a disintegrating marriage, was self-financed and
took three years to make. It earned an Oscar
nomination for Best Screenplay in 1969, but he’s
still swimming outside the mainstream, writing
and directing movies only on his own terms.
In contrast, young Marty has made one
student feature,Who’s That Knocking At My
Door, been fired from planned Hollywood debut
The Honeymoon Killers, and just finishedBoxcar
Bertha, an exploitation picture for one-man
film factory Roger Corman. Brows heavy over
nervous eyes, it’s this he’s here to show his
filmmaking hero. “Marty, come here!” says
Cassavetes, emerging from the screening and
embracing him, before looking into his eyes.
“You just spent a year of your life making shit.”
This might be the most important instance
in Hollywood history of being cruel in order
to be kind. Scorsese was surprised, but accepted
the criticism, because he felt it was delivered
with love, especially when it was followed by
Cassavetes’ encouragement to go back to the
personal filmmaking of his first feature. It was
the shove Scorsese needed to return to a scriptMean
Streets
Robert De Niro
makes his mark
as hoodlum
Johnny Boy.he’d been working on, sporadically, since 1965
— a story of bickering friends, small-time hoods
and life in a Sicilian-American neighbourhood
of New York. He called Mardik Martin, the fi lm-
school friend who was his occasional co-writer,
and once again they set about trying to make
‘Season Of The Witch’. We would come to know
the fi lm by another name, lifted from a phrase in
Raymond Chandler’s essay ‘The Simple Art Of
Murder’: “In everything that can be called art
there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure
tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity
and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter
of the strong man. But down these mean streets
a man must go who is not himself mean, who is
neither tarnished nor afraid.”
Charlie — the hero of Mean Streets — is, it
transpires, rather tarnished and afraid. As played
by Harvey Keitel and modelled somewhat after
Scorsese himself — who provides some of his
voiceover’s internal monologue and prayers —
he is a young man torn between desire and duty,
ambition and obligation. He wants to escape and
open a restaurant uptown, perhaps with hisTHE
MASTERPIECE
We reassess the greatest
fi lms of all time, one
fi lm at a timeTWENTY-NINE YEARS old, long hair lank
around a still somewhat adolescent face, Martin
Scorsese fi dgets in John Cassavetes’ offi ce on
the Universal backlot. It’s 1972. Cassavetes has
proved a powerful screen presence in The Dirty
Dozen and Rosemary’s Baby, as well as more-
or-less invented the American independent
fi lm. Faces, his heart-rending depiction ofREVIEW