Scorsese's third feature, made for $500,000 in Little Italy. The film that established almost everything he has been doing since.
Little Italy, Manhattan, 1973. Charlie is a small-time hood in his early twenties, working for his uncle who runs a restaurant and various low-stakes rackets. He is in love with Teresa, his cousin, who has epilepsy that the family treats as shameful. He is loyal — to a fault — to his friend Johnny Boy, a reckless loose cannon who owes money to half the neighbourhood and refuses to make any of the small concessions that would let him survive.
The film follows Charlie across roughly a week. He goes to mass. He sticks his hand in candle flame as small penance. He tries to manage Johnny Boy's debts. He fails. The film closes on a violent confrontation that may or may not kill Charlie, Johnny Boy, and Teresa, depending on how one reads the famous, possibly-dying final shot.
Almost everything that would become Scorsese-specific is on display in Mean Streets. The slow-motion shots with rock soundtracks (the Ronettes' 'Be My Baby' over Charlie's bar entrance, the Rolling Stones' 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' over Johnny Boy's entrance). The voiceover that doubles as Catholic confession. The handheld camera in fight sequences. The use of New York neighbourhood specificity as not just setting but as moral content.
Scorsese was 30 when he made the film. He had directed two prior features (Who's That Knocking at My Door, 1967; Boxcar Bertha, 1972) and worked as editor on the Woodstock documentary. Mean Streets is the third feature and the one that everything in his subsequent filmography is in conversation with. De Niro and Keitel both became major figures on the basis of this film. The Scorsese-De Niro collaboration would, across the next half-century, become one of cinema's most-productive director-actor partnerships.
Mean Streets opens with Charlie's voiceover: 'You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets.' The line is the film's structural argument. Charlie is, throughout, performing private religious gestures — putting his hand in candle flame, kneeling in church, narrating his own moral state to himself. None of these gestures has any visible effect on his actual behaviour.
Scorsese has spoken across his career about Catholicism as a permanent structuring concern in his work. Almost every major Scorsese protagonist — Travis Bickle, Jake LaMotta, Henry Hill, Frank Sheeran — is in some sense a man performing penance through wrong means. The pattern starts in Mean Streets.
The film's most-quoted scene is the pool-hall fight, in which Johnny Boy starts a melee over a $4 debt to which Charlie is dragged. The sequence is shot handheld, with the soundtrack alternating between diegetic jukebox music and ambient noise. The fight is messy and ungraceful — the opposite of the choreographed mob-film violence audiences had been trained on.
This is what put Mean Streets at the centre of the early New Hollywood. The film was shot for $500,000 in Little Italy, on real locations, with a cast of mostly-unknowns, in a documentary-realist register that European art cinema had been doing for years and that American cinema had largely not. Scorsese's Italian-American specificity gave the New Hollywood a particular ethnic register that the Coppola Godfather films would, a year earlier, also be working.