Mean Streets: A review

For Westerns it was Stagecoach (1939) That epic first team up of two men (John Ford and John Wayne) who would come to change the genre forever.

For Crime Drama it was Mean Streets (1973) when a young director named Martin Scorsese made his first major feature film (after minor movie Boxcar Bertha (1972)) and gave a supporting role to a Robert De Niro, who had a few successes, but was not a true star... yet. Like Ford and Wayne these two men would go on to make many films together that would garner critical and box office success, such as Taxi Driver (1976) and GoodFellas (1990), but it all started with this one.

And what a place to start.

The film tells the story of two men, Charlie (Harvey Keitel) and Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro). The two are friends, but their friendship has some bumps in the road, mainly Johnny Boy's dead beat ways and Charlie's desire to climb the mob ladder, which often times means collecting debts.

The two play off each other amazingly well, with both providing great performances. But De Niro and Keitel are only expected to be great, and when Scorsese is telling them what to do there can be only one out come... a masterpiece of crime cinema.

For a movie that close to the release of The Godfather (1971) I was pleasantly surprised that with the exception of the playful trash can fight, there were no direct allusions or homages. Mean Streets doesn't try to recreate that masterpiece, it tried to be it's own monster, and it succeeds, creating a truly original and masterful look into the mob and the everyday lives of the people that make it in a way that hadn't really been seen before (Well, there was that one movie from a few years before I mentioned).

Like I touched on briefly, Harvey Keitel puts in a strong performance as Charlie. Working off the Scorsese Mardik Martin script to show the conflict of a Catholic in the Mob. The Bible tells him thou shalt not steal... but his boss tells him he should and that creates a conflict, which Keitel handles masterfully. The other main conflict of Charlie is his relationship with Teresa, his epileptic neighbor, whom his "family" has deemed "sick in the head," and there for undateable. So, Charlie has to decide between seeing his girl... and keeping his "family" happy, and adds a romantic subplot to this violent movie.

Although he isn't in the movie nearly as much as Keitel, De Niro turns in a typically amazing performance, but it is not his best. Johnny Boy is a kind of one dimensional character, but De Niro is able to make him seem at the very least 2 and possible 3 dimension, simply because he may be the greatest actor alive today.

All in all this is a very good movie, and should rank up with GoodFellas (1990), Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994) as some of the best Crime movies out there.

Dr. Brooklyn says: LIKE this movie (9/10)