FILM REVIEW : Scorsese’s Love of Bad Fellas Began on ‘Mean Streets’

There’s a remarkable scene in Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” (being shown tonight at UC Irvine) where local thug Harvey Keitel moves drunkenly through the local dive, a bar done up in red, white and blue streamers to celebrate the return of a Vietnam vet.

The film speed is slightly fast, and the camera fixates on Keitel’s face, which jerks this way and that to acknowledge the people and sensations around him. His head moves, but his shoulders appear frozen; the image conveys the disorientation and tunnel-vison that come with getting smashed. The lens follows Keitel’s character, Charlie, until he collapses, once again suckered by a nowhere life.

It’s an exceptional passage, as imagination fuses with technique in unexpected and ineffable ways. That’s the kind of expertise Scorsese has been demonstrating for years; it’s why, especially among younger filmmakers, he’s been raised to near-icon status. As Pauline Kael put it in her New Yorker review of his just-released “GoodFellas,” “They don’t just respond to his films, they want to be him.”

All that adoration probably started with “Mean Streets,” Scorsese’s 1973 look at a couple of wiseguys trying to push their way through New York’s urban sleaze.

The guys in “GoodFellas” are small-timers, but with a vision: They dream about getting “made,” invited into the Mafia’s inner circle. The guys in “Mean Streets” are small-timers without ambition. They’re not only small change, they’re loose change rolling aimlessly through the alleyways.

Johnny Boy (a charged-up Robert DeNiro) owes minor-league money to loan sharks all over town and blows up mailboxes for kicks. His pals run petty scams on kids wanting to buy sparklers and cherry bombs for the Fourth of July. The mobsters in “GoodFellas” would just laugh. These guys don’t seem like they could pull off a serious hit--and it’s a shock when one finally does at the film’s end.

“Mean Streets” first showed Scorsese’s beautiful obsession with the lowlifes he saw crime-scavenging New York’s tough boroughs. The story of loser Johnny Boy and his protector Charlie (Keitel at his anxious best) is alive with affection: Scorsese lets his emotions, both friendly and not-so-friendly, instill the film with a juicy, comic realism.

Charlie, the only one of these men with any hopes at all (he runs numbers but wants to own a restaurant), tries to remove himself from the bad influences choking in all around him. He’s got a nice girlfriend (Amy Robinson), he likes taking care of Johnny Boy, and he knows what guilt is. In a mood-setting scene just before the opening credits, Charlie lies in bed, thinking to himself: “You don’t make up for your sins in church, you do it at home, in the streets. . . .”

Too bad Johnny Boy is such a handful. DeNiro plays him like a street sprite who can’t control his dangerous side. He keeps inviting trouble wherever he goes. Keitel makes it clear that Charlie doesn’t know quite what to do, but he keeps on trying.

There’s a dignity, and a sad-funny hopelessness, in Charlie’s devotion and it gives “Mean Streets” a kind of gutter nobility, dark and stained just like the neighborhood they all slink through.

It was “Mean Streets,” by the way, that reportedly got Scorsese thinking about the next level up, where Mafiosi pull the strings. After 17 years, the result is “GoodFellas,” which doesn’t evoke the operatic, majestically decadent world drawn in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” series but, instead, a de-mythologizd place where violence is as natural as giving the doorman a fat tip.