AT THE MOVIES
MORRIS DICKSTEIN
Self-Tormentors
Like many New York filmgoers, I first encountered Martin Scorsese
when his third feature,
Mean Streets,
made its debut at the New York
Film Festival in 1973. This searching portrait of young toughs in Little
Italy reminded me of my excitement at seeing Bertolucci's
Bifore the
Revolution
at the same festival nearly a decade earlier. Despite the Italian
connection, and the sense of powerful emotions coming from the screen,
the two directors were quite different. Where Bertolucci, like his mentor
Visconti, was operatic and youthfully romantic in his free treatment of
Stendhal's
Charterhouse oj Panna ,
Scorsese's film, with its accumulation of
atmospheric details of urban street-life, more closely resembled the natu–
ralism of
Studs Lonigan.
Yet there was something distinctly European
about
Mean Streets.
Like so many New Wave films of the early sixties in–
cluding
Breathless
and
Shoot the Piano Player,
it seemed casual, improvised,
yet self-conscious, sacrificing linear plot for a gut-wrenching sense of re–
ality. Along with a handful of films by Coppola, De Palma, Lucas, and
Spielberg,
Mean Streets
heralded the arrival of a new moviemaking gener–
ation.
These directors are still making movies today, yet the vagaries of the
industry and their uneven talent have kept them from fully realizing their
promise. Lucas and Spielberg quickly lost interest in personal filmmaking;
instead, like old Hollywood professionals, they developed a canny instinct
for appealing to a mass audience. De Palma went from brilliantly kinky
thrillers like
Carrie, The
F~/ry,
Blow Out,
and
Body Double
to mainstream
big-budget movies that showed only his technical mastery and taste for
violence or absurdity. Of all the young directors who captivated us
twenty years ago, only Scorsese produced an uncompromising body of
work that bears his own stamp in virtually every frame.
All through his career, Scorsese has alternated between personal films
like
Who's That Knocking at My Door?, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging
Bull,
and
CoodFellas
and extremely well-crafted commercial films like
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, After Hours, The Color ojMoney,
and
Cape
Fear
-
with only an occasional dud like
The King oj Comedy
(a pointless
and irritating film with a few brilliant touches). The personal films usually
have a strong autobiographical thread. Scorsese sets explosive Method
actors like Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro, and Joe Pesci in an urban,
