Revisiting any established director’s early work tends to be illuminating, the crude outlines of early style helping to clarify ideas and concepts that will come into clearer focus with more experience. This counts double for auteurs who themselves came of age during the golden age of cinema, with that nascent aesthetic often directly routed through references to prior works, the language of filmic pastiche providing practice runs for neophytes still honing their chops. Few artists are as open about their influences as Martin Scorsese, and so returning to his first movies becomes less about spotting those citations than determining their utility, picking out the specific ways in which such allusions formed the seeds of the mature technique that was to follow.
Fellini, for example, has remained a lodestar for the director, with tribute paid as recently as an effusive essay written for Harper’s in early 2021. Yet unlike the case of fellow movie brat Francis Ford Coppola, the actual artistic links between the Italian master’s symbol-laden, free-associative fantasias and Scorsese’s propulsive, tightly-wound jewel boxes can sometimes be difficult to determine. The connection is clarified through a film like Mean Streets, an apprentice work that heavily takes off I Vittelloni, itself a junior effort with its own share of debt to earlier influences. For Fellini, the carnival of everyday life provided a constant counterpoint to his characters’ emotional turmoil, sometimes alleviating it, sometimes mocking it, sometimes making it worse. For Scorsese, the attraction is similar but more straightforward, with both his characters and his own directorial eye drawn to the often destructive power of outsized personalities, many of them serving as avatars of an enticing criminal underworld.
In Mean Streets that underworld is the gangland demimonde beckoning Charlie (Harvey Keitel), who splits his time between enjoying picayune capers and suffering anguish at the eternal damnation which surely awaits him for such endeavors. Circumscribed within Scorsese’s native Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, the film envisions mafia life as a form of arrested development, a realm where drudgery can be avoided in favor of hustles that approximate adult responsibility without most of the actual work. Yet the mob code also demands an even stricter form of obeisance, with greater stakes for those who flout the rules. The sticking point of Charlie’s internal conflict is his unstable pal Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro), a spluttering firehouse of raw criminal impulse and manic mischief, who threatens to take his old friend down with him.
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A lesser film would imagine Johnny as the devil drawing the morally torn Charlie toward the darkness. Instead, Scorsese imagines him as the animalistic Id that tacitly undergirds the cushy mob lifestyle, with its free cartons of cigarettes and dalliances with strippers. It’s an expanded version of the conflict presented in Who’s That Knocking at My Door, his 1967 debut, which also utilized Keitel as an avatar to document the collision of Catholic guilt with the messiness of real life. Mean Streets, however, stands out as the first classic Scorsese picture in both form and content, and so the allure of criminality is established as an exaggerated version of the guilty pleasures of the material world, where the devotion to higher ideals is constantly tested. As such, the film contains rough dress rehearsals of many of the stylistic markers that would later come to define the director’s oeuvre, from subtitled character introductions to music-bolstered montage and showy lateral camera tracks.
The way these tricks get carried out often feels rough, but the movie contains enough strong stuff to distract from the sporadic clumsiness of the execution. The performances are pitch-perfect across the board, a true feat considering the budget and actor pool, with Keitel’s taut, browbeaten anxiety foregrounding the action. De Niro, meanwhile, earns his breakout status with a fully lived-in portrayal of a potentially cartoonish character, and his insertion into the semi-realistic milieu feels organic, as does the sometimes exaggerated use of lighting and mise-en-scene. The clearest expression of this is found in the characters’ primary club hangout, cast in an oppressive pinkish-red hue that sits somewhere between heaven and hell. The big fight scene, meanwhile, is a masterpiece of anti-choreographed mayhem, a naturalistic melee that’s as hilarious as it is revealing.
Here Scorsese ably demonstrates the film’s primary formal gambit, the idea of centering the camera as an engaged, active observer in the characters’ exploits. This method, which would form the basis of his style going forward, reflects the director’s own neighborhood status as a simultaneous insider and outsider, privy to the lore and general goings-on but not included in the action. Such an approach likely draws some inspiration from John Cassavetes, another less obvious influence whose borrowed techniques are more apparent in this early work. In fact, the famously iconoclastic auteur directly inspired the creation of Mean Streets, after praising Scorsese’s freshman effort, and denigrating the Corman-produced follow-up Boxcar Bertha as beneath his talents, encouraging him to avoid the exploitation racket in favor of a more personal form of filmmaking. Taking the maximalist route, he instead chose to remake exploitation in his own way, refracting individual experiences through the lens of cinematic ones.
Mean Streets therefore occupies a unique space in the director’s filmography, a small-scale, loosely constructed drama culled from a lifetime of overheard stories, filtered through the incipient aesthetic of a future master stylist. Its mishmash of dreamy reminiscence and gritty verisimilitude encompasses scenes such as one in which a bunch of wise guys rip off some teenagers, then use the cash to go to the movies, their juvenile escapades coming off as both believable and pure fantasy. The generally ambivalent tone is eventually ruptured by an ending which fully punctures the fun, closing on a brutal murder in which the trigger is pulled by Scorsese himself, in a wordless cameo as a gunman named “Jimmy Shorts.” Here, one of the few trips outside the neighborhood ends in absolute horror, the credits rolling without any reprieve. Yet this abrupt conclusion is not about punishing characters for their crimes, but instead the realization of what must be sacrificed in order to enter adulthood, a fitting statement for a director on the brink of maturity.
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