owl and bear

Mean Streets
1973, Warner
A

It’s a crime that more people haven’t seen Martin Scorsese’s first major picture.

It’s actually ironic to use the word “crime” when talking about Mean Streets, because most people assume that it’s a genre film. Truth is, it’s probably anything but that.

This is actually a Helluva film about friendship, love, religion, and everything else that people wrestle with daily- whether we live in Little Italy or in the smallest town in middle America. Harvey Keitel is dynamic, and perhaps for the last time in his career, vulnerable, as Charlie Cappa, a smalltime hood trying to work his way up in the organization. Charlie’s best friend is Johnny Boy Civello, and in his first teaming with Scorsese, Robert DeNiro gives the kind of performance that makes people want to sacrifice everything to be an actor.

In Mean Streets, emotional conflict abounds. In his interactions with Johnny Boy, whose character is both choke-able or huggable, Charlie takes on a role of both friend and guardian. Johnny Boy is still that, a boy, and DeNiro reflects the gray area between childhood and adulthood in every scene. In Charlie’s relationship with Johnny’s cousin Teresa, who’s epileptic and considered sick in the head, Charlie hovers between tenderness and the tougher persona necessary for his work with his uncle.
The dialogue is often both offhand and profound, and the story is at once visceral and transcendent. Characters, who at first might seem like generic, ignorant hoodlums, are exposed by degrees to be fully-realized. Dig Tony’s tossed off comment about the tigers.

Do yourself a favor and dig the whole damn thing, including the impeccable soundtrack.