idea ·Mean Streets (1973)

Too much red

In 1975 Michael Powell wrote to Scorsese to say Mean Streets used too much red. Scorsese had got the red from Michael Powell.

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Back in 1975, he'd written to me after first seeing Mean Streets to say that he liked it, but I used too much red - this from the man who had red all over his own films, which was where I'd got it from in the first place!

— Scorsese on Scorsese, sos 80

The "he" is Michael Powell, director of The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus, whom Scorsese would help rescue from obscurity and whose editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, later married. So the most famous colour decision in the film, the red of Mean Streets — Tony's bar, is a quotation, and its source thought it was overdone.

Ebert reads the red as "the color of sex, blood, and guilt" ([[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert|Scorsese by Ebert]], unpaged). Both things are true: a colour can carry a meaning in the film and a debt outside it. A student who knows only the first is reading the image; one who knows the second is reading the filmmaker.

There is also a Powell nod at the start of the film: the projector in the title sequence recalls Peeping Tom (smc 46). See Mean Streets — the opening.

Powell kept giving notes. Ten years later he fixed the ending of After Hours (Michael Powell wrote the ending). See Michael Powell.

A case for Colour. Compare The red tint over the bloodbath, where Scorsese's red three years later was a price paid to a ratings board, not a debt to a master.

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.
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.
person Michael Powell The director of The Red Shoes and Peeping Tom, rescued from obscurity by Scorsese, married to his editor, and a standing note-giver on his films: too much red, the wrong gloves, and the ending of After Hours.
idea Chapman pushed the night stock Taxi Driver's wet neon look came from over-developing night-rated Technicolor stock — a 1970s laboratory habit, not a lighting package.
idea The $85,000 backdrop The Alice prologue set cost $85,000 of a $1.8M budget and shot for one day — five per cent of the film spent on announcing what the film is about.
idea Michael Powell wrote the ending The director of The Red Shoes, by then married to Scorsese's editor, saw a cut of After Hours with Scorsese's father, hated the ending, and suggested the one in the film. He also mentioned Kafka, whom Scorsese had never read.