“It was a film about self-responsibility and also about how people make the same mistakes over and over again.”Ī medievally dark vision of twentieth-century fame, fortune, and family gone catastrophically wrong, Raging Bull assaulted the sports biopic and the rags-to-riches American Dream cliché with the same feral intensity that earned Jake LaMotta the nickname behind the title. “We never intended it to be a feminist tract,” Scorsese recalled. Framed by an audacious Hollywood soundstage prologue and gilded with Scorsese’s dream-like, urgent camera moves, the backfence, blue-collar American Southwest of Alice blurs the borders between movie fantasy and documentary reality that Taxi Driver would subsequently erase. Liberated from an unhappy marriage, aspiring jazz singer Alice Hyatt (Ellen Burstyn in an Oscar-winning performance) struggles to define herself as a single mother to her twelve-year-old son.

But from a pre-credit invocation read by the director himself to a climactic confrontation the film is a 100-percent original and highly influential reboot of the American crime film. Wellman’s social-realist The Public Enemy. The pop soundtrack calls back to Kenneth Anger and to William A. The fatal chemistry between would-be wiseguys Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro) and Charlie (Harvey Keitel) evokes Hollywood Westerns of the forties. Shot on a shoestring, primarily in Los Angeles, Mean Streets is a double-barreled valentine to Scorsese’s childhood Little Italy milieu and the movies that lured him behind the camera.

Roger Ebert’s 1972 review presciently praised Scorsese as “good with actors, good with his camera, and determined to take the grade-zilch exploitation film and bend it to his own vision.” Under Roger Corman’s frugal production eye, Martin Scorsese turned physician, social activist, and Emma Goldman paramour Ben Reitman’s fictional 1937 memoir Sister of the Road-The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha into a discount Bonnie and Clyde, with Barbara Hershey and David Carradine as Depression-era have-nots on an Arkansas crime spree.

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