film

Mean Streets (1973)

Four young men in Little Italy, a debt nobody will pay, and a would-be saint who keeps putting his hand in the fire. Scorsese's first film in his own voice, made in Los Angeles for almost nothing.

audio
colour
camerawork
acting
spoken-language
setting
character
formula
scorsese
new-hollywood
gangster
independent
little-italy

Directed by Martin Scorsese; written by Scorsese and Mardik Martin; shot by Kent Wakeford, who would shoot Alice the following year; edited by Sid Levin; produced by Jonathan Taplin. Premiered at the New York Film Festival on 2 October 1973 and released by Warner Bros. Charlie (Harvey Keitel) collects debts for his uncle Giovanni, who runs the neighbourhood, and is waiting to be given a restaurant. He is also trying to keep his friend Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro) alive, which means keeping him paying a loan shark called Michael, which Johnny Boy has no intention of doing. Charlie is sleeping with Johnny Boy's cousin Teresa, which his uncle has forbidden. He has a private theory of penance that involves fire. It ends in a car in the dark.

Scorsese's own summary:

Mean Streets was an attempt to put myself and my old friends on the screen, to show how we lived, what life was like in Little Italy. It was really an anthropological or a sociological tract.

— Scorsese on Scorsese, sos 48

Why it is in the journal

Because it is where the man in the other two Scorsese films on this site first appears. The priest's-eye overheads in Taxi Driver, the hand over the flame, the records chosen to cut to, De Niro as a man who cannot be managed, Keitel as the one who tries: all of it starts here, cheaply, and some of it for no better reason than that there was no money. "So the economics dictated the style," Scorsese says, "and the style just happened to work" (sos 47).

Scenes

Mean Streets — the opening — a voice in the dark, three wake-ups, and a Ronettes record hitting on the downbeat as Charlie's head reaches the pillow.
Mean Streets — Tony's bar — the red room, the slow motion, and Johnny Boy's entrance to "Jumpin' Jack Flash".
Mean Streets — the back room — Johnny Boy's shaggy-dog story about a poker game, and the argument over who wrote it.

What it demonstrates

Codes

Audio first, because the film is built on records: there is no score, only what the jukebox and the car radio are playing, a model Scorsese took from The Public Enemy (The jukebox is the score). Colour is the red of Tony's bar, which Michael Powell later told Scorsese was too much (Too much red). Camerawork is handheld because tracks cost time, and slows down whenever the music says so. Acting and Spoken language come out of ten days of rehearsal in New York, taped and turned into script (Mean Streets — the back room). Setting is the film's great deception: most of Little Italy is Los Angeles (New York was Los Angeles).

Conventions

A gangster Formula with the careers taken out. Ebert's line is the one to remember: "The Godfather was about careers. Mean Streets was about jobs" ([[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert|Scorsese by Ebert]], unpaged). Character runs on a pairing Scorsese would keep for twenty years: the anxious manager and the man who will not be managed. Structure is episodic, closer to Fellini's I Vitelloni than to Warner Bros., until the debt comes due.

Contexts

Church and street in Little Italy is the Personal and Values context: a neighbourhood where the two powers were "the tough guys on the street, and the Church" (sos 9). Independence, 1973 is the Commerce story: a first-time producer, a non-union Corman crew, a $150,000 offer turned down because it came with a condition (Corman offered to make it Black), and a Warner Bros. release that stalled because the studio was putting its weight behind The Exorcist.

Disputes worth keeping

The sources disagree about almost every number, and the disagreements are more useful than any one figure.

The budget. Corman's rejected offer was $150,000 (sos 39). Scorsese asked Taplin for $300,000, and that is what Paul Rapp budgeted for ([[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey|Kelly]], unpaged). Scorsese told Ebert $650,000. Stefan Sereda estimates about $500,000 (smc 372). Scorsese also says Warner paid $750,000 for the finished film (Kelly, unpaged), which may be where the highest figure comes from.
Days in New York. Rapp proposed four. Scorsese says he "swindled eight days" (sos 41). To Kelly he says five, and elsewhere six; to Ebert, six days and nights with an NYU student crew. The total shoot was 26 or 27 days.
Whether Johnny Boy dies. One critic has Scorsese playing "the shooter who kills Johnny Boy" (smc 107); another says "it is unclear whether any of them will die" (smc 379); Kelly says Charlie and Johnny Boy "survive, dazed and bloody". See Nobody agrees whether Johnny Boy dies.
Who wrote the back-room scene. Scorsese says improvised and "Bob's idea"; Richard Romanus says "basically it was scripted"; De Niro's own papers suggest writing done in advance. See Mean Streets — the back room.

Where it sits

The library's general histories agree on its place. The Oxford history: "Scorsese established his critical reputation with Mean Streets" (ohwc 481). Pauline Kael's review, quoted in the Companion, called it "a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking" (smc 371). Its descendants are easy to spot: Reservoir Dogs borrows Johnny Boy's slow-motion entrance to introduce its gangsters (smc 382), and Wong Kar-wai's first feature, As Tears Go By, was "apparently inspired by" it (hnf 615). Scorsese made Italianamerican the next year, a documentary about his parents that he pairs with this film as its counterpart (sos 113). Twelve years later Amy Robinson, who plays Teresa, produced After Hours and watched him recover the same energy: "It was the same intense kind of fun" ([[Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey|Kelly]], unpaged).

On Axis of Action

The playback page covers the home-movie title sequence as a lesson in form: Super 8 grain, the projector in shot, a feature handing its credits to a home movie. The notes here stay off that ground and go after what it leaves out: the sound, the religion, the rehearsal method and the money.

Sources for this film

Scorsese on Scorsese (pp. 36–49) is the core: Scorsese's own account, chapter by chapter. [[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese|The Companion]] has four chapters that matter here: Sterritt on religion, Muscio and Cavaluzzi on music, Tait on De Niro's papers, and Sereda on independence. Scorsese by Ebert has the 1973 review, a later Great Movies reconsideration, and a long conversation about the title sequence. Kelly has the cast and crew in their own words. Kael — Mean Streets review (1973) is the review that made the film.

Go on, then

scene Mean Streets — Tony's bar Charlie walks into a room lit like hell in slow motion; later Johnny Boy walks in on the downbeat of 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' with a girl on each arm. Two entrances, one room, and the camera's opinion of both.
scene Alice — the prologue Ninety seconds of counterfeit 1940s Hollywood, built at real 1940s expense, existing to be destroyed by one cut.
scene Mean Streets — the back room Charlie tells Johnny Boy he has to pay. Johnny Boy tells him a story about a poker game, a raid and a man called Joey Clams, and loses the thread himself. Everyone agrees it's the heart of the film. Nobody agrees who wrote it.
film After Hours (1985) A word processor goes downtown for a date, loses his last $20 out of a cab window, and cannot get home. Scorsese's comedy of paranoia, shot in forty nights for $4 million after Paramount killed The Last Temptation of Christ.
scene Mean Streets — the opening A voice in the dark, a man who cannot stay asleep, and a Ronettes record that lands on the downbeat as his head hits the pillow. The film's argument and its method before the first title.
scene Taxi Driver — the shoot-out Three men dead in a stairwell, a camera that floats out through the ceiling, and an audience that cheered. Scorsese wanted a catharsis; he got applause, and it frightened him.