Mean Streets (1973)

This film has been overshadowed with all the praise heaped on other Martin Scorcese/Robert De Niro films, but this is a classic which is as good as Casino or Goodfellas. It's more rough around the edges and less tightly plotted than those films, but less cold hearted, and De Niro and Keitel are amazing in these early roles. The sense of tension and danger towards the end, when the situation is spinning out of control, is done perfectly. You can see the influence of this in the films of Danny Boyle and especially Quentin Tarantino. A must for Scorcese/De Niro fans.

Fmovies: Has some great dialogue and is obviously a starting point for Scorcese (And DeNiro) but in my opinion not on par with any of his (and their) later work.

Drearily shot and badly edited, the films cheap production shows and it has no stood the test of time and looks very dated.

The music is almost always too loud, making it a pain to hear what people are saying. The characters tend to drone on and an and to be honest, it put me to sleep a bit.

Only recommended if you are a die hard fan of either scorcese, keitel or deniro...if you are looking for a gangster/mob character study you'd be better off with GoodFellas, in my opinion.

Scorsese's first film, the interesting catastrophe "Boxcar Bertha," marked his birth as a director, but it was with his second feature, "Mean Streets" that we witnessed the birth of an artist. Most of "Mean Streets" is slightly unfocused with a simplistic plot based around a lot of machismo grandstanding and long bouts of boring dialog (occasionally made interesting by DeNiro's off-kilter star-making turn as Johnny-Boy), with spats of visceral violence (far less gory here than in later Scorcese pics), and a visual bravado that seems slightly less disciplined but no less entertaining than your standard Scorsese crime flick.

Despite its drawbacks (mainly due to youth and inexperience), the template was set. The opening credits (done to the tune of "Be My Baby") suck you right into the film, and the rest of the movie is peppered with Scorsese's loving treatment of popular music that would later become one of his most endearing hallmarks. The basic premise featuring Harvey Keitel as Charlie (the young hood with a heart of gold and conflicted internally by the religion of the Church and the religion of the Streets), Robert DeNiro as Johnny-Boy (the equally loved and hated loose-canon brother figure), and Amy Robinson as Theresa (the woman our hero wants to put on a pedestal as a saint but often treats like a whore), is a trifecta of archetypes we see repeated again and again in Scorsese's films (most obviously in "Casino" with the DeNiro-Pesci-Stone characters, and most subversively in "The Last Temptation of Christ" with Jesus-Judas-Mary Magdalene). The religious iconography, the brotherhood of crooks, the attraction to the gangster lifestyle, the keen eye for depicting violence in artistic and startling ways...these are displayed here in "Mean Streets" in their rawest form.

Though flawed in many ways, "Mean Streets" set the stage and laid the the template for the type of film Scorsese would perfect seventeen years later with "Goodfellas." This heralded the arrival of a new talent and a new genre, and the world of film has thankfully never been the same.

Mean Streets fmovies. Martin Scorsese has made some brilliant movies in his life, but unfortunately this isn't one of them. I can't really call it bad, because the direction and the cinematography just drip with pure talent, but I have some major problems with the plot. Mainly, where the hell is it? The story doesn't just move at a slow pace, it appears to go in incredibly tiring loops. It starts of with Johnny Boy (a solid Robert DeNiro) owing a whole bunch of crooks money, which is a pretty riveting starting point. What does he do about it? What do the crooks do about it? Nothing, and that goes on for two hours. The whole movie appears to be Harvey Keitel endlessly saying he has to pay his debts, to which he refuses, to which he asks it again half an hour later, to which he like, makes up an excuse and goes to the movies, and all of it feels so redundant. The movie finally gets to the point in the end, but that doesn't really save it. It shows the sadness of the bad neighbourhoods in New York wonderfully, but that's really all I can say about it.

This is a well acted and stylish film which is let down by a poor script.

Keitel is great in the lead and De Niro steals a lot of scenes as the out of control friend but the good cast are wasted.

Nothing much happens. A little action and violence but that is it. It is a slight character study of a nice guy living in a bad place but that wasn't enough to sustain my interest.

I was expecting a lot having heard the name and read some of then comments on this site as well as seeing the quality of the cast and I was extremely disappointed.

I was bored throughout.

One of the things that I love the most about watching the old classics is when you can so clearly see the beginnings of what later became such trademarks of a director, actor, even a genre. Martin Scorsese begins a long line of films about the gangs of New York with Mean Streets, a gritty look at the underside of New York City that foreshadowed much of the same stark realism portrayed in Taxi Driver a few years later. It reminds me of the minimalist realism of films like Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing, another urban classic.

Robert DeNiro plays Johnny Boy, the fast talking kid who owes money all over town and never seems to care to pay anyone back. We meet other characters who owe people money, and their apologies at not being able to pay are genuine, they realize that they're not going to get late fees added to their debt or Last Notices, they're putting their lives on the line. There is genuine fear on their side and genuine malice on the side of the people they owe money to, but Johnny Boy just doesn't seem to care.

Harvey Keitel plays Charlie Cappa, who is constantly trying to get Johnny Boy to shape up and pay off what he owes, knowing the danger that he is in and frustrated at Johnny's lack of interest or care in the fact that he owes so many people so much money. Johnny and Charlie live in the same environment but completely different worlds. Johnny holds himself in and laughs everything off, occasionally venting his frustration in quick bursts of violence, Charlie is much more contained but is tormented spiritually. While Johnny gets himself into endless debt with people that collect by any means necessary, Charlie goes to confession and holds his fingers over flames to remind himself of the dangers of the afterlife should he mess up in this one. Catholicism is a major character in this film.

The movie is set in New York City in the late 1960s, where Scorsese grew up in presumably something of a similar environment. Something must have gone differently, since he ended up one of the most famous directors in the world rather than dead like so many characters in his movies do, but he creates this environment in Mean Streets that gives an incredible view into the dangers of the life that so many people lived and continue to live there. I've never even been to New York, but having seen so many of Scorsese's films I think I can understand why the environment could have had such an impact on him that it dominated most of his career as a filmmaker.

There are some classic scenes in this movie that would have been much more widely quoted were it not for the even more quotable lines from Taxi Driver. Mean Streets, for example, is where you find the classic speech by Robert DeNiro, I'll call it the "I borrow money from everybody so I owe everybody money so I can't borrow money no more so I borrow money from you because you're the only jerkoff around here that I can borrow money without paying back!" speech. I love that one, especially the expression on his face, he's having such a great time.

But considering the world that he lives in, it's almost understandable the way he cares so little about placing himself in danger. In a life as bleak and unpromising as the one that is portrayed in this movie, it is to be expected that someone will display passive suicidal behavior. Johnny knows he's never going to go to college, he's never going to be a doctor or a businessman or drive a nice car, he's going to grow up working menial jo