Gangsters’ paradise
As far back as we can remember, we always wanted 4K... MEAN STREETS SPECIAL EDITION/GOOD FELA S 25TH ANIVERSARY EDITION 1973/1990 OUT NOW DVD, BD
It’s not really a film, it’s a declaration of who I am,” says Martin Scorsese on the Mean Streets commentary. “I saw it and I lived it,” he confesses on Good Fellas Making Of, Getting Made. As much as the bravura filmmaking and electrifying drama, it’s this lived-in quality, the anthropological minutiae that enriches every frame, that means Marty will forever be associated with gangster pictures despite a terrifically varied and consistently distinguished career spanning six decades.
Coming after period crime thriller Boxcar Bertha (1972), made for Roger Corman, Mean Streets sees Scorsese obey John Cassavetes’ advice to get out of the exploitation game and make something personal. Dusting down old script Season Of The Witch to “take out the religious stuff” (but not all of it), he squeezes five to seven of his formative years into three or four days, as small-time Little Italy hood Charlie (Harvey Keitel) makes collections for his uncle while trying to straighten out volatile friend Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro). GoodFellas, meanwhile, sees Scorsese tempted back to a life of crime by the grunt’s-eye-view of Nicholas Pileggi’s vivacious, violent source novel, Wiseguy, tracking two decades in the soar-and-plummet life of Irish-Italian New York mobster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta). The ensemble (De Niro, Lorraine Bracco, Paul Sorvino, Frank Vincent) is top drawer, but it’s Joe Pesci’s explosive Tommy DeVito who stands out from the mob.
Both movies are character-rich, film-literate (not just the Warner Bros gangster pics of the ’30s; Sam Fuller, Hope and Crosby, and Abbott and Costello are big influences!) and thrillingly energetic, with the camera gliding, the cuts jolting and the soundtrack jostling – rock‘n’roll clashes with opera competes with Neapolitan love songs, just as they did on the block Scorsese grew up in. And while yes, Marty is clearly enthralled by the colourful personalities and dark dealings of these underworld figures, he’s also careful to display their moral and spiritual shortcomings, their shortened life expectancies.
Extras-wise, the GoodFellas 25th Anniversary Edition offers riches to rival the Lufthansa heist. Admittedly, the Making Of, featurettes and stitched-together commentary (Scorsese, Liotta, De Niro, Pesci, Bracco, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, DoP Michael Ballhaus) are imported from previous editions, as is Public Enemies, the excellent doc on the golden age of gangster films, but there’s all-new doc Scorsese’s GoodFellas, a glossy 36-page book and, best of all, the film looks gorgeous in a director-supervised 1080p transfer from a new 4K scan. Mean Streets comes up short, but the Scorsese commentary (with Amy Robinson, who plays Charlie’s girlfriend, Teresa) is a bounty of information, and vintage featurette Back On The Block records Marty returning to Little Italy to promote the movie’s 1973 release.