Mean Streets - Blog Posts
“Fuck you, my child is completely fine”
Ma’am your child is obsessed with decades old crime movies with homoerotic undertones
thinking of this today and wishing i wasn't
Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973)
Siamo a New York. Charlie (interpretato da Harvey Keitel) è un giovane italo-americano che trascorre la sua vita nel quartiere di Little Italy tra feste, partite di biliardo e risse nei bar e svolgendo qualche lavoretto non proprio lecito per lo zio mafioso. Ma Charlie non si sente proprio a suo agio in questa situazione soprattutto a causa della sua forte fede religiosa. Tra gli amici del quartiere Charlie legato particolarmente a Johnny Boy (interpretato da Robert De Niro), un ragazzo scapestrato che non fa altro che mettersi nei guai, indebitandosi con tutti. Sarà proprio Charlie a cercare di proteggere Johnny Boy che deve restituire una grossa somma di denaro a Michael, un loro amico che stanco delle ripetute scuse del debitore comincia a minacciarlo.
Il primo film di Scorsese che tocca la tematica gangster ma in maniera più grezza con una fotografia sgranata ma azzeccata, una regia più caotica e meno curata dei film successivi ma che senza dubbio non deluderà gli ammiratori.
Robert De Niro during the filming of Mean Streets, 1973.
“Mean Streets” isn’t so much a gangster movie as a perceptive, sympathetic, finally tragic story about how it is to grow up in a gangster environment. Its characters have grown up in New York’s Little Italy, and they understand everything about that small slice of human society except how to survive in it. Scorsese places these characters in a perfectly realized world of boredom and small joys, sudden assaults, the possibility of death, and the certainty of mediocrity. He shot some exteriors in Little Italy, where he was born and where he seems to know every nuance of architecture and personality (though most of the movie was shot in Los Angeles), and his story emerges from the daily lives of the characters. They hang out. They go to the movies. They eat, they drink, they get in sudden fights that end as quickly as a summer storm. Scorsese photographs them with fiercely driven visual style. We never have the sense of a scene being set up and then played out; his characters hurry to their dooms while the camera tries to keep pace. There’s an improvisational feel even in scenes that we know, because of their structure, couldn’t have been improvised. The movie’s scenes of violence are especially effective because of the way Scorsese stages them. We don’t get spectacular effects and skillfully choreographed struggles. Instead, there’s something realistically clumsy about the fights in this movie. A scene in a pool hall, in particular, is just right in the way it shows its characters fighting and yet mindful of their suits (possibly the only suits they have). The whole movie feels like life in New York; there are scenes in a sleazy nightclub, on fire escapes, and in bars, and they all feel as if Scorsese has been there.
Roger Ebert
Mean Streets (1973)
Director: Martin Scorsese Writers: Martin Scorsese and Mardik Martin DoP: Kent L. Wakeford
Mean Streets (1973) | Dir. Martin Scorsese
Charlie / Harvey Keitel
The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you can touch with your hand. The kind you can feel in your heart.
Your soul, the spiritual side.
And ya know... the worst of the two ... is the spiritual.
Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” is a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking. It has its own hallucinatory look; the characters live in the darkness of bars, with lighting and color just this side of lurid. It has its own unsettling, episodic rhythm and a high-charged emotional range, that is dizzyingly sensual. Movies generally work you up to expect the sensual intensities, but here you may be pulled into a high without warning. Violence erupts crazily, too, the way it does in life – so unexpectedly fast that you can’t believe it, and over before you’ve been able to take it in. The whole movie has this effect; it psychs you up to accept everything it shows you. And since the story deepens as it goes along, you’re likely to be openmouthed, trying to rethink what you’ve seen. Its about American life here and now, and it doesn’t look like an American movie, or feel like one. What Scorsese has done with the experience of growing up in New York’s Little Italy has a thicker-textured rot and violence than we have ever had in any American movie, and a riper since of evil.
The picture is stylized without seeming in any way artificial; it is the only movie I’ve ever seen that achieves the effects of Expressionism without the use of distortion. “Mean Streets” never loses touch with the ordinary look of things or with common experience; rather, it puts us in closer touch with the ordinary, the common, by turning a different light on them. Every character, every sound, is rooted in those streets. The back-and-forth talk isn’t little-people empty-funny; it’s a tangle of jeering and joshing, of mutual goading and nerves getting frayed. These boys understand each other too well. No other American gangster-milieu film has had this element of personal obsession; there has never before been a gangster film in which you felt that the director himself was saying “This is my story.” We’re so affected because we know in our bones that Scorsese has walked these streets and has felt what his characters feel. He knows how crime is natural to them.
Scorsese could make poetic drama, rather than melodrama laced with decadence, out of the schlock of shabby experience because he didn’t have to “dive below the polite level, to something nearer to the common life” but had to do something much tougher- descend into himself and bring up what neither he nor anyone else could have known was there. Though he must have suspected. This is a blood thriller in the truest sense.
Pauline Kael
Mean Streets (1973) | Dir. Martin Scorsese
Johnny Boy / Robert De Niro
Mean Streets (1973) | Dir. Martin Scorsese
Michael / Richard Romanus
Mean Streets (1973) | Dir. Martin Scorsese
Tony / David Proval