The series A posteriori le cinéma is intended to be an opportunity to celebrate the 7the art by revisiting flagship titles that celebrate important anniversaries.
When the name of Martin Scorsese is mentioned, the pieces of bravery jostle in the cinematic memory. The high angle shot of the bloody apartment at the end of Taxi Driver (Taxi driver)… The destabilizing effect of the pugilist approaching while the background recedes into Raging Bull (Like a wild bull)… The sequence shot at the Copacabana Club in Goodfellas (The Freedmen)… The settling of scores in the cornfield in Casino… However, before all these sequences came that of a young thug bursting into a bar to the sound of Jumpin’ Jack Flash, by the Rolling Stones. It was in Mean Streets (The hot streets), released 50 years ago. The thug in question was played by Robert De Niro, star of all the other films mentioned.
Very personal, Mean Streets put Scorsese and De Niro “on the map”. In a recent commemorative essay published by The GuardianScott Tobias summarizes:
“ Mean Streets is like a slice of life, drawn from stories that Scorsese seems to have heard or observed during his formative years as an asthmatic child growing up on the third floor of an Elizabeth Street apartment building. It’s as if a vivid, often electrifying memory comes back to life. »
A word about asthma: this respiratory disease prevented Scorsese from joining in the games of other kids his age, his parents sent him very early to have fun at the cinema. Birth of a passion, even a second religion, the filmmaker having grown up in a very pious Catholic household in Little Italy, New York.
The opening of Mean Streets is subtly brilliant (the flamboyance will soon appear). In a room plunged into night darkness, a young man (Harvey Keitel) wakes up with a start. Wandering aimlessly, he scrutinizes his reflection in the mirror. On the wall, a crucifix. When he goes back to bed, a succession of “ jump cuts » culminates in a very close-up of the protagonist, visibly tormented.
His name is Charlie and he is torn between his Catholic faith and his desire to serve an influential mafia boss (Cesare Danova). His existence is further complicated by his secret love for Teresa (Amy Robinson), an ostracized young epileptic woman, and especially by his loyalty to the latter’s cousin: Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro), a hothead with unpredictable behavior.
Note that the dynamic of the apprentice bandit who places himself under the yoke of a dangerous criminal became a recurring motif in Scorsese’s work: we find traces of it in Goodfellas and in the very recent Killers of the Flower Moon (The American note). Closer to home, the relationship between the characters of Charlie and Johnny Boy clearly inspired Sophie Dupuis for her formidable Watch dog.
Hungry for cinema
To return to Martin Scorsese, Mean Streets was a pivotal project for him, for all kinds of reasons. At this point, he had made two feature films that achieved no success: the autobiographical Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967; with Keitel), and Boxcar Berthaa romantic-criminal order produced by the king of the B series, Roger Corman (who also launched Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, James Cameron, Ron Howard, Jack Nicholson…).
A bulimic cinephile, Scorsese was hungry for cinema, hungry to shoot. In 2011, during a major interview in front of an audience at Lincoln Center, the director recalled his state of mind at the time:
“Wanting to make films, trying to make them at that time, it was an extraordinary period in the history of cinema, with the different New Waves – those of the French, the Italians, the British, so many others , and of course [John] Cassavetes and Shirley Clarke, who were making films here in New York. »
Years earlier, in a magazine portrait Rolling Stone, Scorsese thus summarizes his initial vision for Mean Streets :
“I wanted to do an anthropological study that concerned me and my friends. I told myself that even if [le film] sat on a shelf, a few years later people would pick it up and see that this is how Italian-Americans — not the godfather, not the big bosses — lived on a daily basis. This is how they talked, what they really looked like, and what they did. That was the lifestyle then. »
Interestingly for a film so fundamentally “New York”: because of the low budget, but also because the neighborhood of Little Italy was not very keen on the idea of being filmed, most of the interior scenes were filmed… in Los Angeles. Scorsese was able to film his exterior scenes in Little Italy, but it was the cross and the banner.
In the 2011 interview, Scorsese recalled:
“My father had to talk to a lot of people [du quartier]paying money to people in the buildings, which upset him a lot, but the fact is that they weren’t very open. […] Everything was designed, shot by shot, to create the impression of New York. »
A true original film
Not only was the illusion perfect, but the film pleased the public and won over critics. In the New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote in October 1973:
“ Mean Streetsby Martin Scorsese, is a true original film of our time, a triumph of personal cinema. [Le film] has its own hallucinatory dimension; the characters live in the darkness of bars, with lighting and colors that are just gloomy enough. [Le film] has its own destabilizing and episodic rhythm, and a very charged emotional range, of dizzying sensuality. »
Two weeks later, in the New York TimesVincent Canby adds:
“However gloomy the environment, however heartbreaking the story, there are films so meticulously staged that they produce a sort of tonic effect having no connection with the subject. Mean Streets, Martin Scorsese’s third feature film, is such a film. The once-promising young director […] has now made a film that is, unequivocally, first class. »
Supporting role or not, everyone also agreed on the striking performance of Robert De Niro (noted in the protest comedies of Brian De Palma Greetings And Hi, Mom!). Which performance cast a little shadow on that, however powerful, of Harvey Keitel. It remains only after Mean Streets, of the two, the star was De Niro. And Scorsese.
A declaration of identity
Mean Streets proved to be a formidable calling card for the director. Indeed, we witness the birth of his style, of his artistic identity. An observation that the main interested party readily admits.
In the audio commentary that he recorded in 2004 for the DVD of his film, Martin Scorsese confides, from the opening sequence already mentioned:
“It’s quite difficult to talk about how and why this film was made. Because… when I think about this film, when I think about this period of my life when I made the film, the lifestyle depicted in the film and of which I was in some way a part… it makes me seems to be the ultimate combination of everything I am, and everything I was going to accomplish. It’s not so much a film as a statement of who I am. »
The film Mean Streets is available on VOD on most platforms.