Mean Streets: DVD Review
August 18, 2004
On the surface, when you first take a stab at Martin Scorsese’s intensely autobiographical classic “Mean Streets”, it looks like a jumbled mixture of music, showoff filmmaking techniques, half realistic, half amateurish acting, and crazy nighttime visuals; it’s as if you’ve just stepped into a bar and all of the lights were bright red. It is, if you just pass it off, like some did when it first exploded onto the scene in 1973, nearly incomprehensible, what with all of its wild editing, improvisational directing and acting, catholic imagery, free-spirited Italian hoodlums and their close Italian community of restaurants, bars, and churches, and the ever present sense of intruding and invading violence that could break up a night’s drinking at any moment. On the surface, yes, “Mean Streets” is not an easy film, it’ll leave you disoriented and partially shattered, and it takes more than one close analysis to realize just what on earth the 31-year-old director was trying to say about himself, Little Italy, Catholicism, guilt, and filmmaking, and how they all tie together through friendship and community, and could just as easily fall apart when violence and betrayal are introduced into the equation. But when you figure it out (kudos to you if you can do it with one viewing), the film reveals itself, quickly and honestly, to be a portrait of growing up, and learning to accept both your roots (religious and familial), and the understanding that the company you keep is often yours and yours alone when responsibility is in question, and wrongs must be made right.
“Mean Streets”, which has just been released in a new DVD special edition, is a film in and of New York City. Not the New York City you’d think of when you hear the words “Fifth” and “Madison” followed by “Avenue”, but the New York City you’d visualize with low-rent brick apartment housing, fire escapes, checkered linoleum and chipped wall paint, religious street festivals, dingy corner dives and the element that frequents them; this is the New York of Little Italy, or just as well, Brooklyn and Chinatown, of Henry Roth’s “Call it Sleep” and William Wyler’s “Dead End”, where the poor dream the American Dream, but often come up a few breadcrumbs short. In Scorsese’s vision, Little Italy is a microcosm for all immigrant communities that came to America to find prosperity, only to be disappointed with the poor job market and the cramped living conditions. The characters of “Mean Streets” are second and third generation, so they aren’t as effected by it as their fathers and grandfathers were, but it’s always in the back of their minds, at the prospects of poverty, and how violence and grifting (organized or freelance) seems like the only way out, when really it’s an ever tightening noose. If the boys of Wyler’s Warner Brother’s studio-bound classic, and the kid of Roth’s dense modernist masterwork every grow up, they may find themselves as characters in “Mean Streets”, because, as Scorsese would have it, the difference between the slums of the ‘30’s, and the slums of the ‘70’s, outside of what’s on the radio, are few and far between.
Much has been made about the improvisational feel to “Mean Streets”, Scorsese subconsciously paying justified homage to both his mentor John Cassavetes and to the French New Wave directors, especially Truffaut and Godard, for whom the revolutionary “movie brats” of the ‘70’s were deeply indebted. Indeed, half of the reason the film is so confrontational the first time is because is it so rushed and free form, a mixture between Cinema Verite, improv comedy (ala Laurel and Hardy, Hope and Crosby), and Italian Neo-realist tragedy. As it is, the filmmaking- an intense combination of handheld long takes, surreal lighting and shadowing, photography tricks, and blasts of jump-cut editing, balanced by an eclectic jukebox of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Italian opera, and soul pop on the soundtrack- often overshadows the story, but that being said, the plot structure, as freeform as it is, is both moving and incredibly problematic in exorcizing Scorsese’s childhood demons.
Harvey Keitel, the star of the director’s first feature, “Who’s That Knocking at My Door?” loosely reprises his character from that black and white experiment as a Scorsese surrogate, Charlie, a man in his late 20’s who still lives at home, dresses in nice suits, drinks and gambles, and does his best to please his uncle, the powerful Don of the neighborhood. Charlie runs errands for the local mafia, who Scorsese notes were as respected in his community as were the priests (similar connections can be made in Coppola’s “The Godfather Part II” a year later), but he isn’t much of a hood himself, he’d rather run a restaurant and marry his epileptic girlfriend (Amy Robinson). But that’s not much of an option (the social impact of marrying a “cripple” could be devastating), because he’s low-level, and if a rival hood doesn’t get him first, on accident (remember, violence is often random), or because he pals around with a pathetic, semi-psychopathic, deeply-in-debt loser named Johnny Boy (Robert DeNiro, in his star making performance), than his inner guilt, and continuing monologues with a questioning Lord and savior would surely do the trick. “Those things,” he says about the confessional act of attrition, “they don’t mean much to me. They’re just words.” But words are strong, and in such a morally bankrupt environment, sometimes they’re all one has before a situation turns ugly and violent. For Charlie and Johnny Boy, continually ducking the advances of an angry creditor (Richard Romanus), and continually ignoring, or questioning the word of religious right, it’s the words of the streets, of the San Gennaro feast, of Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, and the Ronnettes, of the barflies, and of the mafiaso that rules their world, and eventually, in such a case, all of those words mush together to create an endless hum of lost dreams and deafening noise pollution.
You could say that “Mean Streets” has been with Martin Scorsese his whole life. As a boy growing up on the Lower East Side, the only refuge he had from the worlds of the church (he was dangerously close to choosing the priesthood for his life) and crime was the movies, where he could gobble up Italian Neo-realism at home on television, and catch John Ford and Sam Fuller (two he pays respectful homage to in the film) setting the standard, albeit from different perspectives, at the cinema. Film was his escape, and studying at NYU, he met his future collaborator and friend Mardik Martin, who, years later, after Cassavetes urged the director to create from the heart, would help him polish the rough edges of his long dormant script, “Season of the Witch”. Produced for Warner Brothers (how appropriate, given their history of gritty socialist-realism gangster fare) by Jonathan Taplin, after strong support from Roger Corman (the godfather of the New Hollywood era), the film, now titled “Mean Streets”, was shot rapidly and thriftily, primarily in L.A., by non-union teamsters (they were cheaper) in a furious style that suggests both surreal worlds of sin and everyday existence, and incredibly conscious socialism.
With cinematic references abound (Fuller, Cassavetes, Ford, Corman, Lang, and William Wellman can all be cited as influences), and a groundbreaking use of popular music as the only soundtrack (think of Bogdanovich’s use of Hank Williams in “The Last Picture Show”), “Mean Streets” was met with high praise at the N.Y. Film Festival, and Cannes, with the likes of Pauline Kael (a kingmaker in the ‘70’s) and Roger Ebert effusing strong hyperbole from atop their high podiums. Scorsese had arrived; he turned what looked like, at first glance, a hurried attempt at documentary-influenced, pretentious autobiography into a work of kinetic exuberance, and with a young Robert DeNiro popping off like a wounded madman as Johnny Boy, the director and actor were setting the grounds for what lay ahead, namely, “Taxi Driver”, “Raging Bull”, and twenty years later, the surrogate child of “Mean Streets”, the masterpiece “Goodfellas”. I now hold, after about six additional viewings, “Mean Streets” to be as important, if not more important, than such late ‘60’s-early ‘70’s essentials as “Bonnie and Clyde”, “The Last Picture Show” (both of which share editing styles with “Mean Streets”) and, most prominently, “The Godfather”, for which the notion of violence, community, and Italian immigrants dreaming the American Dream is especially prevalent. Charlie and Johnny Boy, in the end, never make it out of Little Italy, but Scorsese did, and “Mean Streets” is his savage and brilliant testament to a beloved urban setting, and a flawed way of life.
“Mean Streets” has been released on DVD by Warner Home Video, with a beautiful wide-screen presentation and director commentary, as part of the “Martin Scorsese Collection” boxed set.
by Adam Suraf