Mean Streets

Not very much happens. Marty filmed a great filler with a couple of brighter moments. Excellent actors, Johnny Boy De Niro was most impressive and a surprisingly posh Harvey Keitel also does a good job. But so what, if the excellently written dialogs don’t have a powerful result. This is simply a prelude to Scorsese’s later, more fundamental movies. (12/30/2011)

A fantastically portrayed atmosphere of New York in the 1970s with all the afros and the smoking, but, in terms of script, the film almost fails, because things get going only in the last 10 minutes. The rest is just a bar crawl with long shots with no editing, where the camera atypically flits around a bar trying to authentically portray the world of the time. Scorsese's start, De Niro's awesome performance. (11/25/2015)

It's not yet the Scorsese we know from Casino or The Departed, but there's already a hint of the precise and groundbreaking filmmaker who would define the crime genre for the next 40 years. The master outlines the relationships and status among gangster "nobodies" in a way that is very patient and typical for the seventies, incorporating into the story classical music, the gloomy New York setting and mafia dens full of dirty money and scantily dressed girls. Most importantly, he begins his collaboration with De Niro and Keitel, his acting stalwarts, who both give great and believable performances. I probably made the mistake of watching this lesser known work after all the other and more famous gems Scorsese has made, and it was difficult to appreciate its quality given the expectations. But I still liked it and I will surely watch it again. For the time being, 70%. (01/24/2013)

I have a little problem with Martin Scorsese. His older movies are not fun for me, even though I consider his newer ones some of the best flicks there are. I’m such a heathen that I gave Taxi Driver and Raging Bull three stars, and I will do the same with Mean Streets. In this case mainly because it’s so boring. Well, boring might be too strong a word. It’d be safer to say that the story is not as captivating as other mafia crime movies, failing to make me give it 100% of my attention while watching it. (01/22/2013)

After being trained by Roger Corman in the art of rapid-fire directing (Boxcar Bertha), Scorsese got his dazzling filmography off to a good start. Together with story elements from Rocco and His Brothers, this dusky buddy movie contains most of Scorsese’s trademarks: rock songs, slow-motion shots (though it’s sometimes hard to determine the motivation for them) and disturbingly smooth camerawork that’s observational in the manner of a documentary. The semi-improvised acting in the style of films by John Cassavetes doesn’t create any tension with the chosen style (as in the later New York, New York); on the contrary, it superbly serves the dramaturgically loose story, or rather series of stories that have to be “resolved” through a deus ex machina by the director himself (who is not mentioned in the credits). From the group of friends who are sometimes too aggressive in defending their turf, Keitel’s Charlie stands out (and in the individual shots where a place in the centre suits him). He is better able than the unpredictable Johnny Boy to restrain his need to assert his male dominance and, because he is in a more serious relationship, he isn’t entirely committed to a life of high stakes and major losses. Keitel portrays the tension between cultivating a romantic relationship and professional growth without theatrical gestures, only with occasional, and thus all the more effective, outburst of anger. On the surface, the torn nature of Charlie and the other characters, their attitude shifting between “I am the master of the world” and “I'll be a good boy now, mommy”, is manifested differently in their confident behaviour at the bar, bathed in a hellishly red light that adds to their insolence, and on the street, where they live their other, normal lives and are obviously more vulnerable. The precise study of characters and relationships within one closed group prevails over a cohesive story that advances from one point to the next. Some may find that this absence of fixed points of reference in the narrative makes Mean Streets a more arduous viewing experience. Its very stylish exterior conceals a handful of more serious themes like the early and later autobiographically conceived films based on what the director was living through at the given time and the excellent actors serve as comprehensible conduits of complex emotional states. Mean Streets is not just a warm-up for the great films that followed; it’s Scorsese already operating at the top of his game. 80% (08/16/2012)