last bring him a measure of true responsibility. Meanwhile the neighborhood, tradition, and his wearying loyalty to Johnny Boy, a compulsive gambler and malcontent, all keep him running in circles.

Presaging and inspiring the generation of movies to come, Mean Streets uses its setting both as a character and force of nature that defines its residents while at the same time trapping them. Charlie and his friends dress in stiff suits and guzzle scotch at a time when the rest of their generation was going nude and smoking grass. They live with their (never shown) parents in cramped apartments overstuffed with heirloom furniture. The restaurants and business are choked with cigarettes, cooking grease, and sweat. It’s a dirty world with few diversions that aren’t venal, but by and large the inhabitants are numbed and toughened to anything else. No wonder, as other critics have noted, the inhabitants break into fightfights at a moment’s notice: stuck in the fugue of their surroundings, the violence becomes a form of tacit commiseration.

Glimpses of the outside world come sometimes as palpable breaths of fresh air. A trip to the seashore with Teresa allows Charlie to express his joys, but even there he’s soon pulled back into the world from which they’ve temporarily escaped. “Nobody tries anymore,” he tells her. “To help. To help people.” Restless as he is, he’s unable to get out from under his uncle’s shadow, or cast off community expectations. In a fit of lust he asks out a dancer at his friend Tony’s (Proval) bar but stands her up for fear he’ll be seen in public with a black woman. He tries to rebuff Teresa when Giovanni describes her as “sick in the head.” His only unflagging loyalty is to Johnny Boy, whose increasingly self-destructive behavior – he owes low-level fence Michael (Romanus) several thousand dollars in unpaid “vig” – endangers both their lives.

Keitel and DeNiro, both young and eager to prove themselves, put one hundred percent into every scene. That’s a good thing more often than not, but as with the movie’s breakneck pace you often wish their characters would slow down – to think – and then come up with a plan rather than bulldoze through the next obstacle. It’s a smaller-scale version of the film’s larger issue of failing to endow lesser characters, such as Michael and Tony, with motivations for their action. For Michael especially, whose ultimate disgust with Johnny Boy sets the film’s climax in motion, such absence is sorely obvious. Johnny Boy, the only one to regularly venture outside the neighborhood, is a voice of contempt for the status quo, demonstrated by his refusal to repay loans and gambling debts (shown in the clip above). At times he seems more a force of nature than a person, but the character remains grounded by and lage by Charlie’s friendship, itself fueled by the leads’ natural camaraderie.

The script suffers from an embarrassment of riches – or rather, the potential for riches. It’s filled with a half-dozen unnecessary digressions and scenes of dialogue that boil down to only a few userful facts or lines. Other scenes are left too implicit, drifting off or getting shunted out of the viewer’s attention before ever pulling their own weight. And somewhat like Orson Welles making Citizen Kane, there’s a sense that Scorsese used every innovative camera trick or odd perspective he could imagine. Sometimes, as when a drunken Charlie wanders through Tony’s bar (with the camera strapped to Keitel’s chest, creating woozy intimacy), the result is revelatory and powerful. Other times, as with a long scene with Charlie and Teresa in bed together, the camera tricks and edits feel derivative and forced. Filmgoers who came of age in the 80s and 90s might find it hard to comprehend Scorsese paying homage to someone else, instead of the far more familiar other way around.

The film is also notable for watching Scorsese begin to craft ideas and imagery that would later become nothing less than iconic. Compare this scene from Mean Streets:

to a similar moment in Goodfellas, released seventeen years later:

Scorsese is hardly alone in quoting his own body of work (Michael Mann and Robert Redford have done it as well, to name just two), but there’s a sense when comparing the two clips above of Scorsese the director as a beginner and as an artist in his prime. With Mean Streets, the gusto – the exuberance – sustains the film through the technical overreach. Even until the ending, which is pretty baldly concerned with artistic effect over narrative cohesion, the attempt at creative filmmaking – the ambition – is unmistakable and completely worth celebrating.

To a certain degree, that exemption applies to many of the superfluous scenes, if only to watch the director work at making his ideas come across on camera. Some pay off, even in their gestating form – as above – while some don’t. If Scorsese the judicious editor was yet to come, watching him discover his own limitations – and in the 70s they were still few and far between – is a joy in itself.

- Michael Kabel

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