a review of 穷街陋巷

As a Scorsese aficionado, I was eager to view Mean Streets, starring a young Harvey Keitel and Robert de Niro. Mean Streets turned out to be less than I hoped for. It feels like a raw improvisation, a rough sketch of Scorsese's more finished classics like Taxi Driver and Goodfellas. It was pleasing to see the talent of Keitel and De Niro shine through the not very structured plot, the soundtrack features a lot of great nostalgic tracks, and it is obvious how much films like this influenced Quentin Tarantino, the Sopranos series and Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant (1992, not coincidentally starring Keitel as well). Despite this in my humble opinion less-than-masterful Scorsese production, his original cinematic style is already apparent in Mean Streets, such as the great scene where Keitel is getting wasted, staggering through a bar while being rigged to the camera, so you really feel his inebriation while the camera sways along with him.