It's Martin Scorsese's early film and it's choppy and a little meandering, but it stands as his introduction to a subculture he was to describe in greater detail over the next twenty years or so, and he does it with flair.
A bunch of the boys were hanging around in the Mulberry Street Saloon. Or somewhere. They all know one another. They give each other hugs and they celebrate the return of one of their own from Vietnam. It's full of ritual, and the dialog is evocative if repetitious.
"What's wrong wit chou?" "Hah? What's wrong wit CHOU?"
"Waddaya mean?" "Whaddaya mean, 'whaddaya mean'?"
The speech sometimes is strained but never difficult to understand. Medial consonants get elided. "Nothing" becomes "nun." "Business" is "biness." Sometimes -- let's face facts -- the dialog sounds improvised and fake. But the streets, the bars, the restaurants, the apartments with the crucifixes on the wall may be rich with friends, but they can turn mean too, because the bonhomie is conditional on the observance of the ritual code. You have to be a man of your word, a man of honor who pays his debts.
Robert De Niro, as Johnny Boy, doesn't pay his debts. Not only that, but he goes out of his way to publicly humiliate the respectable man to whom he owes three thousand dollars, calling him a masturbator, laughing that no one else would be stupid enough to lend him, Johnny Boy, so much money. De Niro is totally pazzo, more than at the end of "Taxi Driver." Harvey Keitel is the sensible but self-sacrificing nephew of one of the local "businessmen." With Keitel, saving Johnny Boy is almost a religious duty. His hero is St. Francis, whose feast day is celebrated with the blessings of reckless animals like Johnny Boy.
Keitel has a girl friend too, Johnny Boy's cousin. Like many of these intrigues, it's supposed to be kept secret but of course it never does and it leads to challenges and mano a mano conflict. There are a lot of fist fights in "Mean Streets" as well as a couple of shootings.
There are some clumsy shots and a few camera tricks that don't work, but it's good that the film received critical plaudits because Scorsese was to go on and do some truly splendid and highly personalized work in the years to come. Well, I ought to mention that there are a few non sequiturs too. For instance, I don't know how you get from Little Italy in Manhattan to Greenwood Lake, New Jersey, by way of Brooklyn, New York. I think this is known as anatopism, which is to space as anachronism is to time. But then this is Scorsese's world. He put it together.
A bunch of the boys were hanging around in the Mulberry Street Saloon. Or somewhere. They all know one another. They give each other hugs and they celebrate the return of one of their own from Vietnam. It's full of ritual, and the dialog is evocative if repetitious.
"What's wrong wit chou?" "Hah? What's wrong wit CHOU?"
"Waddaya mean?" "Whaddaya mean, 'whaddaya mean'?"
The speech sometimes is strained but never difficult to understand. Medial consonants get elided. "Nothing" becomes "nun." "Business" is "biness." Sometimes -- let's face facts -- the dialog sounds improvised and fake. But the streets, the bars, the restaurants, the apartments with the crucifixes on the wall may be rich with friends, but they can turn mean too, because the bonhomie is conditional on the observance of the ritual code. You have to be a man of your word, a man of honor who pays his debts.
Robert De Niro, as Johnny Boy, doesn't pay his debts. Not only that, but he goes out of his way to publicly humiliate the respectable man to whom he owes three thousand dollars, calling him a masturbator, laughing that no one else would be stupid enough to lend him, Johnny Boy, so much money. De Niro is totally pazzo, more than at the end of "Taxi Driver." Harvey Keitel is the sensible but self-sacrificing nephew of one of the local "businessmen." With Keitel, saving Johnny Boy is almost a religious duty. His hero is St. Francis, whose feast day is celebrated with the blessings of reckless animals like Johnny Boy.
Keitel has a girl friend too, Johnny Boy's cousin. Like many of these intrigues, it's supposed to be kept secret but of course it never does and it leads to challenges and mano a mano conflict. There are a lot of fist fights in "Mean Streets" as well as a couple of shootings.
There are some clumsy shots and a few camera tricks that don't work, but it's good that the film received critical plaudits because Scorsese was to go on and do some truly splendid and highly personalized work in the years to come. Well, I ought to mention that there are a few non sequiturs too. For instance, I don't know how you get from Little Italy in Manhattan to Greenwood Lake, New Jersey, by way of Brooklyn, New York. I think this is known as anatopism, which is to space as anachronism is to time. But then this is Scorsese's world. He put it together.