(1973)

Starring Robert DeNiro, Harvey Keitel, Arlene Dahl, Ted de Corsia; dir: Martin Scorsese

Mean Streets has the effect of blurring time. Its perspective of looking up from the bottom, rather than down from above, makes it the true wellspring of the Eighties/Nineties thriller, yet it came at a time when great seventies thrillers were still being made.

A bit of chronology here: Following the exhaustion of film noir in the mid-fifties, thrillers moved out to the suburbs, increasingly reflected a ‘managerial’ perspective and generally, in this period stretching from the mid/late 50s through the 70s, went middle class. Scorsese would change that, and Mean Streets was his opening salvo.

What makes it so different? The first big departure by Mean Streets was avoiding 60s/70s thrillers’ focus on the executive level of crime - detectives and Godfathers - and pioneering the 80s/90s thriller’s predilection for the prole point of view (qv. At Close Range (1986), Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1990), One False Move (1991), City of Industry (1997), The Yards (2000), etc). As Chandler said of Hammett, Scorsese gave crime back to the people for whom it mattered. He was hugely influential in this respect, as a look at his filmography shows.

The second departure for Mean Streets was moving from an exterior point of view to an interior one. This was reflected in its visual strategies. The thrillers of the 50s/60s made extensive use of daytime location shooting in cities, which opened up their vision, especially compared to their dark noir forbears. But by the early 70s there was no avoiding the recognition that America’s inner city society, which had grown through successive waves of early 20^th Century immigration and industrialisation, was down to its dying embers. Its aesthetic had formed a mainstay of Hollywood scenarios for decades, with a ‘New York Street’ on every backlot.

By the early 70s the attrition of this urban environment through postwar prosperity’s suburban drift was nearly complete but there was still a discernible society hanging on in the inner city. Things came full circle at this time with numerous early 70s thrillers using location shooting to reprise the noirish tenements seen in the 40s. It fit the emerging ‘down and dirty agenda’ of "The New Hollywood" of filmmakers like Hal Ashby (Harold And Maude, The Last Detail) and Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens), amongst many others. Even better, this environment’s vaguely under-siege feel provided a perfect backdrop to the ‘lone cowboy’ urban heroes of the time like Serpico, Popeye Doyle (French Connection) and ‘Dirty’ Harry Callaghan, all of whose fraught crusades were beautifully caught on the grainy color film stocks then prevalent. (1995’s Seven self-consciously attempted to recreate this look, with partial success.)

But these vigilante thrillers still offered a middle class perspective. Mean Streets was the first take from the inside – a working class view which can’t see further. (Interestingly, in Mean Streets very little location footage was used; budget strictures meant most of this quintessentially New York film was shot in L.A.)   But, title notwithstanding, the film doesn’t romanticise ‘da streets’. Instead, Mean Streets finds its dominant environment in the upholstered netherworld, saturated in red, of the subterranean bar where our protagonists retire (constantly!).

By the early 1980s of crack cocaine and Reagan’s welfare cuts, the American cities’ collapse was total (Fort Apache, The Bronx, Escape from New York [1981] and Blade Runner [1982]). Most 1980s thrillers turned away from this reality towards an escapist artificiality which helps explain why so few of them stand up well today. But where Scorsese’s influence is revealed is in a strand of directors like Abel Ferrara, James Toback, Quentin Tarantino and Spike Lee whose films were interested more in the underworld’s deviant milieu than in plot closure. Spike Lee in fact told the Los Angeles Times that "the two movies which continue to inspire him are Mean Streets and La Pixote". (Harvey Keitel was also a big common denominator amongst these filmmakers.)

Today Mean Streets presents as a violent, near-plotless black comedy, stupidity energizing ineptitude. Yet three decades on it still packs a punch, not least because its verbal, physical and emotional violence is rooted in a guilt-riddled, misogynist mix of solipsism and double standards. Mean Streets objectively portrays an environment redolent of the animal world: the selfishness of a pack mentality with the hierarchical awareness of where everyone sits in the food chain. The local capo, Keitel’s uncle, sits atop theirs. These interweaving conflicts are artfully underlined by Scorsese through devices like cuts that align the priest with the don, etc.

There’s no question where Scorsese’s sympathies lie. The Jumpin’ Jack Flash slow-mo victory parade down the bar which introduces DeNiro’s unfettered Johnny Boy character is as electrifying as any boxing movie’s comparable introducing-the-champ scene, but it's even better here when pumped up with a classic cock-rock riff.  In the blood red-hued underground of the bar the film’s highly interior perspective finds its true metaphor. Here the boys can shut out the world and its realities to concentrate on what matters: each other and their petty schemes. Any doubt where this group’s priorities lie is swept away in a key scene late in the story when Keitel’s Charlie must choose between his girlfriend and his best friend. (Go on - guess.)

Growing up with Hollywood’s pulp thrillers which his family in the old neighbourhood said were OK, but would never show the real workings of the crime world, Scorsese literally asked "why not [show it]?". The result was Mean Streets. Scorsese proved not just that it could be done and succeed - Mean Streets opened up a whole new chapter in the art of the thriller.