Church and street in Little Italy

The datum

Scorsese describes the world of his childhood, around Elizabeth, Mott and Mulberry Streets, as having two authorities:

In my neighbourhood, the people in power were the tough guys on the street, and the Church. The organized crime figures would tip their hats to a priest and watch their language, and they would have their cars and pets blessed.

— Scorsese on Scorsese, sos 9

And the respect that went with them: "not the working people, they were the wise guys, the gang leaders, and the priests. And that was what inclined me towards the priesthood, which was a tougher profession, I'm afraid!" (sos 48). At fourteen he went to Cathedral College, "a junior seminary on the Upper West Side", and was expelled after a year because he had fallen in love (sos 12). Mean Streets (1973) is what happens when a man who wanted both careers makes a film about one who has both.

The film's version

Charlie is the compromise. He collects for his uncle and goes to confession. Scorsese, later:

In Mean Streets, the main character, Charlie, tries to live a Christian life; he goes to church, does confession, listens to all the philosophy within the edifice of the church. But outside in the street, life is ruled by the gun. So how does one live a good Christian life in a world of this kind?

— sos 215

His earliest statement of the idea was more direct: "the whole idea was to make a story of a modern saint, a saint in his own society, but his society happens to be gangsters" (Kelly, unpaged). Teresa punctures it: "St. Francis was not a numbers runner."

What the critics saw

Ebert, who notes that "both Scorsese and I had attended Catholic schools" (Ebert, unpaged), makes it the key to the film:

Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets is not primarily about punk gangsters at all, but about living in a state of sin. For Catholics raised before Vatican II, it has a resonance that it may lack for other audiences.

— Scorsese by Ebert, unpaged

He notices that Charlie's guilt is aimed at the wrong target: "Although he is an apprentice gangster involved with men who steal, kill, and sell drugs, Charlie's guilt centers on sex. Impurity is the real sin; the other stuff is business" (Ebert, unpaged). And he spots the liturgy hidden in the bar: Charlie has whiskey poured over his crossed fingers, "a literal reenactment of what the priest does when an altar boy pours water and wine over his fingers holding a chalice" (Ebert, unpaged). Pauline Kael's review praised the film for showing "Catholicism as it's actually practiced among these people, what it means on the street" (Kael — Mean Streets review (1973)).

The judgement

Scorsese is harder on Charlie than the critics are:

Charlie uses other people, thinking that he's helping them; but by believing that, he's not only ruining them but ruining himself. When he fights with Johnny against the door in the street, he acts like he's doing it for the others, but it's a matter of his own pride — the first sin in the Bible.

— sos 48

That is the film's theology in one reading: penance performed for an audience of oneself is pride. It is why the voice-over at the start says "you do it in the streets" and the film then shows what that costs (Mean Streets — the opening).

Why it belongs on the bench

It is the clearest Personal context on the site: a film whose meaning depends on where the director was born and what he nearly became. It also sets up a motif that runs through the next forty years of his work. The gesture is The hand in the flame; the camera angle is Overhead shots are the priest's-eye view. And it shows the limits of the Values force: Ebert's own caveat is that a non-Catholic audience may miss half the film. That is a reception claim a class can test.

The companion documentary is Italianamerican (1974), made the next year, about Scorsese's parents at their kitchen table. Scorsese pairs the two (sos 113).

Films noted here that this context touches: Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976).