How Mean Streets changed the face of American… | Little White Lies

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How Mean Streets changed the face of Amer­i­can cinema

20 May 2015

Words by Paul Risker

A scowling man holding crumpled papers next to a sign reading "POSITIVELY NO GAMBLING".
A scowling man holding crumpled papers next to a sign reading "POSITIVELY NO GAMBLING".
With Mar­tin Scorsese’s sem­i­nal crime dra­ma final­ly out on Blu-ray, we gauge the film’s endur­ing influence.

When François Truf­faut saw Alfred Hitchcock’s penul­ti­mate film, Fren­zy, he was of the opin­ion that it was a young man’s film. While the irony is obvi­ous, in this sin­gu­lar moment Hitch­cock had redis­cov­ered his artis­tic youthfulness.

Only a year sep­a­rates Hitchcock’s Fren­zy from Mar­tin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, and dur­ing this nar­row­est of win­dows the same ener­gy that reju­ve­nat­ed an old mas­ter lit a spark for a future mas­ter of cin­e­ma. Both of these films exhib­it a youth­ful exu­ber­ance that offers an impres­sion of two indi­vid­u­als at dif­fer­ent stages of their career, but with an abun­dance of ener­gy to expend.

Now looked upon as a mod­ern clas­sic, Scorsese’s first full for­ay into the gang­ster genre sat on the cusp of his bur­geon­ing youth­ful prowess. But rewind the clock back to 1973 and Mean Streets offered only an ear­ly impres­sion of the great Amer­i­can film­mak­er. Look­ing back on the ear­ly impres­sion of Scors­ese that Mean Streets offers, what is revealed is a musi­cal and pic­to­r­i­al moment that has evolved through­out his body of work, along­side a reliance on inter­per­son­al rela­tion­ships that are a cor­ner­stone of his cinema.

These have sought to draw our inter­est through a back cat­a­logue of human dra­mas that touch upon self-sac­ri­fice, loy­al­ty, friend­ship and the famil­ial. But equal­ly the acknowl­edge­ment of the impor­tance of Mean Streets serves to con­tex­tu­alise Scors­ese as the artis­tic con­science of the New Amer­i­can Cinema.

The open­ing of Mean Streets tran­si­tions from pic­to­r­i­al sub­tle­ty to an explo­sive musi­cal and visu­al aes­thet­ic. Keitel’s angst filled voiceover reflec­tions about repent­ing on the streets quick­ly tran­si­tions to the home video mon­tage set to The Ronettes’ Be My Baby’. From here the stage is set for the infu­sion in Scorsese’s cin­e­ma of the lit­er­ary method­ol­o­gy along­side the pow­er­ful uni­ty of music and image. From The Ronettes to the Big Band music of Good­fel­las’ open­ing scenes and onto the clas­si­cal reper­toire through a col­li­sion of the glitz and glim­mer of Las Vegas with Bach’s St Matthew Pas­sion for Casino’s colour­ful titles, and Cav­al­le­ria Rus­ti­cana for Rag­ing Bull’s poet­ic black-and-white title sequence. The way in which Scors­ese mar­ries mov­ing image and sound infers his appre­ci­a­tion of film as not an exclu­sive­ly visu­al medi­um, but a sound medi­um in equal measure.

The Ronettes home video sequence off­sets the angst rid­den open­ing scenes with a play­ful and light musi­cal accom­pa­ni­ment, an approach that will be explored again by Scors­ese. Con­sid­er Rag­ing Bull’s title sequence, which is infused with both a swirling aes­thet­ic beau­ty and fore­bod­ing sense of tragedy, and Good­fel­las’ musi­cal open­ing which off­sets the dark under­tones with a play­ful­ness that allows us to enjoy the trag­ic tale of this flawed char­ac­ter who always dreamt of being a gangster.

Mean Streets rep­re­sents a point of cre­ative con­cep­tion, although bor­row­ing George’s Delerue’s Theme de Camille from Le Mépris for Casino’s ren­dezvous in the desert is a high point of the mar­riage of image and sound in Scorsese’s cin­e­ma. It is sprawl­ing, fan­tas­ti­cal and dream­like that trans­ports the poet­ry of motion to a whole new lev­el. First there was Mean Streets and the home video aes­thet­ic, and then there was cin­e­ma; a tech­no­log­i­cal and aes­thet­ic evolution.

Mean Streets is a tight­ly woven inter­per­son­al dra­ma cen­tred around Charlie’s (Har­vey Kei­t­el) rela­tion­ships with his fam­i­ly, his girl­friend Tere­sa, and his friend John­ny Boy. This inter­per­son­al ten­sion is thread­ed through­out Scorsese’s cin­e­ma, although of course if char­ac­ters are a tool to tell the sto­ry then a lone­ly or iso­lat­ed char­ac­ter can­not ful­fil the storyteller’s pur­pose as the need for con­flict inher­ent­ly comes through inter­per­son­al rela­tion­ships. Scorsese’s cin­e­ma is mem­o­rable for deeply root­ed inter­per­son­al rela­tion­ships of which he adds a twist.

The use of voiceover in Mean Streets, Good­fel­las and Gangs of New York laces his cin­e­ma with a lit­er­ary qual­i­ty that con­nects pro­tag­o­nist and audi­ence, forg­ing a bond in the lit­er­ary tra­di­tion, or as close as a film can come to enter­ing the mind of its pro­tag­o­nist. Although dat­ing back to Mean Streets this has been a pre-occu­pa­tion of Scorsese’s that takes the inter­per­son­al beyond the screen through this lit­er­ary pre­oc­cu­pa­tion to con­nect on a more intri­cate lev­el with his audience.

Char­lie is torn by the expec­ta­tions of indi­vid­u­als that are com­pound­ed by issues of loy­al­ty, friend­ship and the famil­ial. These are the themes that crop up again and again in Scorsese’s cin­e­ma. The warn­ing giv­en to Char­lie to be cau­tious of John­ny Boy is mir­rored by Paul Sorvi­no and Ray Liotta’s father-son rela­tion­ship in Good­fel­las, when the for­mer warns the lat­ter to be cau­tious his mob friends do not lead him into trou­ble. Of course loy­al­ty, friend­ship and the famil­ial are cor­ner­stones of the inter­per­son­al dra­ma of the arche­typ­al gang­ster nar­ra­tive, but even out­side of the gang­ster chap­ter of his oeu­vre the inter­per­son­al remains thought­ful in what it has to say.

1982’s The King of Com­e­dy is con­struct­ed around the awk­ward­ness that derives from unre­al­is­tic expec­ta­tions that Rupert Pup­kin (Robert De Niro) has of Jer­ry Lang­ford (Jer­ry Lewis), but also the latter’s con­flict­ing rela­tion­ship Lewis has with his fans as a celebri­ty. Mean­while for Taxi Driver’s Travis Bick­le his loy­al­ty to the young pros­ti­tute Iris is a reflec­tion on the individual’s self-sac­ri­fice that mir­rors the self-sac­ri­fic­ing nature of his pro­tag­o­nist friend Char­lie in Mean Streets.

The tim­ing of Mean Streets is of par­tic­u­lar sig­nif­i­cance as fol­low­ing the col­lapse of the stu­dio sys­tem and the emer­gence of the auteur the­o­ry, the direc­tors had wres­tled a degree of total­i­tar­i­an or dic­ta­to­r­i­al con­trol away from the pro­duc­ers. The 1960s and 1970s rep­re­sent a moment of rein­ven­tion or reshap­ing of the Amer­i­can cin­e­mat­ic brand. It was in this for­tu­itous moment that Scors­ese and his fel­low Movie Brats emerged to enter the fray.

If, how­ev­er, Scors­ese was on the cusp of his bur­geon­ing youth­ful prowess, then his con­tem­po­raries, notably Steven Spiel­berg and George Lucas were on the cusp of leav­ing their own mark or scar on the sto­ry of film, in a moment that divides film from movies, and art from spec­ta­cle. While Spiel­berg and Lucas remain known for drop­ping the block­buster bomb, Scorsese’s per­son­al dra­mas (Mean Streets and Taxi Dri­ver), full of grit and a grainy image to accom­pa­ny them, define his work in this period.

In the shad­ow of age and stature Mean Streets has a dis­tinct feel; a prod­uct of its time and per­haps how Scors­ese fit­ted into the tur­bu­lent New Amer­i­can Cin­e­ma in con­trast to his con­tem­po­raries: Coppola’s larg­er than life cin­e­mat­ic vision of the mob and war, and the less per­son­al but more arche­typ­al sto­ry­telling through spec­ta­cle with the block­busters that were just around the cor­ner. While Cop­po­la, Spiel­berg and Lucas all made small­er more per­son­al films, the scale of their big­ger pro­duc­tions over­shad­owed them.

For Scors­ese, 1977’s under­whelm­ing big pro­duc­tion musi­cal New York, New York has both been lost and dis­missed in the shad­ow of these small­er and more per­son­al films. This there­in frames Mean Streets as an his­tor­i­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant moment in his career, and the obvi­ous first step in his gang­ster canon. But it also serves to frame Scors­ese as the his­toric con­science of the per­son­al for the New Amer­i­can Cinema.

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