Mean Streets
Mean Streetsi is one of those films. Like Lord's of Flatbush only with more meat on the bones.
Or maybe that's not really fair. Anyway, a young Harvey Keitel. The girls say he's delicious. I don't know about boys, personally, but if you've ever wondered what the fuck is it with this guy and what's he doing in movies, well... maybe that's the explanation. The girls thought he's delicious back in 1973. Thirty years ago. When he was young.
Also a young De Niro. You'd think he looks kinda young now, but he's old as dirt really and it becomes stringent by comparison. A young De Niro playing a jerk-off as they called it at the time, a loser, a fag voted least likely to succeed by Mob Class of Little Italy, 1973. That's a rare sight, isn't it, a losery De Niro.
Both of them bouncing off people and walls inside this little concrete box that was a much younger town, back then. A town so young pulling a gun wasn't considered particularly smart, a town so young mobsters were afraid enough of contact with guns and bullets that they drove the car while some jerk-off hired for the occasion pulled the trigger, haphazardly and inefficaciously. And then took off before even making sure everyone's dead. A town so young police sirens blared within the minute of any disturbance, a town so young some loser beat-cop shakes down wanna-be Irish ring leaders. A town so young it looks like it's never been fucked.
Depending on just exactly how old you are this film can be really, really boring. It is, I grant, a little absurd. In retrospect, so is your mom.
———- Mean Streets, 1973, by Martin Scorsese with Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel. [↩]
