The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Mean Streets (1973/USA/dir. Martin Scorsese) appeared at #52 on my original list.
What it is • Part crime genre, part art film; part Cassavetes, part Bertolucci; defined by both handheld grittiness and graceful camera dollies, Mean Streets announces Martin Scorsese as a filmmaker interested in all forms of cinema. His third film is deeply personal with universal aspirations, a Catholic film in more senses than one. Charlie (Harvey Keitel), a petty debt collector in early seventies Little Italy, is caught in the crossfire - at first just figuratively - between his responsibility to his gangster uncle (Cesare Danova), his loyalty to his dangerously irreverant cousin Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro), his love for the epileptic Teresa (Amy Robinson), and his guilt-ridden Catholic faith. The plot's certainly not irrelevant to the film's priorities - far from it - but the experience still registers less as a narrative machine than as a flowing succession of moments, defined by performance, musical accompaniment, camera movement, and in some of its boldest moments, the arresting cuts that would come to define Scorsese's touch (rendered this time by Sidney Levin, rather than usual collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker). Like many other films on the list, Mean Streets isn't present so much for its story as for the way that story is told.
Why I like it •
