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Stream On: Scorsese’s forgotten masterpiece ‘Mean Streets’

By Peter Hummers on November 16, 2023

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor.” (Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye)

When Martin Scorsese made his first feature in Hollywood in 1972 for the producer Roger Corman, the Depression-era exploitation film Boxcar Bertha, his mentor John Cassavetes told him, “You’ve just spent a year of your life making a piece of s––t.” The criticism reinforced Scorsese’s conviction to return to what he knew. The result was Mean Streets, about what Scorsese had seen every day, growing up in Manhattan’s Little Italy: the pervasive tension between the Church and the mob.

MEAN STREETS

/Amazon /Streaming /🍅95%🍿84% /Trailer /1973 /R

Martin Scorsese once said that his whole life “has been movies and religion. That’s it. Nothing else.” When he was 14, he enrolled at the Cathedral College on the Upper West Side, planning to study in the junior seminary and then take his vows. He lasted but a year, and went on to study English and film at New York University School of the Arts.

Taxi Driver (1976) is usually invoked first in superficial lists of Scorsese’s “best” movies, but his relationship with Taxi Driver star Robert De Niro began three years before, in Mean Streets, a Dostoevskian story of young Charlie Cappa (Harvey Keitel) and his cousin “Johnny Boy” Civello (De Niro). Charlie (whose voice-over narration is by Scorsese) is someone who in another life might have spent a year in seminary, but now is a collector for his Uncle Giovanni (Cesare Danova), a small-time Don in Little Italy. As St. Paul recommends in his first epistle to the Thessalonians in the Bible, Charlie prays without ceasing … out loud, which draws the mockery of his friends: “Who’s gonna help [Johnny] if I don’t? That’s what’s the matter. Nobody tries no more, tries to help us all, help people… Francis of Assisi had it all down.”

Johnny Boy, introduced to the accompaniment of the Rolling Stones’ “Jumping Jack Flash” (“born in a crossfire hurricane”), is Giovanni’s godson, a young psychopath who is tolerated perhaps because of his connections. Charlie and Johnny Boy hang out with and Michael (Richard Romanus), an ambitious gangster, at Tony’s (David Proval, The Sopranos) bar where they play billiards and drink.

Charlie reminds me of Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin in The Idiot (read it here), a “holy fool,” completely without guile; an innocent who is the source of amusement for others more … sophisticated. Myshkin is an epileptic, like Teresa (Amy Robinson), Johnny’s cousin with whom Charlie is having a secret affair.

In Dostoevsky’s novel, Prince Myshkin is torn between two women—a notorious kept woman, Nastasya, and a childlike Aglaya, as Charlie is torn between the mob and the church, and as Myshkin feels responsible for the soul of his acquaintance, the psychotic Rogozhin, Charlie tries to shepherd Johnny Boy through the mean streets of Little Italy.

De Niro is impressive as Johnny Boy, a punk with no impulse control and to whom nothing is sacred, including huge gambling debts; a kid who thinks nothing of emptying a revolver from a rooftop across the neighborhood. De Niro had caught everyone’s attention as a dimwitted southern baseball catcher (also a “holy fool” type) in Bang the Drum Slowly; here he is as fascinating as a coiled snake.

We see many of Scorsese’s techniques being fleshed out—long takes following characters around, especially as Charlie navigates a hellacious party in the bar and ends up passed out prone on a pool table. The bar scenes are mostly shot with a shaky handheld camera, sometimes in oppressive red lighting, while scenes in Charlie’s church, where he spends a lot of time, are static, colorful and lovingly framed. (Like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, Charlie tests himself by holding his hand over open flames, even in church.) The soundtrack is dominated by Derek and the Dominoes, the Rolling Stones and doo-wop, including the Chips’ “Rubber Biscuit,” a wonderful orgy of nonsense. Cream’s percussion-heavy live cover of Memphis Slim’s “Steppin’ Out” accompanies an apocalyptic car chase and shootout.

Well worth the watch for students of film, Scorsese, theology—or Dostoevsky, too, in my opinion, and unfairly eclipsed by the flashier but still excellent Taxi Driver, three years later.

(Pete Hummers is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to earn fees by linking Amazon.com and affiliate sites. This adds nothing to Amazon’s prices.)

Click here for more Stream On: What to watch on TV columns by Pete Hummers. Columns are archived and updated when necessary on Substack.

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