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A young man wakes up in the middle of the night. The sounds of the city are outside. He walks over to his bedroom mirror, takes a look at himself and then returns to bed. As his head reclines toward his pillow, he is suddenly moving in slow motion. The thumping beat of the Ronettes' "Be My Baby" begins and the scene shifts to a screening of Super-8 films of the young man and his friends. Just as Ronnie Spector breaks into the beautifully sweet chorus of "Be my, be my baby," the film reveals its title in plain, typewritten letters: Mean Streets. Released in 1973, Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets, a masterpiece of story, substance, music, camerawork and color,is one of the most influential movies of the last 30 years. Inspired by old Hollywood pictures, the documentaries of David and Albert Maysles, and the French New Wave, Mean Streets' raw, blood-soaked power has found no cinematic equal. It is aesthetically and thematically honest, as well as experimental and purposeful. It is a work of art. The story is noir bathed in red light. Harvey Keitel plays Charlie, an inhabitant of New York's Little Italy who is raggedly progressing toward manhood. His best friend is Johnny Boy (Robert DeNiro), a volatile, immature but ultimately lovable character who gets Charlie in more trouble than he needs. Charlie is trying his best to become something, but he is met with constant dilemmas. He works for his uncle (Cesare Danova), an old-school Mafioso who would like to move him up in the business. But Uncle disapproves of Charlie's friends, chiefly his epileptic lover, Teresa (Amy Robinson), and Johnny Boy, who is "touched in the head" and an instigator of unnecessary disorder. Uncle advises Charlie to remove them from his life. But this is not so easy. Nothing is easy for Charlie. Strongly Catholic, he is guilt-ridden by his every move. While he sits at the bar in his neighborhood hangout, questioning his penance, he watches Johnny Boy walk toward him and almost humorously asks: "You talk about penance and this iwhat walks through the door?" Johnny Boy certainly walks through the door. His entrance is a tour de force of exciting visual and sonorous stimuli. Bathed in the bloody red light of the bar, shot in slow motion and accompanied by the Rolling Stones' "Jumpin Jack Flash," the joy and ambiguity of Johnny Boy is summed up in less than 30 seconds. He is the streets; he is exciting, nervous energy; he is trouble amidst trouble; he is crookedly attractive, young and spirited. Johnny Boy is the symbol of uncertainty that, like the streets, threatens the picture's world with kinetic violence. Charlie attempts to ride this out with some semblance of control, but he cannot avoid the crashing waves. What is so unequivocally brilliant about this film is that Charlie never has to tell us as much. Because of Scorsese's expert technique, we know the picture's nature instinctively. Scorsese displays the randomness of these people's lives with saturating experimentalism; his inventive style is not a glaring gimmick but a natural expression of street and conscience. Mean Streets contains so many influential techniques it would require pages to list them all, but some do bear mentioning--particularly for how they are abused in present cinema. Mean Streets utilized the New Wave technique of a moving camera, now seen often in movies and TV commercials. It used Super-8 film stock to convey happy, jumpy memories, which is now an overused, trite standard á la The Wonder Years. It was scored with pop music as an interesting counterpoint to violence. Though Scorsese's musicality has been imitated effectively in films like Blood Simple and Reservoir Dogs, it has quickly become a lazy Gen-X way of relaying irony, as in movies like Feeling Minnesota. Mean Streets' film references--Charlie watching John Ford's The Searchers and Uncle watching Fritz Lang's The Big Heat--contained a specific potency now undermined by the reference-soaked movies of Quentin Tarantino. And finally, Mean Streets employed the character-introducing title sequence, where key figures are shown doing something (Johnny Boy blows up a mailbox), and then their names are typewritten on the screen. This was used in Trainspotting, a movie that has more than a few references to Scorsese. So many films emulate Scorsese, but none has achieved the beautiful, ugly, vulnerable, violent and thrilling power of Mean Streets. |
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