event Mean Streets

After an early-career detour through Roger Corman’s low-budget film school, where he emerged with Boxcar Bertha (“You just spent a year of your life making a piece of shit,” John Cassavetes told him), director Martin Scorsese returned with 1973’s Mean Streets, a galvanizing piece of personal filmmaking. The divergent moral codes of the church and the street haunt Harvey Keitel as he navigates the vice-ridden world of a low-level gangster while groping haplessly for salvation. Charged by the whip-crack juxtaposition of violence and humor, innovative use of voiceover, and a vivid depiction of Italian-American life, Mean Streets also begins Scorsese’s long collaboration with Robert De Niro, whose screw-up hoodlum forces Keitel into permanent exile.

After an early-career detour through Roger Corman’s low-budget film school, where he emerged with Boxcar Bertha (“You just spent a year of your life making a piece of shit,” John Cassavetes told him), director Martin Scorsese returned with 1973’s Mean Streets, a galvanizing piece of personal filmmaking. The divergent moral codes of the church and the street haunt Harvey Keitel as he navigates the vice-ridden world of a low-level gangster while groping haplessly for salvation. Charged by the whip-crack juxtaposition of violence and humor, innovative use of voiceover, and a vivid depiction of Italian-American life, Mean Streets also begins Scorsese’s long collaboration with Robert De Niro, whose screw-up hoodlum forces Keitel into permanent exile.

After an early-career detour through Roger Corman’s low-budget film school, where he emerged with Boxcar Bertha (“You just spent a year of your life making a piece of shit,” John Cassavetes told him), director Martin Scorsese returned with 1973’s Mean Streets, a galvanizing piece of personal filmmaking. The divergent moral codes of the church and the street haunt Harvey Keitel as he navigates the vice-ridden world of a low-level gangster while groping haplessly for salvation. Charged by the whip-crack juxtaposition of violence and humor, innovative use of voiceover, and a vivid depiction of Italian-American life, Mean Streets also begins Scorsese’s long collaboration with Robert De Niro, whose screw-up hoodlum forces Keitel into permanent exile.