Film Review: Mean Streets

Info:
Film Title: Mean Streets
Length: 112 mins
Director: Martin Scorsese’s
Producer: Universal

“You don’t make up your sins in church. You do it on the streets, you do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.”
The Godfather, Scarface made the mob a vicious, cut, brutal dog with a diamond necklace. Mean Streets removes the necklace. Scorsese’s grimy 1973 classic shows us crimal life lower down the food chain, were you risk getting slapped about and killed just to make a buck. Charlie Cappa (Harvey Keitel) is our anti hero, completely loyal to Jonny boy (Robert De Niro), but his insane ways keeps getting him dragged back in and Cappa follows…
Mean Streets is aggressive, raw and authentic and this is portrayed through everything, the lighting, characters, script and music: watching Keitel walk down the street to the sound of the Ronettes, or De Niro dancing solo in the street to ‘Mickey’s Monkey’, pure class.
Scorsese places these characters in a perfectly realized world of boredom and small joys, fights, death, and the certainty of mediocrity. His story emerges from the daily lives of these characters. They hang out. They go to movies. They eat, they drink, they fight, they fallout, they have women issues, it is them that make this film, all Scorsese’s does is add a big chunk of icing to a ruined cake in the form of a video camera. However I might add it contains a massively unconvincing bar fight.