Mean Streets follows Charlie, a petty debt collector torn between the church and the mafia, and his irredeemable friend John- ny Boy (Robert De Niro), who’s in debt to everyone. The bar is coloured in red light without a source, the pool hall fight goes on for too long, the camera sways like a drunk. Paradoxically, the film was mostly shot in Los Angeles, with only a few days filming in New York, but Scorsese knew his own neighbourhood well enough to be able to recreate it anywhere. Here Little Italy is a closed village in the middle of the metrop- olis, where everyone knows everything and it’s a question of honour. The neighbourhood is like a family, while the family is a trap. Jungle: Taxi Driver (1976) If Mean Streets is the neighbourhood, Taxi Driver is the entire city seen from one taxi cab. Shot in the summer of 1975, when New York was on the brink of bankruptcy, the film is almost a documentary record of a metropolis in decay: with garbage on the pavements, and porn theatres and peep show booths around Times Square. Based on the screenplay by Paul Schrad- er, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), a for- mer Marine suffering from insomnia, drives night shifts and looks at everything he pass- es with contempt, waiting for the “real rain” to wash the streets clean. Here that Elizabeth Street window has become a car windscreen: Travis looks at the city like little Marty once did – from a frame and from a distance, but with no trace of tenderness. Cinematogra- pher Michael Chapman shot through glass covered with water droplets, so neon light spills like paint on wet paper, and in the first shot the taxi emerges from steam as if from hell. Bernard Herrmann‘s score, the last he wrote before his death, slides between se- ductive saxophone and menace. The par- tially improvised scene in which Travis asks a mirror “are you talking to me?” went on to become one of the most quoted scenes in film history. Taxi Driver won Cannes’ Palme d‘Or and received four Oscar nomi- nations. Its New York is no longer a village, but a jungle where loneliness is the most dangerous beast. Labyrinth: After Hours (1985) After Hours is a black comedy about one night. Office worker Paul Hackett (Grif- fin Dunne) catches a taxi to SoHo to meet a girl he met in a café, and his only $20 bill flies out the taxi window. From that mo-
ment on, Manhattan grabs him and doesn’t let go: the price of a subway ticket goes up at midnight, and every new encounter – a waitress with a ‘60s hairdo, a neighbour- hood watch patrol chasing him like a bur- glar – leads him deeper into the labyrinth. The SoHo of this film, with loft conversions and deserted cobbled streets, no longer ex- ists. It was a city of artists before boutiques and investors. This film brought Scorsese a director’s award at Cannes in 1986 and restored his confidence. In this film the city doesn’t at- tack you – it just won’t let you leave. Drawing Room: The Age of Innocence (1993) When, in the wake of Goodfellas, he an- nounced an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, many won- dered what the director from Little Italy was seeking in the drawing rooms of Fifth Av- enue. The answer turned out to be simple: the same thing he’d sought in Little Italy. Scorsese called this film his most vio- lent, and for good reason. Aristocratic New York lives by the same code as Little Italy: family, honour, punishment for dissent – the only difference being that instead of a gun, one is killed with a look over a glass and an invitation that never arrives. At the farewell dinner for Ellen, Archer real- ises that everyone around the table already knows everything. The film ends decades later in Paris: an elderly Archer sits below El- len’s apartment, looking at her window but choosing not to climb the stairs. Scorsese’s protagonist once again observes life through the frame of a window - and again opts not to enter. Scorsese, who makes a cameo ap- pearance as a photographer, dedicated the film to his father, who passed away that same year. This is his quietest, most beau- tiful, and perhaps most cruel, New York. One city, four worlds What ultimately connects the gangsters of Little Italy, the lonely taxi driver, the lost office worker in SoHo and the aristocrat from Fifth Avenue? With Scorsese, the an- swer is always a man caught between his own desire and the rules of the communi- ty. His New York isn’t a “melting pot”, but a collection of closed tribes, each of which has its own code and punishes anyone who breaks it: Charlie is trapped between the church and the street, Travis is trapped in his own solitude, Paul in a night that won‘t
end, Archer in a perfect marriage. The city of the first three films is one of the night, ne- on and rain, while in The Age of Innocence it is a city of candles and drawing rooms – but the light is just as cold. Little Italy and Fifth Avenue are just a few miles apart, while socially they are worlds away; the boy who saw Upper Manhattan as a forbidden world walked into its drawing rooms and discov- ered that it was dominated by the same rules as his home neighbourhood. Half a century at the top New York also features throughout the rest of his career. Following the failure of the now cult musical New York, New York (1977) and a severe personal crisis, De Niro per- suaded him to film Raging Bull (1980), the story of a boxer from the Bronx that proved to be a sensational film in every sense, re- storing his self-confidence. It was followed by The King of Comedy (1982), in which Manhattan is obsessed with fame, Goodfel- las (1990), which follows mafia goons from Brooklyn to JFK Airport, Gangs of New York (2002), which returns to the bloody city of the 1860s, and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), which shows the financial heart of Manhattan, where they steal using suits in- stead of guns. Even when he moves away from the city – to Las Vegas (Casino) or Okla- homa (Killers of the Flower Moon) – Scors- ese carries the same code of the neighbour- hood with him. Ironically, after many years of waiting, in 2007 he finally won an Oscar for a film set in Boston, The Departed. With ten Academy Award nominations for best director, he is today the most nominated living director. And The Irishman (2019) and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) both showed that he still makes films with the same ambitions. City that no longer exists New York has changed beyond all rec- ognition since Mean Streets. Little Italy has been reduced to a few blocks of tour- ist restaurants, Times Square has become a family-friendly amusement park, SoHo is now a shopping centre, and the draw- ing rooms of Fifth Avenue have long since been replaced by glass towers. The city of Scorsese’s films exists today only in cin- ematography. And that’s why his work is precious. He didn’t just shoot New York, he preserved it. The boy from the fire es- cape is still watching – and we’re watching with him. Happy birthday, Marty.
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