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The saint-as-hood anguish is derived from Accattone, Martin Scorsese's breakthrough explores it as a fulfillment of Godard's "neorealist musical." Little Italy in the midst of the San Gennaro Festival is a zone of effulgent grit, where the smallest squabble turns volcanic and intimations of hellfire are never far off. The neighborhood is casually lorded over by a seedy-elegant capo (Cesare Danova), the loan shark (Richard Romanus) keeps getting stuck with truckloads of useless loot, everybody hangs out at the tavern where the owner (David Proval) keeps a panther caged in the basement. Straight from the confessional, the young debt-collector (Harvey Keitel) strolls into the saloon: "Hallelujah, I've come to create order." Manacled to the prejudices and anxieties of tradition, he's torn by feelings for a tough, willowy epileptic (Amy Robinson) and loyalty to her freewheeling cousin, the mooching shit-stirrer (Robert De Niro). Plus "the infinite," of course, "you don't fuck around with the infinite." From the iconic opening (Keitel in bed, jump-cuts and home movies and "Be My Baby," the holy light of the flickering projector), Scorsese exalts cinema as the mediator of reality, memory and reverie, the demonic art that enthralls the church boy. The ardent novice avails himself of the medium's whole panoply: Powell for the crimson suffusions, Polonsky for the gangland capitalism, Fuller for the centrifugal pool-hall brawl, Murnau for the protagonist's seesawing intoxication at the soldier's party. Heightening the Augustinian imagery is the pulsing tessitura, the molten flow of opera, The Rolling Stones and Motown mixed with the vaudeville push-pull of characters bumping their heads on the limits of their macho pose. (If Coppola's study of the business of crime and family is a stately Leoncavallo, Scorsese's is a feverish Verdi.) Brooklyn Bridge's desperate abyss and Calvary blood on a bullet-cracked windshield, a tenor so fierce only Abel Ferrara could possibly continue it. With Jeannie Bell, Victor Argo, George Memmoli, Harry Northup, Lenny Scaletta, David Carradine, and Robert Carradine.
--- Fernando F. Croce |