#14 — Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973)
I have a strong awareness that retroactively visiting certain films creates an entirely different impact than, say, connecting with them chronologically, especially as they’re released. For example, I’d seen a lot of films directed by Martin Scorsese before I ever got around to his true breakthrough, Mean Streets. For those that encountered it for the first time back in the fall of 1973, perhaps when it famously became a sensation at the New York and Chicago Film Festivals, the shift had to be astonishing, not just from other films at the time, but also from the earlier entries in the filmography of this runty Italian kid from Manhattan. Through the lens of all the masterworks that followed, what’s most amazing about Mean Streets is the way the distinctive Scorsese style emerged fully formed in this film, as if hatched after a period of robustly transformational stasis. His film is brutal, real and thunderously alive in a way that few others ever achieve.

Written with Mardik Martin (who would also sign his name to Scorsese’s monumental Raging Bull a few years later), Scorsese’s Mean Streets patches together the dangers, passions, excitement and enticement of the New York City where the director grew up. No scrubbed-clean tourist mecca, it was a city dominated by those who were prepared to struggle instead of strive. These are thugs with only the foggiest of inclinations to reach beyond their assigned stations in life, and a fumbling inability to avoid sabotaging their own success any time a sliver of ambition did infiltrate their souls. Harvey Keitel plays Charlie, whose modest underworld aspirations are continually delivered setbacks by the company he keeps, most notably a boisterous live wire called Johnny Boy. He’s played by Robert De Niro with a sinewy, raw ingenuity. He has such an tenacious unpredictability and fulsome charisma that its easy to understand the lingering goodwill that still allows him to be accorded due reverence as one of the true greats despite a current complacency that threatens to be best measured in decades.

Great as De Niro is, it’s truly Keitel’s film, his story. He speaks with a rapid, articulate, measured patter that, we now well know, owes a debt to his director. He has the carriage of a thug, a necessary survival tactic in his asphalt ecosystem, but the obvious whirring intelligence of a man who’s turned reacting into a intricate scheme. One of the most fascinating aspects is how he’s constantly sizing things up, weighing his conflicts against one another and trying to figure out how his own different sides–most notably the malfeasance of his profession and the pull of his Catholic faith–cohere to each other, or if that’s even possible.

Scorsese puts the film together with ripe dynamic that’s now become his trademark, right down to the redefinition of safe, familiar pop songs through shockingly new bruised knuckle context. The cinematography and editing are relentlessly vibrant and Scorsese’s camera moves like the toughest, sliest person in the barroom, always positioning himself for the possibility that some serious shit is about to go down. Scorsese was a young man at this point–still only thirty-years-old when the film was released–but he’d already been looking to cinema as his personal sanctuary and redemption. With Mean Streets, he first unlocked the door to that promise of freedom through creativity he’d made to himself long before.