MAESTRO OF CINEMA MARTIN SCORSESE
Mean Streets (1973)
See, the whole idea was to make a story of a modern saint, a saint in his own society, but his society happens to be gangsters. You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. Charlie has to get through his pride. He understand that spirituality and practice is not limited to the actual edifice of the literal church. But out on the street you can’t choose your own penance. He thinks he can, but penance comes when you least expect it, from a quarter that you can never anticipate. I think the key to compassion is denial of the self. Charlie’s trap is thinking that his care for Johnny Boy can be his penance, for his own redemption, his own spiritual use. The good priests I knew always put their egos aside. Once you do that, there’s only need—the needs of others—and questions of choosing penance or what compassion is or isn’t fall away. They become meaningless.
In my Little Italy experience certain people were aligned with certain families. People with power, and if somebody hit somebody, or did something, not just on the street level, not just kids, the settling up was done, usually in the old way, between the different groups. Lives were run that way. It’s a very tough way of living. We walked on tightropes, careful to respect the right people. There were good citizens, there were guys out of town who couldn’t come back, there were guys who were dead. I was in the middle of it, trying to understand how one should behave in life. What is right, and what is wrong? How do you have a sense of dignity in that world?
Bob De Niro said less than, say, Harvey Keitel and me, we would talk for hours. But Bob knew specifically everything that I knew when I was growing up. And to this day, it’s beyond finishing each other’s sentences, it’s like we just look at each other, and shake our heads sometimes and move on. And yet Bob could be extremely articulate about things. It became the three of us— Harvey, Bob, and me—up through the 70s. We were almost like the same person.
Mean Streets shaped my style. Pop music, some Italian folk songs, and some opera. The music was very important. And also the cutting with the music, with the emotions. It was all designed.
This series is authorized by Martin Scorsese and Sikelia Productions, and co curated by Martin Scorsese and Greg Olson.
Thanks to The New Yorker poet, film curator and teacher Tova Gannana for her film essay, and to series coordinator Kendal Gabel
Harvey Keitel as Charlie
David Proval as Tony
Amy Robinson as Teresa
Richard Romanus as Michael
Cesare Denova as Giovanni
Victor Argo as Mario
George Memmoli as Joey
David Carradine as Drunk
Robert Carradine as Boy with Gun
Catherine Scorsese as Woman on Stairs
Martin Scorsese as Jimmy Shorts
Moonlight on a pillow. A man in a white tank top is woken by his dream. A mirror on the wall, sirens outside, and then the music of The Ronettes singing about the night we first met. Charlie Cappa (Harvey Keitel) is a suit in the neighborhood, dancing in the audience among tables at his friend Tony’s (David Proval) basement bar while women dance naked on stage. Charlie runs numbers, is in the mob by way of his Uncle Giovanni (Cesare Danova). Charlie is full of warmth and feeling. He isn’t removed, but involved. Penance and how you repent is what consumes Charlie: the scales of justice. What is mean is reality, and what is mean if not meant? The meanness of the streets is both random and directed.
Charlie’s uncle sees the neighborhood as transactional. He isn’t susceptible to the inhabitants the way Charlie is, Charlie is impressionable, he is porous. Giovanni is cold; he sits in his living room and watches a movie on TV, a film he may’ve already seen. Charlie and his friends Tony, Michael (Richard Romanus), and Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro) go to the movies more than they go to church. In Tony’s bar, they philosophize. The bar is like the underworld: men and women in stages of undress and slumber. The movies they see are like their lives—violent, expressive, comic, filled with music. Their neighborhood is like a film set: festivals of saints parading, we see the neighborhood at night with the lights strung across the streets, bright as stars hung low, touching the buildings, illuminating the pavement. Charlie and his friends are in the thick of it. No one can catch a moment alone.
Charlie’s inner monologue peppers the film. Talk about penance and look who walks through the door, Charlie says to himself. Johnny Boy is Charlie’s charge. One night, he fires his pistol from a rooftop wanting to wake up the neighborhood. He says he wants to shoot a clothesline in half and hit the lights on the Empire State Building. Johnny Boy answers Charlie back with questions. He’s always asking, “What?” but he leaves off the “t” so it sounds like “Whaaa?” Johnny Boy has two tabs at Tony’s bar: a short-running tab and a long-running one: put liquor on a tab, put leaving your neighborhood on a tab, put making a decision about living differently than your pals on a tab, put life on a tab. The tab is more than a list; it’s a reputation. What’s good for Johnny Boy isn’t good for Charlie.
In Mean Streets (1973) Italians are played by a Christian Arab, a Puerto Rican and two Jews. In Mean Streets the neighborhood’s borders are physical, yet at the same time invisible. It’s the music that pushes the neighborhood, that pulses and pumps, an artery connecting Charlie and his friends to the rest of America. At any given party, laughter will turn into screams. Such a party is thrown at Tony’s bar for a returning Vietnam vet. There are streamers, shots, beer, dancing, and speeches. Late into the night when everyone is drunk, while suffering a flashback, the vet attacks a young woman on the dance floor. Charlie and his friends intervene, stopping what
needs to be stopped. They’re not bystanders; it’s their space, and they’re in control. Charlie comforts the young woman in a back room, dancing with her as he holds her. Charlie’s uncle has a birds eye view of the neighborhood while Charlie’s view is that of the worm’s.
Teresa (Amy Robinson), Johnny Boy’s cousin, having undressed in front of windows, having rolled around naked in a hotel bed with Charlie, stays dressed for the rest of the film. Her red sweater up to her neck, in a yellow vest she carries her groceries in a brown bag, she tells Michael in a stairwell, who is looking for Johnny Boy, to go to hell, her baguette and eggplant end up on the floor.
An hour into Mean Streets, Charlie crouches before a bedroom window in his parents’ apartment and peers through the blinds past the fire escape into Teresa's window as she peels off her nightgown. In Charlie’s room, Johnny Boy lies on his bed, as if to say “The neighborhood is always present”. Teresa’s swimsuit bottom has left a tan line, marking her in shadow and sun. Teresa tells Charlie “I love you” while he smiles and tells her not to tell him that. Theresa has epilepsy, and has a seizure in a hallway. Charlie will leave her briefly for Johnny Boy. Teresa and Johnny Boy are indivisible for Charlie, like two sides of a coin; he loves them both.
Michael, who has loaned Johnny Boy money, is charging him interest, is threatening to kill him “or worse”. Michael calls Johnny Boy “a jerk off”; Charlie calls Johnny Boy “a good kid.” Theresa wants to move to the village, and she wants Charlie to come with. Johnny Boy is like the needle nearing the label on a record: The record will need to be flipped.
The neighborhood is about to change. One day the neighborhood will get up, stretch, yawn and turn a corner. Nothing personal, it’s just what neighborhoods are want to do, like songs on the radio, one year they are called provocative the next they are considered easy listening.
Undecided about his own life, Charlie focuses on saving Johnny Boy from Michael, which is to say, the neighborhood. Up until then, Charlie had always been a passenger. Throughout the entire film we see his indecision, his arguing about staying or leaving, about who needs to pay up and whose debts should be forgiven. Fleeing in a moment of panic over the bridge to Brooklyn, away from their neighborhood in Manhattan, Theresa sits in the middle, with Johnny Boy and Charlie on either side. The energy in the car is like that of driving to the hospital to give birth.