I have to go with the middle-of-the-road reviewers here. Scorsese is a gifted director and you should definitely see this movie, but Mean Streets, his break-through 1973 film financed on spec by Francis Ford Coppola, is a low-budget, low-production values, plot less piece of cinema verite that celebrates what used to be Little Italy in lower Manhattan, just as Marty celebrates the Bronx of roughly the same period. I suspect that Mean Streets was intended to ride the coat-tails of Coppola's Godfather I, released the previous year, and Godfather II, then in production, but it has not aged as well.
Still, De Niro gives an extraordinarily entertaining performance as a fun loving low life in hock to the Mob. Harvey Keitel is O.K. as a stand-in for Scorsese himself in what is admittedly the director's memoir of his youth. In the first half of the film, the dialog, especially that between De Niro and Keitel, is in the tradition of great screwball comedy. Later Keitel's uncle corrects his understanding of Mafia ethics, and there is a brief long shot of Keitel observing a zonked out line chef sneezing and smoking a cigarette over a pot of pasta. As script and image, these scenes typify Scorsese at his high and low comedy best.
There is also a fine sense of period here, from wardrobe to score, but the plot is mostly missing in action, and the characters (including the love interest played by Amy Robinson and even De Niro) are undeveloped or made to act in ways that flow from nothing. For example, a big point is made of the fact that Robinson's character is an epileptic, and at one point she even has a seizure on a staircase, but unless the purpose is to illustrate Keitel abandoning her in a time of need or the use of period first aid techniques on a staircase, it was lost on me. De Niro is a great impromptu actor. Keitel is not.
There are gratuitous if pleasant uses of nudity, the familiar Feast of San Gennaro, the Italian language, and unconvincing violence, the last of these a part of the low production values. The last half of the film is not well edited. When Scorsese waxes poetic, as in use of Catholic imagery and a graveyard at night, the poetry rings false. Some rental discs come with a short, informative, but truncated selection of scenes and voice-over by Scorsese and Robinson, and a grainy making-of-the-movie short with a ponderous, March of Time-like voice-over.
Still, De Niro gives an extraordinarily entertaining performance as a fun loving low life in hock to the Mob. Harvey Keitel is O.K. as a stand-in for Scorsese himself in what is admittedly the director's memoir of his youth. In the first half of the film, the dialog, especially that between De Niro and Keitel, is in the tradition of great screwball comedy. Later Keitel's uncle corrects his understanding of Mafia ethics, and there is a brief long shot of Keitel observing a zonked out line chef sneezing and smoking a cigarette over a pot of pasta. As script and image, these scenes typify Scorsese at his high and low comedy best.
There is also a fine sense of period here, from wardrobe to score, but the plot is mostly missing in action, and the characters (including the love interest played by Amy Robinson and even De Niro) are undeveloped or made to act in ways that flow from nothing. For example, a big point is made of the fact that Robinson's character is an epileptic, and at one point she even has a seizure on a staircase, but unless the purpose is to illustrate Keitel abandoning her in a time of need or the use of period first aid techniques on a staircase, it was lost on me. De Niro is a great impromptu actor. Keitel is not.
There are gratuitous if pleasant uses of nudity, the familiar Feast of San Gennaro, the Italian language, and unconvincing violence, the last of these a part of the low production values. The last half of the film is not well edited. When Scorsese waxes poetic, as in use of Catholic imagery and a graveyard at night, the poetry rings false. Some rental discs come with a short, informative, but truncated selection of scenes and voice-over by Scorsese and Robinson, and a grainy making-of-the-movie short with a ponderous, March of Time-like voice-over.