“You don’t pay for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. The rest is bulls–t and you know it.”
– opening monologue in “Mean Streets”
Charlie, the flawed hero in Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets,” knows it. That’s his downfall as a tough guy. While everyone else in his mob circle is content to stare hell in the face, living carelessly on their way to oblivion, Charlie takes his Catholicism seriously enough to feel conflict, but not enough to change his ways. He spends his days at the altar and his nights betraying his good intentions.
Ever since Scorsese drew an Oscar nomination for “Gangs of New York,” I’ve wanted to write this column. Younger viewers were probably baffled at the idea “Gangs” – a thoroughly unimaginative picture – could have been considered among the five best films of the year; baffled moreover at the prospect its director was considered the front-runner to win the Oscar. I wanted to write this column to invite all of those uninitiated viewers to look at the lives of Charlie, Johnny Boy and the rest of the Italian-American hoodlums who occupy Scorsese’s “Mean Streets,” celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.
Having seen the film on the big screen at Studio 35 recently, what struck me was not only how spontaneous and alive the picture seems by the standards of today’s formula films, but also how much more spontaneous the film is compared to Scorsese’s own recent work. That is why I think the film might go a long way toward explaining why such sentimental affection is still heaped upon Scorsese by older viewers to this day, and why young people viewing it for the first time might have a blast.
In the world of low-level gangsters that the film inhabits, fights break out of absolutely nowhere, spread from one location to the next and fizzle out as quickly as they begin. Everybody’s got a hustle – petty theft, gambling, even gunplay, have become routine. Where are the police? They’re there all right, but the bribes are too good for them to bother enforcing laws. Survival comes first, and the rest is an afterthought.
Scorsese sees the world like no other director. His stark lighting strategy gives us a sense of immediacy, of action happening here and now. The director’s palette is soulful, even a bit dangerous. He smothers us with reds and blacks, letting his Catholic sensibility dominate not only the narrative element, but the visual one as well.
He finds a memorable alter-ego in Charlie (Harvey Keitel). Charlie is a bright neighborhood kid who, like many of the young men in Little Italy, doesn’t have too many options in life, so small-scale crime becomes a way of getting some quick cash and quick respect when he’s not neurotically confessing his sins in church.
Charlie does have one benevolent outlet. He looks after his girlfriend’s troubled cousin Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro, in one of his earliest and best performances) like a surrogate older brother, helping him pay back gambling debts and smoothing over conflicts with the local loan-shark (Richard Romanus). Johnny Boy’s got a head full of rocks and a mouth that gets him into trouble. He’s fearless in a crazy sort of way, and it always struck me that he’d make a heck of a better mobster than Charlie, who, for all his criminal ambition, doesn’t have the courage to be really ruthless.
Charlie is so stymied by guilt, his actions and words are hesitant, and in his line of work, there’s no room for hesitation. He gets by from one day to the next by rationalizing his illicit behavior and treating his girlfriend like a whore so that, in his eyes, their sexual relationship falls just short of mortal sin. But despite the rationalizations, Charlie’s gut is tying in knots.
That’s the tension that I miss from Scorsese’s recent pictures – a sense the director is expressing something so personal that he’s almost confessing his own sins through characters like Charlie. There’s less bloodshed in “Mean Streets” than in the grisly, over-the-top “Gangs.” In some ways, however, the earlier film is more violent, and on a far deeper level. When I look back at the director’s catalogue, it is the way I choose to remember his contribution to the movies.
Jordan Gentile is a senior in journalism and The Lantern arts editor. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
