Mean Streets

Mean Streets (1973) takes place in New York's Little Italy. Charlie wants to rise in the mob but lives inside Catholic guilt; his friend Johnny Boy is a disaster who does not pay his debts and listens to nobody. Charlie tries to protect him, and the film is about how that protection drags him down. It is Scorsese's breakthrough. His first film with Robert De Niro and his second with Harvey Keitel, the start of fifty years of collaboration. There is an oddity in where it was made. The story is set in Little Italy but most of it was shot in Los Angeles, with only a few days in New York. The budget was tiny and Scorsese had come out of working under Roger Corman. The use of music is its most influential element and announces every Scorsese film that followed: pop and rock records of the period laid over scenes in deliberately mismatched ways. It runs 112 minutes. Good for: the origins of Scorsese, crime at street level, and early De Niro. Less good for: the plot is thin and the film moves in episodes. The image quality shows the budget. The women are at the margins and the language belongs firmly to its period.