The Streaming Canon: ‘Mean Streets,’ The Ascent of Scorsese, and The Portrait of a Vanished New York

Cultural difference isn’t something that manifests itself from country to country. As we denizens of the land of the red, white, and blue should be sometimes painfully aware by now, it exists from state to state. And in New York City back in the day, cultural difference could be just a matter of a few blocks up or downtown.

In Mean Streets, the third feature directed by Martin Scorsese (that’s newly available to stream on Netflix), one of the central locations is a bar in what used to be Manhattan’s Little Italy, (the location of the bar as it appears in a couple of exterior shots is in SoHo, but we’ll get to that in a bit) run by one of its four male leads, a guy named Tony, played by David Proval. In a signature scene early in the film, to the strains of the Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” Robert De Niro as Johnny Boy struts in. The anarchic, sociopathic ne’er do well has two giggling young women in tow, and he introduces them to Tony and to Harvey Keitel’s Charlie, who’s trying to steer Johnny Boy clear of a loan shark pal who’s eager to collect.

Gesturing to the women, Johnny Boy brags, “I met them in the Village.”

“Bohemians,” Tony nods.

Getting specific, Johnny Boy says, “Café Bizzaaaahhhh.” (That’s Johnny Boy for “Café Bizarre.) Johnny Boy asks the ladies what they’d like to drink and they ask for tequila. Tony shakes his head and Johnny Boy is almost incredulous. This bar doesn’t stock tequila.

“Have a Seven and Seven, it’s good for da boat a yas,” Johnny Boy insists.

Café Bizarre, which likely did stock tequila, was a deliberately outré venue (the Velvet Underground played there in its early days) on West 3rd Street in Greenwich Village. Tony’s bar, which is located around where Mott Street’s San Gennaro festival used to roost, is maybe a 20 minute walk from there — a few blocks east, ten or so blocks south. But as this little exchange shows, it’s a different world. (This bit isn’t the only tequila joke in an early ’70s film by a major director. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy, released the year before, the police inspector played by Alec McGowan is tormented at his dinners by the gourmand experiments of his wife, played by Penelope Merchant, who at one of them offers him a salt-rimmed glass, which he regards with stomach-churning confusion. She then explains the concept of a margarita to him, and his stomach turns even more.)

It’s a testament to the proficiency of the just-turned-30 Scorsese that, with Mean Streets, he turned out such a credible portrayal of this milieu. Not least because the low-budget movie that was shot largely in Los Angeles!

The director was able to wrangle about five days in New York, where he captured footage of the actual San Gennaro street fair (“I hate this feast with a passion,” one of the fellas observes), the East River, and other urban landscape touchstones. (For the exterior of Tony’s bar, he used Volpe’s, a joint on SoHo’s Cleveland Place; back in those days, Little Italy extended much farther north than it did in the subsequent ‘80s; and today, of course, it can be said to occupy maybe two square blocks.)

For the interiors and limited exteriors the director scoured Los Angeles for the closest equivalents to NYC he could get. So obsessive about authenticity was he that he could be seen on location measuring the length of a sidewalk curb to the street pavement. Fortunately, back then, dive bars and basement pool halls and such looked the same in New York as they did in California. Still, with the exception of a stray shot of a suspiciously tree-lined block (and don’t assume — a couple of those shots check out as actual New York locations), you’d never guess the crew was ever outside of New York.

Mean Streets is, among other things, the movie that brought the word “mook” into the popular urban lexicon, and the characters it portrays have mookish qualities that seem far more pronounced and objectionable than they did back in the day. This is in many respects an autobiographical movie. Harvey Keitel’s Charlie, tormented by ideas of hell and confused about spiritual atonement, and also seriously confused about women, is a stand-in for the director, who cowrote the script with Mardik Martin. (To underscore this, Scorsese himself provides the voice-over for significant sections of Charlie’s interior monologues.)

But its structural hook of making Charlie part of a quartet of friends is derived from Federico Fellini’s 1953 I Vitelloni, a group portrait of some idle young men who are going to face life soon, whether they like it or not. A similar premise animates American Graffiti, also released in 1973 and directed by Scorsese’s future friend George Lucas.

But Charlie, Johnny Boy, Tony and the wannabe mobster Michael (Richard Romanus) are much rawer characters than those presented by Fellini and Lucas. Indeed, they make the cars-and-girls-obsessed fellas of Graffiti look like veritable Eagle Scouts. Scorsese conceived these characters with affection and affinity, but also a clear eye that emphasized the brutality that any of them could access at practically any time. They’re sexist, racist and homophobic in ways that are increasingly ugly as the movie’s story inexorably steers the characters to catastrophe.

Johnny Boy is first seen putting a pipe bomb in a mail box. As startling as the action is, it plays as an impish gesture. In the bar’s back room with Charlie, the two lapse into what could be a lost Abbot and Costello routine (“Joey Clams, Joey Scala, same guy”). But by the end, in a showdown with Michael — the scene that really put De Niro on the map as the most galvanic acting talent of his generation — Johnny Boy proclaims “I don’t give two shits for you or anybody else” and you know he’s not kidding.

Strangely enough, in his own sick way, Johnny Boy has more integrity than Charlie, whose desire to please his mobster uncle compels him to sell out both his friend and his girlfriend Teresa, who’s Johnny Boy’s cousin. (She’s played by Amy Robinson, who would later become a producer of excellent independent movies including John Sayles’ Baby, It’s You and Scorsese’s After Hours.)

But as the movie ratchets up tension in its discursive, rambling way (Scorsese has stated several times over the years that while he’s fine with story, he dislikes “plot;” and here, the concentration on environment, character and incident genuinely diffuses the slight story the picture has), it situates itself in the characters’ dysfunction in a way that, as they say nowadays, is apt to alienate contemporary sensibilities. Many might find it goes several knuckle-bitings too far, to say the least.

As squirmy a sit as it may sometimes be, the film remains noteworthy in several other respects besides its portrait of an environment, and a particular Italian-American ethos, that’s pretty much vanished from today’s Manhattan. It’s the movie in which Scorsese brought his own cinematic voice to full, dynamic volume. And while Robert De Niro had made an impression in theaters earlier in 1973 playing a doomed Southern-raised ballplayer in Bang the Drum Slowly, it’s here that he introduces the urban rough guy persona that would become a pop-culture icon, for better or worse. (Think of all the bad De Niro impersonations, comedic or dead serious, that we’ve been subjected to since then.)

It was also a career-launcher for Keitel, who’d worked with Scorsese on the director’s first, rarely seen 1967 feature Who’s That Knocking At My Door? (if you’re curious, that just landed on Netflix, too). And if you’re a Scorsese person, Mean Streets offers bits from actors who were part of his ’70s rep company, so to speak: Victor Argo, previously seen in Boxcar Bertha, later to turn up in Taxi Driver; Murray Moston and Harry Northup, both later in Taxi Driver, and George Memmoli, who was supposed to be in Taxi Driver, couldn’t make the shoot, and was subbed for by Scorsese himself…and who later turns up in Scorsese’s doc American Boy. (Scorsese’s cameo in this picture is as “Shorty,” a gunman enlisted by Michael after Johnny Boy proves an immovable object.)

So if you’re gonna stream Mean Streets, get ready for a trip to Mookville that gets a lot less funny down its nearly two-hour line than it suggests it might in its first twenty minutes. If a movie can be faulted for packing in a little too much realism, this is definitely one of them. But, you know, cinema isn’t always about being comfortable.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny.

Where to stream Mean Streets