Product: Mean Streets (1973)
Rating: 5.0
The breakthrough
Scorsese once said that all his movies are about sin and redemption, but none is more than this one. "You don't make up for your sins in the church. You do it in the streets!". This is somehow the message of almost all of his movies. Keitel plays Charlie, who is keen to do the right thing by God and by himself. He keeps asking for a sign which is delivered to him in the shape of Johnny Boy ( Bobby de Niro ), a loser, an irresponsible gambler that believes that the people that surround him owe him a living. He is going to be the cross that Charlie will have to bear. Even the neighbourhood godfather has washed his hands of him. He keeps telling Charlie, his nephew, to cut the ties with this loser, but Charlie is torn between the loyalty to his friend and fealty to his family. But Johnny Boy manages to make life even more difficult by refusing to pay off a local loan shark and then rebuffing Charlie's attempts to mediate. Charlie and his girlfriend Teresa decide to smuggle Johnny out of the neighbourhood, but they're pursued by the loan shark's gunmen who hand out a vicious lesson in the final bloody confrontation. Both de Niro and Keitel give absolutely electrifying performances, especially de Niro who is simply explosive right on the first appearance in the movie when he drops a bomb into a mailbox and than runs away exhilarated by what he has just done. This is an important movie in the cinema history: it brought a new filming technique, a young director who'd later establish himself as one of the greatest of the last thirty years, and it was the first milestone in young de Niro's career ( "Bang the drum slowly" was not much known at the time and is yet less known nowadays ): the man was a firework waiting to go off! And what maybe matters the most - the movie has laid the groundwork for the most important creative relationship between an actor and a director in the history of the cinema. Scorsese had found his artistical twin, the actor who most mirrored and complemented his own sensibilities. On the other hand de Niro had found a director whose sense of commitement and intensity of purpose matched his own. "Mean streets" begun a string of films that would virtually define the benchmark against which the american cinema would be judged for the next decades!