MEAN STREETS
For its 25th anniversary, Martin Scorsese's
stunning masterpiece about youth and Catholic guilt in New York's
Little Italy has been rereleased by Warner Bros. in a restored
print. Fans will no longer have to settle for muddy TV or revival
prints that would make passionate film-restoration advocate Scorsese
wince. Mean Streets centers on the lowest level of the
underworld, the small-time hustlers and crooks unable to escape
the neighborhood and rise to success or find direction in their
lives. One of these hoods is Charlie (Harvey Keitel), a conflicted
young numbers runner torn between following in the footsteps of
his don and restaurateur uncle Giovanni (Cesare Danova) and saving
his troubled friends — the crazy, hotheaded Johnny Boy (Robert
De Niro), a trigger-happy Lennie to Charlie's George, and Teresa
(Amy Robinson), Johnny's epileptic cousin, as well as Charlie's
lover.
Charlie, viewed by Scorsese as a "modern
saint," seeks inner peace, but never finds it — the
astounding camerawork, in all its jittery bravado, reflects that
conflict in Charlie's soul. The opening credits sequence is a
home movie of Charlie and his friends, and the film feels like
that home movie, with the handheld camera following the characters
everywhere, up and down the streets and barrooms like a relentless,
restless fly on the wall. And like a home movie, the low-budget
picture has its share of crudely filmed moments too — Robinson
is badly dubbed, and there are scenes that were obviously shot
years before (pay close attention to Keitel's changing looks).
But the minuscule budget, which didn't allow for many retakes,
also coaxed some brilliant acting from Keitel and De Niro —
the improvised exchanges between the two actors are amazing, considering
how young and new to film they both were at the time. Mean
Streets' intimate, in-your-face and passionate view of its
characters and their atmosphere is unlike any other gangster picture,
which is why it has inspired many young indie filmmakers to do
their own Mean Streets-like movie — but most of these
films can't compare to the original.
© 1999 Jim Aquino