Mean Streets and the Rule of Sound

Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” was released in 1973, and it still feels like one of the best and vivid presentations of street life and culture ever filmed. It was declared a breakthrough by the film critic Pauline Kael (she called it “a triumph of personal filmmaking”), and I still think it ranks higher as a film than “Raging Bull” or “Goodfellas”. And one of the reasons why I am still hooked on this one has to do with what I heard when I watched it.

Scorsese’s soundtrack feels like it belongs to this story, more so than in many other films of that era. It is the beat of the lives of his characters.

The story is quite simple, but the feeling behind it is very deep: Charlie Cappa (Harvey Keitel) is related to a gangster who wants him to not only avoid a woman he loves, Teresa (Amy Robinson), but also to handle the off the wall antics of “Johnny Boy” (Robert DeNiro). Teresa has epilepsy, which in the eyes of Charlie’s gangster uncle is a mental illness that must be avoided, and Johnny is deep in debt to other gangsters. But Charlie sees himself as guilty as the people around him, and he needs his salvation, no matter what it costs.

And what does the music say about this?

If you have not seen the film, you might be very surprised by some of the music chosen for it. I still wonder if I am watching a film set in the seventies or sixties when I hear the Rolling Stones (“Tell Me”, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”), Smokey Robinson and the Miracles (“Mickey’s Monkey”), the Ronettes (“Be My Baby” in a sequence the critic Owen Gleiberman called “the single greatest use of a pop song in Hollywood history”) and a host of other one hit wonders and obscure talents that I never thought I would hear in a film about low-level gangsters in New York City. I am still struck by a sequence where Charlie is in a bar, the camera locked onto to him (GoPro before it existed), and we hear what I could only imagine was a standup comic who somehow found the backing of an R&B group (it was actually “Rubber Biscuit” by the Chips, a mutant spoken word doo-wop number that still haunts my ears).

Don’t think that the film is just a tribute to 1960s pop. There is classic Italian folksongs and operatic numbers that strike just the right tone (“Mala Femmina” by Jerry Vale is a beautiful ballad, and “Addio, Sogui Di Gloria” by Giuseppe Di Stefano is given an incredibly dramatic casting when Charlie decides his fate). There is room for more than one noise at this particular table, and Scorsese pulls of a miracle of balance between sound and vision.

Returning to Kael’s review to cover my thoughts on this film, she mentioned that the music “is the electricity in the air,” and “like and engine that the characters move to”. It may seem odd to say this about any particular film, but I do not think that “Mean Streets” would exist without that music. Yes, we would still have that vision of New York’s demimonde, and we would never forget the performances that were a real breakthrough of their era (hello, Mr. DeNiro), but we would not have the sounds that drive the momentum of the film. If I can be very honest about this movie, there really isn’t one straight story in it. Charlie wants to help Johnny Boy; he wants to help his epileptic girlfriend, too; he also wants to have the respect of his uncle and gain a secure future as a low-level gangster. And you can dismiss all of it as the fights, boasts, threats and bloodiness is punctuated by the wind of the film (Sir Ben Kingsley’s wise interpretation of the soundtrack:"film music is the wind that makes flight possible, the image float" ). It is what you take with you and what you want to recall when considering this early masterpiece.

“Mean Streets” is the film that I believe introduced me to sound as its own character. We should still be taking lessons from New York, and Little Italy’s most famous son.

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