Martin Scorsese (1973)

Martin Scorsese had made two feature films previously; the first of these, Who’s That Knocking At My Door (1967), shares with Mean Streets the same geographical and psychological terrain, and the same lead actor.  Both films take place in New York City and inside the head – and the guilty Catholic conscience – of an Italian-American local boy, played by Harvey Keitel.  (The intervening Boxcar Bertha is a lawbreaking-lovers-on-the-run story, set in the American South.)  Scorsese’s cinema of personal expression didn’t begin, then, with Mean Streets but his career as a big-time film-maker took off on the back of it – the movie seemed the right one with which to start my visits to BFI for their two-month Scorsese retrospective this January and February.  Mean Streets is an invaluable record of the locales and culture that fed the young Scorsese’s imagination; the perceived originality of this rough but highly dynamic piece of work excited many on its original release.  I understand and accept the film’s importance without feeling any such excitement or much engagement with it – beyond the vivid opening titles sequence, at any rate.  This isn’t just because of distance in time (I’d seen Mean Streets once before yesterday’s BFI outing but not in the 1970s).  I also feel distant from the drives of the main characters and the ‘street mentality’ which Scorsese, who co-wrote the screenplay with Mardik Martin, has summarised as ‘Somebody does something wrong, you’ve got break his head or you shoot him’.

Keitel’s protagonist Charlie wants to be a good Catholic, to work his way up in the New York Mafia, and to reconcile his attachments to family and friends.  (These ambitions and loyalties conflict more sharply than they do for, say, some of the Corleone clan in the contemporary Godfather films.)  Charlie goes regularly to church and confession.  His Uncle Giovanni (Cesare Danova) is the local caporegime.  Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro), Charlie’s buddy from childhood, is a spectacularly loose cannon, deep in gambling debt.  Johnny is also the cousin of Teresa (Amy Robinson), with whom Charlie is having a secret affair.  It has to be secret from his family:  Teresa, who suffers from epilepsy, is described by Giovanni as ‘sick in the head’.  Charlie literally plays with fire (and metaphorically with hellfire):  when he sees a flame, he’s drawn to putting his hand in it.  Harvey Keitel expresses Charlie’s divided feelings convincingly and expressively:  it’s good to be reminded of his excellence in the roles that made his name – before his somehow strong-armed approach to characterisation set in (as in Blue Collar, for example).   As Johnny Boy, Robert De Niro is, both physically and emotionally, amazingly volatile – even though it’s impossible to see this performance for what it originally was.  There was so much to follow from De Niro in the years immediately ahead that viewers of my generation are liable, rather, to see a palimpsest.

Mean Streets is firmly set in the guts of the city.  An incongruous sequence on a beach features the following dialogue between the hero and his girlfriend:

Charlie: I hate the sun. Come on, let’s go inside, will ya?
Teresa: What else do you hate?
Charlie: I hate the ocean and I hate the beach and I hate the sun… and the grass and the trees and I hate heat! …
Teresa: What do you like?
Charlie: I like… spaghetti and clam sauce, mountains, Francis of Assisi, chicken with lemon and garlic, uhhh, and John Wayne.
Teresa: There aren’t any, uh, mountains in Manhattan.
Charlie: Tall buildings, same thing. And I like you.

It’s often hard, and never more so than at this moment in the film, to resist seeing Charlie as Martin Scorsese’s alter ego.  Although there are plenty of outdoor scenes, rather few of them take place in the cold natural light of day.  At night the darkness of the streets is modified by car headlights and signage on buildings – and contiguous with the indoor settings Scorsese favours:  dusky, smoky subterranean bars and clubs; poky, Venetian-blinded bedrooms.   The headlong camera movement – especially in the bar-rooms, when fights break out (as they often do) – is giddying.  The pop soundtrack can reasonably be described as eclectic but girl groups – the Ronettes (‘Be My Baby’), the Marvelettes (‘Please Mr Postman’) and so on – are especially well represented.

9 January 2017