scene ·Mean Streets (1973)

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.

colour
lighting
camerawork
audio
setting
character
iconography
editing
close-reading
scorsese
music
slow-motion

Observation

Two entrances into the same bar.

The first is Charlie's. The camera follows him in from behind, and the room is red: red light on the walls, the faces, the smoke. The picture slows, and the sound slows with it. He moves through the bar greeting people, climbs up onto the stage with the stripper, and for a moment he is the only thing in the room that is in focus with himself.

The second is Johnny Boy's. Charlie is at the bar with his drink; the drum on "Jumpin' Jack Flash" drops; the film cuts to slow motion at that exact frame; and Johnny Boy comes through the door with a girl on each arm, hat tilted, grinning, in no hurry at all. The camera tracks in on Charlie watching him, then tracks back ahead of Johnny as he comes on.

What the sources say it is

The library's editors call the first one "the celebrated opening tracking shot, when Charlie enters an infernal red-hued bar", achieved with "slow-motion cinematography and slowed-down sound" (sos 45). The second was planned to the frame. Scorsese told Richard Schickel:

The moment of the downbeat, I knew that Keitel would be taking his drink and it would be slow motion. Exactly what speed I wasn't quite sure of at the time – I think we went with ninety-six frames per second

— Scorsese, quoted in the Companion, smc 276

Ninety-six frames a second is four times normal speed, so the entrance plays at a quarter of real time. That is an extreme choice for a first-time studio release, and it is one the Stones paid for: the rights to "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and "Tell Me" cost $30,000 (smc 265). He could not afford "The Last Time".

Connotation code by code

Colour and lighting

Ebert's reading is the one that stuck:

The real world is shot in ordinary colors, but then Charlie descends into the bar run by his friend Tony and it is always bathed in red, the color of sex, blood, and guilt.

— Scorsese by Ebert, unpaged

"Descends" is the right verb. The bar is the film's hell, and Charlie's theology says hell is fire (The hand in the flame). Stefan Sereda pushes the reading somewhere more political: the bar is "a Hellish synecdoche for capitalism", and while Charlie and Tony argue about religion, "a mob hit takes place in the bathroom" (smc 378). The red came, Scorsese says, from Michael Powell, who wrote to him in 1975 to complain there was too much of it (Too much red).

Camerawork

Giuliana Muscio notices the angle: these are "tracking shots taken from the back of characters – instead of more conventional framing showing them from the front – following their movement in, and their control of, space" (smc 276). The camera trails Charlie as though it were one of the crew. It does not do that for Johnny Boy. It backs away in front of him, which is how you film someone who has taken the room.

The slow motion does two different jobs. On Charlie it is interior: the red, the smoke and the slowed sound are the inside of his head. On Johnny Boy it is Charlie's point of view on his friend, as Anthony Cavaluzzi notes: the jump to slow motion "at the precise juncture of the downbeat" lets the track into Charlie and the track back from Johnny "compliment the voice-over narration" (smc 299). Johnny Boy arrives the way Charlie sees him: glamorous, doomed and entirely unbothered.

Audio

The bar has a jukebox, and the film has no score; everything the audience hears is what someone in the room could be hearing (The jukebox is the score). That is why the downbeat can do the editing. The song is not commenting on the scene. The scene is happening to the song.

Setting

The bar was in Los Angeles, in what Scorsese calls "the Chicano section - a very rough area, where the everyday violence was far worse than anything we showed in the film" (sos 41). The red helps hide that it is not Mulberry Street (New York was Los Angeles).

Character

Two ways of occupying a room. Charlie works it: greetings, handshakes, the manager's circuit. Johnny Boy owns it without trying. Ebert's summary of Johnny is "almost as a holy fool: a smiling jokester with no sense of time or money and a streak of self-destruction" (Ebert, unpaged). The first time we see him, earlier, he blows up a corner mailbox. "Why? No reason."

Audience

Pauline Kael caught the room's effect in her 1973 review: the film "has its own hallucinatory look; the characters live in the darkness of bars, with lighting and color just this side of lurid" (Kael — Mean Streets review (1973)). The entrance has had a long afterlife. Reservoir Dogs adapts it to introduce its gangsters (smc 382), and the slow-motion, back-lit arrival to a needle-drop has been a crime-film convention ever since. That makes it an Iconography case as much as a camera one: a way of walking into a room that now means "this man is dangerous" in any film that borrows it.

Compare

Mean Streets — the opening — the other place the film cuts on a downbeat.
Taxi Driver — the shoot-out — three years later, the same director uses red as a settlement with a censor rather than a choice (The red tint over the bloodbath).
Psycho — the parlour scene — another room whose lighting tells you what the people in it are before they speak.

Writing leads

Time the Johnny Boy entrance and check the 96fps figure against the running time of the shot. Scorsese himself was not sure.
Find the shot where the red is broken by white light, if there is one, and ask what gets it.

Go on, then

scene Alice — the prologue Ninety seconds of counterfeit 1940s Hollywood, built at real 1940s expense, existing to be destroyed by one cut.
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 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.
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.
context Church and street in Little Italy In the neighbourhood Scorsese grew up in, the two powers were the wise guys and the priests. Mean Streets is a film about trying to answer to both.
scene After Hours — the keys A cab ride in fast motion that eats Paul's only $20, then a set of keys dropped from a loft window with the camera riding them down at his face. The point-of-view shot as a joke, a threat and a stunt that nearly went wrong.