movies (subject to tumblr's inconsistent search engine. for more complete results, try the archive): badlands, blow out, bring me the head of alfredo garcia, cadavres exquis, charley varrick, chinatown, dog day afternoon, il conformista, klute, le cercle rouge, marathon man, mean streets, night moves, point blank, prime cut, save the tiger, serpico, sisters, straight time, the day of the jackal, the don is dead, the driver, the friends of eddie coyle, the getaway, the harder they come, the hot rock, the killing of a chinese bookie, the last of sheila, the long goodbye, the mackintosh man, the onion field, the organization, the parallax view, the spook who sat by the door, the sting, the taking of pelham one two three, the yakuza, three days of the condor, villain, wanda
New York City circa 1900-1906. “Clam seller in Mulberry Bend.”
For Scorsese, Mean Streets meant a return to the old neighborhood, the place in which he had grown up. An insular, devoutly Catholic ethnic subculture, Little Italy on New York’s Lower East Side might just as well have been another planet. Scorsese was born on November 17, 1942, in Flushing, Queens, where his barely upwardly mobile parents, like other children of immigrants, fled the tenements. Five years later, for reasons the young boy never fully understood, his family moved back to a fourth-floor walk-up on Elizabeth Street, his father’s old block.
March 1912. “Row of tenements, 260 to 268 Elizabeth St., New York, in which a great deal of finishing of clothes is carried on.”
Charlie Scorsese was a pants presser and tailor, his mother a seamstress. They were hardworking union people, only a generation removed from the Old Country. “I lived in a Sicilian village most of my life,” says Scorsese. “There was Us, and there was the world. You could feel palpable tension, always on the verge of violence.”
(Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls)
Dan Weiner, Little Italy, Manhattan, (Feast of San Gennaro), 1952
Ironically, Scorsese’s homage to his childhood, his neighborhood, cut him off from his past. A lot of the people in Little Italy didn’t like Mean Streets. “It’s pretty tough stuff, real life,” he says. “It’s not like some movie where everybody’s singing and dancing and drinking bottles of Chianti.” He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, go home again.
(Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls)
