Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973)Adam & Matty's takes (starts at 41:47)One of the rare films in this whole endeavor that I've already seen, and I think I stand by my assesment of it as Scorsese's best film, of the 9 I've seen anyway. Even if one prefers Goodfellas or Raging Bull or whatever, Mean Streets seems like the ultimate Scorsese film. Aside from some technical imperfections (the sound mixing is generally not great), he's fully-formed here, with his obsessions in full display: the catholicism and the guilt that goes along with this particular brand of it, New York and more specifically Little Italy and the mafia culture. This is also true stylistically, particularly in his use of contemporary music to score the action.
I suppose this is generally a common thread of New Hollywood that I haven't adressed much, but it's been quite noticeable in this marathon. There's the obvious: The Graduate and its iconic Simon & Garfunkel score, Easy Rider and it succession of music videos in the first half, and this, which has an average amount of music-dominated sequences for Scorsese, which is to say a lot. But Midnight Cowboy has the recurring Harry Nilsson song, The Long Goodbye has its variations on the eponymous song, and even Jules et Jim has Le tourbillon de la vie. I don't remember music in Bonnie and Clyde I suppose ? In any case, my point is that the use of music is clearly one of the many stylistical innovations from New Hollywood, and Mean Streets feels like a culmination of that trend. Along with the home-footage opening credits and the way Scorsese writes these characters and shoots New York, it creates this incredibly strong sense of time and place, in a way that I don't think that even a Goodfellas doesn't, perhaps because Scorsese is looking in the past there, whereas this is entirely of-the-moment.
On that point, the musical choices are particularly on-point in that there's a healthy mix of very current needledrops (Scorses's beloved Rolling Stones getting the most iconic one with Jumpin' Jack Flash) along with canzone and 50s stuff like The Chantels's I Love You So which opens the film. It's specific, and personal. Of course the performances, especially by Keitel and De Niro, also play a huge part. It's been quite the pleasure seeing people like Nicholson and De Niro in their breakout roles throughout this marathon, though the performance I'm most impressed by here is Keitel's. The film is not subtle about his inner demons (hah, because he spends all this time in hell-ish looking places, get it ?), but his performance is. You can feel the pain in realizing that he understands that in order to get where he wants to be, he has to both compromise himself and abandon someone like Johnny Boy, but he can't quite do it because he knows it's not right. But is it ? The conflict between his cultural values and his religious values is constantly playing out right there on his face, and it's deeply tragic. Here gain I think of Goodfellas and how little I care for anyone in that film: aside from Michael (and even him I don't hate half as much as Henry Hill), they're all endearing in some way. They're not quite lost yet, and therein lies the tragedy.
8/10