When Martin Scorsese finally won the directing Oscar for 2006’s The Departed, he inspired a handful of film buffs to point out the supposed travesty implied by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences long ignoring the landmark titles on the filmmaker’s resume in favor of a remake. Few pointed out, or seemed to recall, that America’s most beloved living auteur, was not only no stranger to remakes, but took up the business of remaking, rebooting, and paying homage as a more than honorable foundation for a now-legendary body of work.
New York, New York was essentially a ticker-tape parade for old Hollywood’s Technicolor musical legacy, while Taxi Driver was a tribute either to Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket or John Ford’s The Searchers, depending on which auteur lens (Paul Schrader or Martin Scorsese) you look at it through. And 1973’s Mean Streets, the director’s third feature, the one that really drove the backhoe into the vacant lot that would eventually become the tower we call Scorsese, was itself something of a do-over of his 1967 debut feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door?
Genealogical signposts consist largely of two elements. First, the two films dedicate long passages to Hawksian, just-hanging-out business, as much inspired by Scorsese’s Little Italy remembrances as the profound tonal influence of John Cassavetes’s seminal 1959 film Shadows. It’s this stuff, the men-will-be-boys shenanigans, the dusk-‘til-dawn revelry, the lines like “Twenty dollars, let’s go to da movies!” that has been kept alive through Raging Bull (“I’ll be at the gym or the other joint, one of da two”), Goodfellas (“I thought you said, ‘I’m all right, Spider’”), and, in a greatly diminished capacity, his more recent crime dramas, including Gangs of New York and The Departed. Beginning with Who’s That Knocking at My Door? and Mean Streets, Scorsese has both delighted in, and recognized the occasionally brutal ferocity of, what happens when some dumb, headstrong guys get a few drinks in them, and one of them decides that somebody made a crack about somebody’s mother, or something.
The second connective thread is, of course, the Catholic guilt/Madonna-whore business, enmeshed in the mildly melancholic self-loathing of a poor sap who can’t respect a girl who’d stoop so low as to sleep with him. More than the later, more volcanic (and iconic) collaborations with Robert De Niro, Scorsese leavens this heavy mixture with a brief homage to that super-long bedroom chat in Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle Vague classic Breathless. Out from under the early layering of aimless non-narrative, inchoate anxiety, and run-ins with various urban lowlifes (the core cadre of “good fellas” hates anyone who happens to be a bit different, or a lot), there emerges the sad ballad of Johnny Boy (De Niro), a firebrand who’s just a little too old even to be grudgingly tolerated as a mere headstrong kid, and eventually has to answer for his disrespect, and for his failure to heed the 11th commandment: “Fuck you, pay me.”
While the film covers the cohabitation of violence and location verisimilitude from the first few frames, during which we see footage of the Feast of San Gennaro crosscut with a junkie getting 86’d from the characters’ favorite dive bar, the transition from slight narrative to operatic, Wellman-esque tragedy is a bumpy one. And Scorsese and Mardik Martin’s script, augmented by the cast’s hit-and-miss improvised dialogue, seems wholly unprepared to take that trip.
Still, while the storytelling sags as Mean Streets enters its final stretch, it succeeds as the first of Scorsese’s grand, disturbing, music-infused crescendos, a lethal ambush scored to panicked automotive noise and Eric Clapton and Johnny Mayall and the Bluesbreakers’s “Steppin’ Out.” If the math doesn’t exactly add up, Mean Streets is justly valued for its visceral, concussive force, grounded in remembrances that couldn’t have been made up for love or money.
Image/Sound
Thanks to some early reviews questioning the color grading in the 4K restoration of Mean Streets included on this UHD release, the Criterion Collection issued a rare statement defending the legitimacy of the restoration and noting the hands-on involvement of Martin Scorsese and longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker in preparing the source for the disc’s transfer. Such a step shouldn’t have been necessary, as Criterion’s disc presents Mean Streets in gorgeous detail, retaining the heavy grain of the location-shot film while revealing levels of texture and color separation wholly absent in previous home-video releases. Similarly, darker scenes that used to be murky and crushed now display rich black levels and consistent clarity. The original mono track betrays some inherent limitations of separation between the copious voiceover narrations and the roar of street noise in the Little Italy setting, but all sounds are well-distributed and dialogue remains clear even when it’s purposefully surrounded by the din of New York City life.
Extras
Criterion offers a new video essay by critic Imogen Sarah Smith that unpacks the film’s sharp but often tender depiction of toxic masculinity and friendship. It also includes a booklet essay by critic Lucy Sante that situates Mean Streets at the vanguard of the post-Watergate shift in tone of New Hollywood cinema to bleak social and political self-assessment.
The remainder of the extras are sourced from prior releases and archival material, most notably an excerpt of a 2011 conversation between Scorsese and director Richard Linklater at a Directors Guild of America event and a selected-scene audio commentary by Scorsese and actor Amy Robinson. In both instances, the filmmaker provides ample information about both the making of Mean Streets and how the film significantly boosted his career. An interview with cinematographer Kent Wakeford offers insights into how he and the director captured the film’s intimate yet expressionistic look. Finally, excerpts from the documentary Mardik: Baghdad to Hollywood cover the career of co-writer Mardik Martin and his collaborations with Scorsese.
Overall
Martin Scorsese’s first great feature receives a sterling UHD upgrade from Criterion that enshrines its position as one of the pivotal films of the New Hollywood era.
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