Mean StreetsIf you try to save everyone, you're likely to get dragged down yourself. Guys like Charlie (Harvey Keitel) try to do good and believe in the idea that people have to fight their sinful impulses or pay the price. But Charlie becomes ensnared in a metaphorical web trying to save jokers like "Johnny Boy" (Robert DeNiro), who takes advantage of Charlie's good will (and everyone else's) at every turn, never even trying to get out of trouble on his own...because getting into it is more fun, and is in his nature. As Charlie desperately tries to bail Johnny Boy out of escalating crises with their mutual friend and Johnny's creditor, Michael (Richard Romanus), he's forced to confront that for all his penance, he's just as prone to the temptation to sin it is with Johnny.
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Mean Streets is a tale of guilt set in a pre-gentrified New York City. Charlie's guilt is born from the idea that as a Catholic, his confessions and the subsequent penance of prayer isn't enough. Charlie always has to take on a superior approach--in his case, he holds a candle to his fingertips to teach himself the torments of Hell. Charlie's perception of the world is stained by his concept of guilt. The time he spends at the seedy bar his buddy Tony (David Proval) owns is like a descent into sin and hell in his eyes, bathed in red light, where he indulges--in his eyes, at least--in a bacchanal of women and drinks. The red light is the color of his carnal desires, like his attraction to an exotic, black dancer, or his drunken reverie when an army friend comes home. Charlie's perception of his sins is also highlighted in a similar moment where he prepares to confront Johnny about his failure to pay Michael his weekly debt payment. When it comes, it is as if his perception were heightened as Johnny Boy strides into the bar, a woman on each arm, joking around and playing at being a big shot. Charlie has a particular image of himself in his mind, one cultivated by his loose mafia ties via his caporegime uncle, Giovanni (Cesare Danova), who is grooming him in the business, advising him that "honorable men go with honorable men". Charlie carries on a secret affair with Johnny's epileptic cousin, Teresa (Amy Robinson), even though he knows that Giovanni wouldn't approve since his uncle's old world mentality equates epilepsy with a mental disability. Part of what draws Charlie to Teresa--aside from her attractiveness--is that she represents something he can both work to "fix" (her attitude is in some ways as bad as her cousin's), but also that she is forbidden fruit. While Charlie believes that deep down, he craves the kind of wild vice which his friends so freely engage in, he is straddled with the image of respectability to please his uncle, and tears himself apart (and Teresa) by both pushing her away yet still seeing her. This same feeling holds true for his friendship with Johnny Boy, who is such a hoodlum that our first introduction to him blowing up a mailbox instantly cements our image of him as pure trouble. In fact, everyone sees this but Charlie it would seem. Charlie doesn't want to see Johnny as a lost cause, because he considers himself to be of a "higher order", like a guardian angel to protect his seemingly impossible charge. People who Charlie consorts with know that he possesses a kind of faint "holier than thou" attitude, and joke with him about being a "saint", to which he naively loses the joke at his expense. But it's true that Charlie holds himself to such an impossible standard that it causes him to fail to see the writing on the wall--about Johnny and about what he wants in life to make him happy. It's clear that he enjoys his clandestine moments with Teresa, but he refuses to let himself say "I love you" to her, overcome with guilt and believing it will bring him down to the level of the sinners he plays with anyway. He talks to Teresa of his idol, Francis of Assisi; Teresa chides him that "St. Francis didn't run numbers" for the mob. She tries to tell him the hard truth that he's just as dirty as the rest of them, but Charlie's tragedy is that he won't relinquish this nice guy persona, because it would deprive him of his sense of moral superiority.
Mean Streets was a watershed moment for legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese, introducing a signature style, one which would embody flourishes and thematic tropes that would come to identify the great director for decades to come. It is a film set in 1970s New York City, a place which was not only grimy and lousy with organized crime, but also one where Catholicism was a way of life for the Italian-American residents; these are the two worlds Charlie finds himself torn between. Similar to future films by Scorsese, the mafia plays an important role in the story. In Mean Streets, it is implied that Charlie and Michael are gangsters, evidenced by scenes where Charlie has to collect loan payments from a failing restauranteur and Michael get shafted trying to import black market camera lenses. It's a place so corrupt, that guys like Michael and Tony can get away easily by conning a couple of teens from Riverdale looking to score some black market fireworks; even the cops are sleazy opportunists angling for a bribe. These scenes, however, are not played to moralize, but to establish the nature of the city and the world in which Charlie represents a kind of paradox of virtue and vice. Mean Streets is also a breakthrough role for Robert DeNiro, who plays Johnny Boy with such chaotic enthusiasm that he is a magnet for the action in any scene in which he is present, giving but the first of many iconic characters to come in his long-standing partnership with Martin Scorsese. Mean Streets also stands as an example of a film where the predominance of the score is composed of pop music selections, a style which was revolutionary at the time and has become popularized by homage through other talented filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, inheritors of the legacy of Mean Streets. Scenes like the pool hall brawl over an unpaid debt suddenly becomes a bravura display of directing, combining tracking shots, realistic scrapping, set to The Marvelette's "Please Mr. Postman", with the high point being when the wild Johnny Boy leaps onto a pool table, brandishing a broken pool cue like a club, kicking and flailing like a wild animal...clearly enjoying every minute of it. And in true divine fashion, the opening truism uttered presumably to the dreaming Charlie is spoken by Martin Scorsese, commenting on the nature of penance, a herald to an epoch of American filmmaking still strong decades later.
Recommended for: Fans of a seminal turning point in modern directing and a powerful signature, early work by Martin Scorsese. It is a story about guilt, sin, organized crime, and hypocrisy. It is also a chance to see how young Robert DeNiro truly was at one point in the first collaboration between him and Scorsese, partners in crime for decades to come.
Mean Streets was a watershed moment for legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese, introducing a signature style, one which would embody flourishes and thematic tropes that would come to identify the great director for decades to come. It is a film set in 1970s New York City, a place which was not only grimy and lousy with organized crime, but also one where Catholicism was a way of life for the Italian-American residents; these are the two worlds Charlie finds himself torn between. Similar to future films by Scorsese, the mafia plays an important role in the story. In Mean Streets, it is implied that Charlie and Michael are gangsters, evidenced by scenes where Charlie has to collect loan payments from a failing restauranteur and Michael get shafted trying to import black market camera lenses. It's a place so corrupt, that guys like Michael and Tony can get away easily by conning a couple of teens from Riverdale looking to score some black market fireworks; even the cops are sleazy opportunists angling for a bribe. These scenes, however, are not played to moralize, but to establish the nature of the city and the world in which Charlie represents a kind of paradox of virtue and vice. Mean Streets is also a breakthrough role for Robert DeNiro, who plays Johnny Boy with such chaotic enthusiasm that he is a magnet for the action in any scene in which he is present, giving but the first of many iconic characters to come in his long-standing partnership with Martin Scorsese. Mean Streets also stands as an example of a film where the predominance of the score is composed of pop music selections, a style which was revolutionary at the time and has become popularized by homage through other talented filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, inheritors of the legacy of Mean Streets. Scenes like the pool hall brawl over an unpaid debt suddenly becomes a bravura display of directing, combining tracking shots, realistic scrapping, set to The Marvelette's "Please Mr. Postman", with the high point being when the wild Johnny Boy leaps onto a pool table, brandishing a broken pool cue like a club, kicking and flailing like a wild animal...clearly enjoying every minute of it. And in true divine fashion, the opening truism uttered presumably to the dreaming Charlie is spoken by Martin Scorsese, commenting on the nature of penance, a herald to an epoch of American filmmaking still strong decades later.
Recommended for: Fans of a seminal turning point in modern directing and a powerful signature, early work by Martin Scorsese. It is a story about guilt, sin, organized crime, and hypocrisy. It is also a chance to see how young Robert DeNiro truly was at one point in the first collaboration between him and Scorsese, partners in crime for decades to come.