person

Harvey Keitel

The actor in each of Scorsese's first three films on this site: Charlie in Mean Streets, Ben in Alice, Sport in Taxi Driver. Scorsese's stand-in before De Niro was.

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scorsese
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Harvey Keitel is the one thread through Scorsese's 1970s films on the site, and he plays three entirely different men. (He is not in After Hours (1985); that film belongs to Griffin Dunne.)

Film	Role	Credit
Mean Streets (1973)	Charlie, the would-be saint	`sos 221`
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)	Ben, the charming married man who turns violent	`sos 222`
Taxi Driver (1976)	Sport, the pimp Travis kills	`sos 222`

Before any of these he was J.R. in Who's That Knocking at My Door? (1967), Scorsese's first feature, and Charlie is the same character a few years on (sos 23).

Why Scorsese cast him

When I cast Harvey Keitel in my first feature, I found him to be very much like me, even though he's a Polish Jew from Brooklyn.

— Scorsese on Scorsese, sos 42

Keitel's own version: "Perhaps I got the part of Charlie because Marty sensed that I came from a similar background" (Kelly, unpaged). He was nearly not Charlie at all. Jon Voight was approached first, and Keitel was confirmed the night Voight dropped out; the shots of him walking through the San Gennaro feast were filmed the same day (Kelly, unpaged).

What he does

In Mean Streets he is the straight man to De Niro, and Pauline Kael saw that the straight man made the film: "Keitel makes De Niro's triumph possible; Johnny Boy can bounce off Charlie's anxious, furious admiration" (Kael — Mean Streets review (1973)). It is a generous performance in the technical sense: most of his work is reaction. See Mean Streets — the back room.

In Alice he is the film's one moment of real danger, and the Companion reads him as a revision of the western: Ben, "with his cowboy hat, boots, and scorpion bolo", is the cowboy as threat (smc 124). In Taxi Driver he is the man Travis shoots first (Taxi Driver — the shoot-out).

A useful exercise for Acting: watch the three in order and list what stays the same. The answer is less than you'd expect, which is the point.

Go on, then

person Robert De Niro Johnny Boy in Mean Streets, Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. The actor whose rewrites and rehearsal-room inventions are all over both films, often more than the credits admit.
film Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) Scorsese's studio women's picture: a widow, a kid, a road east, and an argument with every film Alice grew up watching.
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.
scene After Hours — the diner A man alone with a Henry Miller paperback, a woman at the next table who knows the book, and a camera that pounces. Ten minutes that set up the whole night, and borrowed more than anyone admitted at the time.
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.
scene Taxi Driver — the mirror "You talkin' to me?" — the most quoted line in the film is not in the film's script. De Niro wrote it standing up, in a derelict building, over traffic noise.