Sin and shame are the driving forces of Martin Scorsese’s blistering early classic from 1973, now on rerelease for its 50th anniversary; it is an ultraviolent urban pastoral boiling up from the streets of Little Italy in Lower Manhattan around the time of the annual San Gennaro feast. It’s a thrillingly sensual, dangerous, effortlessly fluent movie which reaches back to the Warner Brothers’ gangster films, but also to Fellini’s I Vitelloni (1953), Godard’s Breathless (1960) and even the Boulting brothers’ Brighton Rock (1948). One year before, Francis Ford Coppola had released his sensational mob drama The Godfather, the great top-down grand political narrative of organised crime. Mean Streets is a great example of the opposite tradition: the ordinary worm’s-eye-view of the mafia, which was to lead to Scorsese’s GoodFellas and David Chase’s The Sopranos, stories of low-rankers and their day-to-day lives.
At its centre is Charlie (played by Harvey Keitel): a fledgling mob enforcer, nephew of much-feared middle-aged mafioso Giovanni (Cesare Danova), a first-generation Italian immigrant who has a cool, priestly authority over the younger man. Charlie is possibly about to be made the manager of a restaurant whose original owner has defaulted on a mob debt; Charlie is a snappy dresser, as befits his future importance as a man of honour; and his piety and brooding obsession with St Francis, punishment and hell have earned him the nickname “Saint Charles”.
