Old Movie Time - "Mean Streets" (1973)

In his ranking of Gangster Movies, Washington DC film critic Jason Fraley listed Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets" at Number 16 on his list.  This prompted me to seek out this now forty-seven year old movie, which, surprisingly given my affinity for mob movies, I had never seen.   

The storyline of this one follows a couple of young trying-to-be-up-and-coming-wiseguys in New York City's Little Italy.  Harvey Keitel plays Charlie, whose uncle is a capo of sorts in the neighborhood, and Robert De Niro plays Johnny, a punk wannabe who can't keep up with his payments to the neighborhood sharks and who's constantly flying off the handle and getting into fights with the other punks in the neighborhood.  Charlie spends most of his time trying to cover for his buddy Johnny Boy at the possible expense of his own standing in the neighborhood hierarchy.  It all comes to a predictable conclusion on the "mean streets" of Little Italy.  

In and of itself, "Mean Streets" is a somewhat predictable gangster story.  If it was the only such movie that Scorsese made, it probably would not be as highly remembered or regarded today, but what makes it an important movie is what it foreshadowed.  In 1973, the 31 year old Scorsese had a few directing credits to his name, mostly shorts and documentaries, and the 30 year old De Niro had only one significant role to his name ("Bang The Drum Slowly").  "Mean Streets" was the first time that these two collaborated on a motion picture, and it was the beginning of one of more significant director/actor combos ever.  The two of them would go on to make nine other  feature films together over the next forty-three years, and they're probably not done yet.  This movie had everything that we came to know as trade marks of a Scorsese flick.....a freeze frame shot where the character's name gets  superimposed on the screen to identify him to the audience....a scene consisting of an extended  single take tracking shot (this one was a fight among the various hoods in a bar's  back room that circled a pool table)....extended swatches of dialog with De Niro going back and forth one-on-one with other characters in his NYC/Italian/Wiseguy dialect....and, most significantly, a sound track of period rock-n-roll music (Motown, Rolling Stones, etc) that blared almost constantly throughout the movie.  All of the things that Scorsese did, and did better, in movies like "Casino", "Goodfellas", and "The Irishman", were seen for the first time in "Mean Streets", and THAT makes this a movie worth watching.

In a vacuum, The Grandstander would give "Mean Streets" Two and One-Half Stars, but because it represents and presages what was to come from the Director and the Actor, it gets Three Stars.

A couple of more words on the casting.  Keitel was 34 years old when he did this movie, and he, too, would appear in many other Scorsese films, most recently, "The Irishman."  About the only Scorsese touch missing from this movie was Joe Pesci!  Another character in this one was actor David Proval as Tony.  Many years later, Proval would go on to additional screen Mob fame as Richie Aprile in "The Sopranos."  

De Niro and Keitel

A much younger De Niro and Scorsese