The American Dream: A Broken Promise
Mean Streets, Dir. Martin Scorcese
Al Capone, the notorious gangster of 1920s Prohibition-era Chicago, once said, “Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class.” Organised crime has always represented the underbelly of the American Dream: the belief that anyone can achieve wealth and success, regardless of their background.
Capone understood that it was a rigged game, played by everyone but won by few. And he saw capitalism as a perfect opportunity to acquire money and power, using any means available, fair or foul.
Perhaps this explains the enduring fascination of gangster movies. People struggling to find a legal way of securing a better life for themselves are drawn to a world where the normal rules don’t apply. Where tremendous rewards go hand in hand with great risks. And the main characters also happen to be cool, well-dressed anti-heroes.
Down these mean streets a man must go
People often think of films from the 1930s and 1940s – think Little Caesar, Scarface or White Heat – as representing the classic period of the genre. But plenty of great gangster movies have emerged since then. And one of the greatest, surely, is Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets. Released in 1973, it was more than just a gangster movie. It’s also a story of sin and redemption and offers a surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of what it was like to grow up in a tough neighbourhood like New York’s Little Italy.
Scorsese knew what he was talking about. This is where he’d spent his childhood. And this is reflected in the way the film captures perfectly the seedy, sometimes violent atmosphere of this world at the fringes of the Mafia.
The film’s title came from crime writer Raymond Chandler’s essay The Simple Art of Murder. Reflecting on the art of storytelling, Chandler wrote, “In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”
The film revolves around the tense relationship between the two main characters, Charlie (Harvey Keitel) and Johnny Boy (Robert De Nero). They inhabit a Mafia environment because that’s the world they were born into. But while Charlie experiences very Catholic doubts about the moral choices he’s forced to make, he can never quite sever the ties with the family business. Johnny Boy, by contrast, is an anarchic and occasionally violent product of Little Italy’s criminal underworld. More honest in a curious way. But destructive and self-destructive at the same time. And the film charts his inevitably tragic end.
Listen to the music
One of the most striking features of Mean Streets is the integration of rock ‘n’ roll into the structure of the narrative. It was one of the first films to do this effectively. This shouldn’t surprise us. Growing up in the Lower East Side, music was everywhere. As Scorsese said:
“From 1947 on, music scored what was happening in the streets, the back rooms. And it affected, sometimes, the behavior of the people, because this music was playing in the streets…Windows were open, and you could hear what everybody else was listening to. It expresses the excitement of the time. Simply, it’s the way I saw life. The way I experienced life.”
The film opens with Charlie struggling to resolve the tensions between his religion and life as a minor gangster. The Ronettes’ "Be My Baby," suddenly kicks in and plays under the Super 8 home movies used to portray Charlie's reflections on the innocence of his childhood. The nostalgia for a lost past provides a powerful contrast with the tawdry criminal world which provides the backdrop to the film.
Shortly after, we’re introduced to Johnny Boy, accompanied by The Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin' Jack Flash”. This is astonishing cinema. Charlie waits for his friend in a demonically red-lit, sleazy bar. The motion slows down as Johnny Boy swaggers in with a girl on each arm. The song's lyrics (“I was born in a cross-fire hurricane/And I howled at the morning driving rain/But it’s all right now, in fact, it’s a gas/But it’s all right. I’m Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”) foreshadow the later conflict between the two characters.
As the story develops, Scorsese creates other magical music moments, including deploying The Chips’ doo-wop classic, “Rubber Biscuit”, to underscore the drunken euphoria of Charlie in a bar-room scene. And later uses The Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman” to offer an ironic commentary on the fight at the pool hall.
Scorsese doesn’t simply use music as an accompaniment to the narrative or to heighten emotion. But to draw us into the world unfolding on the screen, offer a window into a character’s soul and provide a powerful evocation of the film’s setting.
The power of redemption
Scorsese’s commitment to realism has led him to depict violence – in all its apparently random manifestations – in ways that sometimes generate controversy. But as he said, “It seems to me that any sensible person must see that violence does not change the world and if it does, then only temporarily.”
And he’s not above tempering the violence with a sense of humour. There’s a wonderfully funny point in the pool-hall fight where Johnny Boy insults the owner by calling him a mook:
Jimmy: "Mook? I'm a mook?"
Johnny Boy: "Yeah"
Jimmy: "What's a mook?"
Johnny Boy "A mook, what's a mook?".
Bruce Springsteen once said, “I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream.” Mean Streets is a great example of how the subject has been approached by cinema. It’s lost none of its power. The searing depiction of low-level mafiosos remains compulsive viewing. And as Charlie said early in the film, “You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullsh*t and you know it.”