Mean Streets (1973)

Dir.: Martin Scorsese
Plot: A young man in Little Italy tries to keep his head above water whilst protecting his unpredictable friend from loan sharks.

For me, Scorsese is a director who, bafflingly, reached his peak before he’d even really got started. Mean Streets is a mesmerising exhibition piece which vividly highlights every quality which has since made Scorsese a legend. Shot through with both pathos and humour (the whole 'mook' sequence still gets me), it's an intensely personal but unromanticised look at life in Little Italy.

It centres on Charlie (Harvey Keitel), a young Italian-American living in a murky underworld of hoods and hustlers, and his relationships with his crime boss uncle, his girlfriend Teresa (Amy Robinson) and, most importantly, his ne’er do well childhood pal, Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro). Johnny Boy is an irresponsible drifter who borrows money all over town; Charlie works for one of these loan sharks and the pressure is on him to ensure Johnny Boy makes good on his debt, but in reality he spends most of his time pleading for second chances. 

The film takes a piecemeal approach, the story progressing through several small incidents and encounters. It’s a format in which it is easy to lose one’s way and end up rambling indecisively towards an unsatisfying conclusion, but Scorsese keeps a tight hold on the reins and the whole film comes together as a magnificent, interconnected whole. In some ways, it’s almost like a documentary in terms of the care Scorsese takes in crafting a rich picture of life in Little Italy in the late 60s/early 70s, a feeling enhanced by the naturalism of the performances, the jolting suddenness of the outbreaks of violence and the shaky, deliciously rough camerawork.

Fights explode out of nowhere, out of muttered, half-obscured asides – everyone is looking for a fight, always. Violence is the only outlet these young men have, living in a world which, for all its seeming looseness, is regulated by a strict hierarchy. Johnny Boy’s refusal to live on the bottom rung of a pecking order marks him out for an inevitable downfall. Also on the bottom rung is Teresa, shunned by the still-superstitious community for her epilepsy, dismissed by Charlie’s uncle as ‘sick in the head’. Charlie, whose powerful relation could secure him a bright future in the organisation, chooses instead to spend his time down here amongst the outcasts. Keitel is great as this young man whose innate goodness is tearing him apart, whose criminality is a social condition rather than an inclination. Tellingly, whenever he sees an open flame, he is drawn to reaching out his hand to it - purging his guilt over his lifestyle and his continued failure to ‘save’ Johnny Boy. Himself he does not consider worth saving: although he is smart enough to see that it will only bring him trouble, he doggedly sticks by a friend who is compulsively irredeemable.

 

De Niro is even better as the self-destructive Johnny Boy, a performance of swagger, of humour and of underlying desperation that I personally prefer to both Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. It’s a performance which is best exhibited in one of my favourite moments in the film – De Niro’s delivery of a monologue in which Johnny Boy describes a police raid to Charlie. It goes on for a good couple of minutes of non-stop, rambling narration which is clearly at least half bullshit, and you can tell that neither one of them really buys it. In this scene, simply, he’s not an actor - he’s a man telling a story. And so is Scorsese. And it’s a brilliant one.

I just want to say one more thing: the opening credits (including the famous ‘You don’t make up for your sins in church’ bit) are themselves just dazzling. Set to the consummate beauty that is ‘Be My Baby’ by the Ronnettes, the credits flicker around grainy home-movie clips of the characters on the streets of Little Italy and at a christening party.

The question is often asked: are these supposed to be from before or after the events of the movie? Some argue before, claiming that Johnny Boy features in the home video and he died in the ending (which leaves it ambiguous), or that Michael and Charlie would not be standing with their arms around each other after Michael had nearly killed him. For me, the answer is clearly after. For one thing, Teresa and Charlie’s relationship was kept secret in the movie until the very end, yet in the home movie they casually kiss and kid around at a family gathering. Johnny Boy is there, but with a noticeably smarter, clean-cut appearance (short hair, suit), implying he has somehow pulled his life together by this point. The baby whose baptism is being celebrated might even be Charlie and Teresa’s – look at how he makes a big deal of shaking the priest’s hand for the camera on the church steps. Anyway, that’s my view on that little debate surrounding what is undoubtedly one of my all-time favourite films and the best thing Scorsese ever made.

10/10