#163: Mean Streets

Release Date: October 14th, 1973

Format: Criterion Collection on Blu-ray

Written by: Mardik Martin and Martin Scorsese

Directed by: Martin Scorsese

4 Stars

The first time that I saw Mean Streets I was probably 19-years-old and I didn’t think much of it. This would have been in the early 2000s, I was in college, and I was just beginning to broaden my film knowledge. To me, at the time, the movie looked dated. It didn’t sound good. The blow-dried hair and the wide polyester ties? That was some old shit, and not in a good way. The visuals of Mean Streets didn’t fit in with the dapper stereotype that most young men associate with gangsters. I was young and dumb and couldn’t appreciate what I was seeing. 

As I’ve gotten older, Mean Streets has gotten better. I now recognize it as the masterpiece that it is.

The irony here is that Mean Streets is a young man’s movie, through and through, in terms of its spirit (if not its production quality). It’s absolutely brimming with desire and testosterone. It’s got balls, but it’s not dumb. It has ideas, but not wisdom. Its confidence borders on recklessness. 

It’s really a film conduit for Martin Scorsese, the young genius who made it. I’m not sure if he regrets having made the film at such a young age (29), or with such a small budget ($650,000), or with such a lack of experience (this was only his 3rd feature film), but I’d say Mean Streets came about at the perfect time in his life. Scorsese is able to not only dramatize his experiences growing up as the son of Italian immigrants in Manhattan, but he metaphorically turns the camera around on himself and documents a portrait of the artist as a young man.  

What does that portrait show? Watching Mean Streets through a biographical lens, we see a kid who grew up in a rough, predominantly Italian neighborhood. He was a kid that had ties to the seedier side of that life, from petty street-level hustling to gangs to even connected mafioso, but a kid who was also raised to be a good Catholic boy by no nonsense immigrant parents.

And my god, we see a kid that loves cinema. A kid that pulls from Italian neorealism, with its incorporation of untrained actors and gritty, on-location shooting. A kid that loves the sensational menace of pre-Hays Code gangster pictures. A kid that wants to experiment with ‘60s European New Wave editing and sound design. And a kid who doesn’t know any better, and wants to mix it all with contemporary rock music and the nihilistic energy slowly displacing the hippies’ flower power of the late ‘60s. 

Passive resistance and free-flowing love? Tree-hugging? 

Go fuck ya self. Getta job ya fuckin’ mook.

Director Richard Linklatter considers it the most culturally impactful movie made in the 20th century, this low-budget crime film that most people have never seen. Why? Why Mean Streets and not Star Wars or The Godfather? According to Linklatter, it’s because it inspired an entire generation of young filmmakers to believe that they can make movies about the things they know, using the influences of the things they love, and if you have enough passion (and youthful ignorance), you can make something special. 

That’s the precious quality of Mean Streets.