Mean Streets: Rites of Passage

What Mean Streets had in 1973 that the other crime movies that came out that year couldn’t provide was a mirror for its audience. Scorsese had made a collective portrait of a group of young guys, bound tightly together by any number of ties, who have known one another since childhood but have recently taken the first steps into full adulthood and the gradual dispersion of their personalities. His film describes traditional cultural assumptions about a specific time of youth, the period between adolescence and marriage during which men’s sowing of their wild oats is expected, if officially deplored. (There’s only one significant female character in the picture, but the women’s side would be a whole other story, with a different color and rhythm.) The film’s depiction of the boys’ social dynamic, which mixes alcohol-fueled and testosterone-driven bacchanalia with a deadly serious accounting of debts and slights and degrees of power, was immediately recognizable, in 1973, to anyone who had ever experienced or even witnessed similar situations, which is to say nearly everybody on the planet. Note how the same basic social principles can be seen in movies as wide-ranging as Federico Fellini’s I vitelloni (1953) and Wong Kar Wai’s As Tears Go By (1988).

The songs are the characters’ youth—and that of the film’s first audience, not to mention Scorsese’s—and they are also part of the fabric of the city. The picture breathes with the spirit of New York City at the top of the seventies. Though most of the film was shot in Los Angeles, Scorsese does a good job of situating you in the physical environment of Lower Manhattan when it was still half industrial, was still divided up by ethnicities, and still featured a lot of guys who spent their lives loitering. Much of this is supplied by evocative B-roll of the West Side Highway, Forty-Second Street, and the Feast of San Gennaro on Mulberry Street.

Mean Streets is mostly an indoor picture, and most of the outdoor locations were photographed at night; it’s rare that there’s a horizon to be seen. The bars and clubs where much of the film takes place are caverns where it’s midnight around the clock and primitive passions reign—a caged lion cub makes a brief appearance. The camera is restless, agile, often handheld, moving with the characters—mobile even during conversations, emphasizing Charlie’s jitters. It is always subjective, always enacting Scorsese’s point of view and establishing his fondness for long tracking shots that function like lists; during a fight in a pool hall, it inventories the space as it tracks a character being beaten along all four walls. Scorsese’s hand and eye are incarnate in every detail, making this a rare work of personal cinema with broad popular appeal; as an on-screen character in the last seconds of the picture, he stages his directorial authority, embodying the final cut.

Johnny Boy aside, the boys wear good suits and keep their shoes shined, aspiring to the imperturbable suavity of Uncle Giovanni but rarely able to maintain the act for long. Michael (Richard Romanus) has the slickest presentation, impeccable in his velvet-collared chesterfield, but he is also the angriest, and cannot maintain his cool. Tony is eternally eager to please and also aware that he can’t quite match the machismo of the others, which is perhaps where his lion comes in. Life outside the family, suggested by peripheral characters who blow in and move on, is worse. Despite his Silver Star, the returning Vietnam veteran (Harry Northup) is damaged goods, and the drunk played by David Carradine is such an irritant that it comes as a relief when he is gunned down (while he keeps charging, like a movie monster) by a teenage hit man who extravagantly shakes out his long hair before firing. Teresa, the only woman with more than a bit part, is almost improbably perfect, but she has epilepsy, which makes her a leper to Uncle Giovanni.

Charlie is the future, the one most likely to succeed, and the most likely to carry the burdens of others. But his strength is also his weakness, and his weakness is Johnny Boy. The two of them are Goofus and Gallant, Tom and Huck, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—they are Abbott and Costello, down to the rhythms of their verbal spats, a comedy duo in hell, with Charlie the eternal straight man and Johnny Boy the explosive, free-range id. Thanks to Johnny Boy’s lawlessness, the two are in perpetual crisis, but even in some of their worst moments they quickly revert to being kids together—what begins as a verbal fight can become a duel with garbage-can lids. The performances unsurprisingly established Keitel’s and De Niro’s careers, and they have by now long resided in the general unconscious. They seem almost elemental: There’s Charlie’s troubled soul; his attempts to please everyone; his many slips off the path of moderation; his gaze, in which you sense a dozen conflicts going on at once. And there’s Johnny Boy’s body language and porkpie hat and crooked grin, the self-assurance of an eleven-year-old who has just discovered matches, a sociopath with a lust for life. De Niro has become one of those actors whose on-screen personality doubles as a shtick, something he has explored or subverted in later roles and turned on like an effect in pictures where little else of note is going on.

Along with the two Godfather movies that bookended its release, Mean Streets inaugurated a long series of movies and TV shows—good, bad, and indifferent—set in Italian American urban milieus inflected by organized crime. There had been Mafia movies before, but in their different ways Mean Streets and the Godfather pictures brought intimacy and nuance and voluptuous detail to the depiction of this underworld. Francis Ford Coppola’s movies offered the mystique, the rituals, the medieval atmosphere of warring feudal kingdoms; Scorsese’s picture brought the youth, the corner talk, the small-time, the maze of debts and obligations, the confusion. It is especially hard to imagine The Sopranos without Mean Streets; David Proval’s recurring role as Richie Aprile in the television series is something of an homage. And the minute you see Harvey Keitel in a church in Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992), the memory of Mean Streets supplies the context with no further explanation required.

Scorsese has meanwhile gone on to a distinguished career, rolling out a bewildering number of movies in a kaleidoscopic array of styles. He has made nearly every kind of picture, it would seem (from the independent-woman saga of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore to the wild psychodrama of The King of Comedy to my own recent favorite, Silence, which is about Jesuits in seventeenth-century Japan), and his appetite for new directions has not flagged. He has doubled as a kind of one-man cinematic memory bank, someone who has seen every movie ever made and remembers them all, down to their shot order, and has been equally active in film preservation and the encouragement of young and diverse talent. He is an institution, and Mean Streets is the cornerstone of his edifice, containing all the elements of his future career in one spectacular, bravura throw-down—a movie that is all at once a pop song and a novel of manners and a crime melodrama and a neorealist character study, and that speaks to its viewers in whatever language they wish to hear.