Scorsese/De Niro: Mean Streets (Dir. Martin Scorsese, 1h52m, 1973)

Ten minutes into Mean Streets, Robert De Niro, as Johnny Boy, changes the entire trajectory of American Cinema. Mean Streets has already presented one of the most memorable and argubaly greatest title sequence in 1970s cinema: a blend of grainy Super 8 home movie reportage, christenings and all, and public life of Harvey Keitel's small-time mobster member, Charlie, effortlessly cut and linked together to the Ronnettes' 'Be My Baby', the first of hundreds of classic Scorsese needle drops. Another one is coming, very soon. We've already met the characters that comprise Charlie's Little Italy, his New York. A New York based heavily on Scorsese's own experiences.

Thus, through Charlie's eyes, we're taken across this patch of New York, from the bar owner, Tony DeVienazo (David Proval) , who tries to fit in with the group that patronise him, to the faintly sinister figure of loan shark, Michael (Richard Romanus), to Johnny Boy (De Niro), who is introduced planting, and running from, a letterbox bomb, to the commanding figure of authority that is Charlie's uncle, Giovanni (Cesare Danova), one of the major Mafioso in the area. Each of these introductions is a vignette, a perfect outline sketch of its subject. The film arrives in Tony's Stygian red-tinted bar. We are, if not in hell, in a figurative one, a place of vice and temptation. Neither are far.

Between hell and salvation: Harvey Keitel as Charlie

Later, blood will be spilt in the bar, in a shooting that underpins the bubbling undercurrent of violence that sits below the surface of the film-our main crew later attempt to shake down another relative of Charlie-compared to the genteel world of Coppola's The Godfather, fourteen months previously, there's something down-at-heel about the dilapidated world of 1970s New York, of rotting pool halls, and almost perpetual night, from which Keitel, De Niro and the rest loom, so often bathed in red. We rarely see our characters during the day, and the few times we do, the sunlight is almost harsh, or we're in the deep, shadowy reds, of Tony' bar.

Standing at the end of that bar: cue Keitel; much of Scorsese's filmography, as will be discussed later-is concerned with the concept of redemption, Charlie's narration, one of many tricks from French New Wave, considering his devout Catholicism, his penance in looking after Johnny Boy, the idea, right out of the mouth of Scorsese himself, that "You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home". Here is Charlie, making up for his sins, only to find temptation sidling in through the door. Keitel, for his part, is torn between his faith, and his job, between the positively saintly figure that tries to be everyone's friend, and the enforcer for his all-powerful uncle. 

Born in a crossfire hurricane-De Niro's Johnny Boy is a wild and unpredictable deuteragonist.

All of this is further complicated by his connection to Johnny Boy and his cousin, Theresa (Amy Robinson), an epileptic, who Charlie has fallen in love with, despite his uncle's warnings. The relationships between this trio, of the friendship between Johnny Boy and Charlie, and the love affair between Charlie and Theresa, dominates the second half of the film. There is danger, a verité wildness from De Niro, and whilst later scenes will see Johnny Boy's increasing volatility, the foolish young man raging against the world, all this is to come. There is, however, already a sense of De Niro's qualities as an actor, and Johnny Boy's seemingly doomed approach to life; De Niro after all, would end up on the shortlist for the National Society of Film Critics' Best Supporting Actor, in what amounts to his second major role after Bang the Drum Slowly.

There is a sense of unpredictability, of danger to De Niro. Against the godly Charlie, Johnny Boy is almost devilish-in a few seconds, he's going to take the walk down the bar, a suited and booted practical joking Lucifer, right at home in the devilish red of the bar. We already know that Johnny Boy is deeply in debt-we already know, from the joke Johnny plays on Tony's door staff, and the explosives he's introduced planting and setting off, a sense of this wild, hot-headed young man. Yet, there's an undeniable coolness to De Niro-he may be doomed youth incarnate, a figure either too headstrong, too idiotic, or too dangerous to realise his reliance on his friend, but Robert De Niro, and Harvey Keitel and all the other figures in this film that crowd in at the edges in the darkness, are cool, and cool in a way that belies the film's sizeable debt to the French New Wave.

A Film of Darkness and Violence: Mean Streets is a perfect start to Scorsese's filmography proper.

Cue De Niro. Scorsese and DP Kent L. Wakeford cut to a POV shot, a smooth slide down the bar to Keitel. The needle drops on the Rolling Stones' 'Jumpin' Jack Flash', the camera settling for a few seconds on Keitel. So far he's been our undeniable protagonist; this is, after all, his narration, his story. No it's not. Not any more. It's also the start of a relationship between music and cinema that is exemplified by that between Scorsese and the Stones; first, the idea of rock music as score to begin with remained fairly rare in 1973, but the way that Scorsese uses music: a song is never just a song, but a audio-visual shorthand for a time, a place or an emotion.

Cut again, to De Niro, face on to camera, strutting down the bar, woman on each arm, waving and nodding to its patrons. Cut to Tony, grinning-this is just the first of a number of times the film will underline his attempts to fit in, from the tiger his back rooms, to his tagging along. De Niro arrives at the end of the bar, embraces his friend, and the film moves on. Scorsese's films will focus, for the next fifty years on the thin line between machismo and masculinity, between organised crime and its agents and victims. Mean Streets, in its tale of masculinity, of power, of faith and brotherhood, is not just a thematic encapsulating of Scorsese but a blueprint of his visual and editing style.

His avatar, his villain, his hero, his mirror through many of his best instalments, eight of which we will discuss over the next two months (Taxi Driver, New York, New York, Raging Bull, King of Comedy, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, Casino, and Killers of the Flower Moon-I've already covered The Irishman in 2022), is the man reaching the end of the bar now. Here comes Robert De Niro. Here comes Martin Scorsese. American cinema will never be the same again.

Rating: Must See

Mean Streets is available to stream via Apple TV in the UK and USA, and is available on BluRay via ‎Universal.

Next week, we take a ride with De Niro and Scorsese's most infamous creation, as the anti-heroic Travis Bickle descends into the underbelly of 1970s New York in Taxi Driver.

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