In one particularly funny sequence from Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets – and Mean Streets is one of Scorsese’s funniest movies, even if it’s not understood as a comedy – two guys approach Michael (Richard Romanus), a half-competent loan shark, on a grimy corner of Little Italy, looking to buy illegal fireworks. Sniffing out a couple of suckers, Michael and an associate talk up a supply they don’t have. (“Do you know where this stuff comes from? It comes from Maryland,” says Michael. “That means it’s good,” says his cohort.) They set out to scam the buyers by taking the $40 in cash, dropping them off on another corner and driving off to their secret stash of nonexistent fireworks. But as they pull away, they realize their marks have stiffed them by only giving them $20. So they decide to clock out for the night and go to the movies.
There’s nothing in this sequence that moves the plot forward. Michael isn’t even one of the main characters, just another lowlife among many who are trying to collect for their bosses. It could be excised from the film without a single narrative hole needing to be patched up. But that’s part of what separates Mean Streets from the hard-changing gangster epics that Scorsese would make later, like GoodFellas or The Departed, which are also rich and evocative, but more relentlessly on task. Mean Streets is more of a slice of life, drawn from stories Scorsese seems to have heard or witnessed during his formative years as an asthmatic kid growing up on the third floor of tenement building on Elizabeth Street. It’s like a vivid, often electrifying memory sprung to life.
