the true tragedy
by Douglas Messerli
Martin Scorsese and Mardik Martin
(screenplay), Martin Scorsese (director) Mean Streets / 1973
I saw Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets in
Maryland the year it was released, 1973. I do remember its endless street
scenes in black, green, yellow, red, and sometimes—particularly when the cop
cars came around—in white. All the gangster films I’d seen until then had been
basically noir films in black-and-white. Here, for the first time in my memory,
the evil-doings of mafioso-like figures was painted in the colors of our day, a
reality so potent that it would eventually result in some of the best movies of
the next decade in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather 1 and 2. And, of
course, from another perspective, Scorsese’s own brilliant Taxi Driver.
Despite the early years of total bigotry toward Italian-Americans (which
continues more-subtly still today), Americans took to Italians, particularly to
the actions of the mafia, almost immediately, in part, because that culture so
resembles our own claims to this country’s origins; the combination of deep
religiosity, dedication to family and friends, an innate sense of honor—however
one might define that—along with a love of place (usually a narrow swath of land
settled by people like oneself, but sometimes confused with a love of country)
along with very large doses of hypocrisy and extreme violence. Aren’t these the
ingredients behind absolutely every US Western film?
As
Roger Ebert perceived, however, Mean Streets, unlike the later Coppola
films, is not really a story of the Mafia, although those pernicious villains
certainly do play a role in the movie. But, rather, this work simply reveals
the effects of that world upon the children and young adults who live in their
community.
One
might imagine him in a happy marriage to Teresa Ronchelli (Amy Robinson), a
lovely epileptic, shunned by the community, who lives nearby. But as both know,
in the world in which they live, such a relationship would be impossible. And
they keep their love silent. In a strange sense, the horrific “Johnny Boy”
becomes their symbolic child, a boy which had they birthed, might have grown up
in this scratch of the New York landscape just like Teresa’s cousin. And this
is the true tragedy behind the basically comedic riffs of Scorsese’s film.
Charlie attempts to redeem himself, instead, on the street, particularly
by protecting Teresa’s young cousin, “Johnny Boy” Civello (and amazing vision
of a young Robert De Niro), who is the very opposite of his “protector”—a
violent live-wire triggered, like the bombs he tosses into US
De
Niro, this early into his career, already has perfected a role he would play in
so many variations: a man so high-wired and near-mad that he almost might be
described as “cool.”
“Johnny Boy” knows that in this world, death is part of the territory.
He embraces it as if it were a warm coat to temporarily keep him out of the
cold air he inhabits. He knows death far better than he realizes life, and that
is his problem and, of course, his destiny. While Charlie attempts to redeem
the “mean streets” of this cinema’s title, the “boy” abandons himself to them,
drinking in their lurid pleasures, women, money, and momentary friends.
Thank
heaven, however, this highly plotted dichotomy does not at all appear in this
film as an effort leaden with ambition. As Ebert writes:
“We
never have the sense of a scene being set up and then played out; his
characters hurry to their dooms while the camera tries to keep pace. There’s an
improvisational feel even in scenes that we know, because of their structure,
couldn’t have been improvised.”
As
startlingly brilliant as Coppola’s films were, this early story by Scorsese of
lost men in search of an American Dream, seems to be closer to the actual world
in which we all know we live: violent dreamers who barely manage to stumble
through their very everyday lives. Nobody in this film is a true hero, and,
strangely enough, nobody in Mean Streets is an absolute villain. That
is, quite obviously, the real problem.
Los Angeles, November 6, 2019
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November
2019).
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