Mean Streets (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1973)

The screen is black. A voiceover intones: “You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.” In 1973, Harvey Keitel, future icon of screen cool, shoots up in bed, looking like nothing more than a struggling thirty-something actor. He gets up and examines his face in the mirror while we hear the sounds of the street coming through his bedroom window. He returns to bed. As he reclines, his head hits the pillow in slow motion. The fat, echoing beat of The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” — one of pop music’s most magnificent soul symphonies — kicks in as the title credits roll, superimposed over a scratchy Super-8 home video reel of the characters, in the almost-hammy style later associated with sitcoms. As the song hits its crescendo — Ronnie Spector’s impossibly plaintive chorus of “Be my, be my baby…” — the film’s title emerges from the gloom in stark, typewritten letters. Mean Streets.

What a way to launch a movie — and what a movie. The movie that launched the careers of Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro — the most iconic director/actor combination in American cinema — practically defined the template for gritty realism in film for the decade to come.

Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas all have legions of admirers. Mean Streets, by comparison, goes curiously unloved. The film represents an entirely different beast to the slick, kinetic, tightly constructed crime epic that constituted Goodfellas. Scorsese’s ultra-personal examination of Catholic guilt — expressed in the inconsequential, quotidian lives of goons so minor they barely scrape above the street trash — has a roughed up and intimate air, redolent of the improvised narrative structure and raw, live-on-the-street feel of the French New Wave more than Classical Hollywood. The movie takes an interest in the little details, as opposed to the “big” story, offering a slice of gritty street life in New York’s Little Italy circa the late 60s and early 70s. The characters seem like people one might bump into, if in possession of a time machine.

Mean Streets introduces its main characters in a series of brief vignettes, after which their name comes up on the screen on a title card, another future classic technique that would grace such later films as Reservoir Dogs and Trainspotting. We’re introduced to Michael (Richard Romanus), a low level wheeler-dealer on the make, with pretensions to rise above the gutter level of his friends. These manifest in the imperious manner he has when he holds a cigarette and his penchant for lion-hugging. But Michael faces the same tribulations as everyone else in his environment. At the start of the film he struggles to offload a bunch of dodgy camera lenses – “We can’t use these. They’re Jap adaptors” – in a scene that typifies Mean Street’s tone of deadbeat, understated humour. We also meet Tony, played by David Proval, the rather cynical and perpetually put-upon manager of the scuzzy strip bar frequented by his friends.

And, of course, we have Johnny Boy. From the first moment he appears on the screen, De Niro imbues Johnny Boy with the aura of the inveterate delinquent. Everything in his body language — in the slouching Bronx street cool of his walk — alerts the viewer that the man is breezily tripping down a road to self-destruction, poised to take everybody around him down with the ship. Johnny, with his insouciant charm, is probably the most magnetic character in the movie, while also a blatant, dim-witted Trumpian jagoff. This slick-fringed catastrophe possesses a sympathetic vulnerability that seems endemic to the type — the charismatic yob too thick to comprehend his own power. Credit the noxious De Niro for bringing such conflicting qualities to the character. For the more unruly viewer, De Niro ends up overshadowing the performance of leading man, Harvey Keitel. After Mean Streets, Robert De Niro would forever replace Keitel as Scorsese’s leading man, while Keitel had to settle for being the elder statesman of 90s indie cinema.

In Mean Streets, Keitel plays Charlie, the emotional centre of the movie, and Scorsese’s on-screen alter-ego. Trapped between his Catholic spiritual longings and the reality of survival on the street, Charlie’s constant attempts and failure to reconcile these two worlds form the essence of Mean Streets. For this bozo, Catholicism remains something far more serious than just going to church and its attendant rituals. In the film’s recurring motif, Charlie holds his hand into a flame, as if reminding himself of hell’s immediacy, with a perennial yet pathetic degree of guilt.

Charlie works as a debt collection man for his uncle and local mafia boss, Giovanni. But in reality, the poor softie seems just too nice to be effective. A modest ticket to the future flickers on the horizon — a restauranteur has failed to keep up with his debts and must cede ownership to Giovanni — but in order to claim the restaurant, Charlie has to keep his uncle happy. Obliged to stay away from his clingy, epileptic girlfriend, Teresa, and her cousin Johnny Boy, to whom Charlie appoints himself as guardian and savior, Charlie wants to please everybody, and ends up pleasing nobody.

To some degree, his friends are all contemptuous of his faith and naivety. Johnny Boy is contemptuous of Charlie’s attempts to help him out, Teresa is contemptuous of his reluctance to commit to their relationship and Giovanni contemptuous of his nephew’s inability to swerve these distractions.

Happily for us, Johnny Boy’s inexorable sense of feckless self-destruction proves the instrument of Charlie’s downfall. Johnny Boy has borrowed money from all around town, with no real intention of honouring the debts. His most pointed impugnments fall to Michael, who repeatedly puts off exacting retribution out of consideration for Charlie. But even he has limited tolerance for Johnny Boy’s brazen disrespect. Charlie, who sees himself as a latter day St. Francis of Assisi, views Johnny Boy as a cause — his way of atoning for the sins he commits on the streets. As Johnny Boy points out to Charlie after their world comes crashing down around them — in a throwaway line which also happens to be the most insightful in the movie: “Hey, you wanted this.”

But apart from Scorsese’s heavyweight obsessions with Catholic guilt, redemption and retribution, Mean Streets is also just a movie about guys hanging out. One particularly joyous interlude sees them wrestling a loquacious young man into the car after a murder, only to wrestle him out again as he starts catcalling passing tough guys. This balance constitutes much of the film’s charm, with its affectionate, funny and compassionate look at the down-and-outers of a bygone Little Italy. Scorsese’s heroes appear as street guys trying to make their way in an unforgiving environment, by any means necessary. This aspect of the film loudly echoes Italian classics like Nero Riso, with its group of young people doing their level best to stave off encroaching responsibility in a dead-end agricultural town. Mamma Mia!