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The first two scenes—pasta and saints in the kitchen, gelheads bashing skulls to doo-wop—lay out the Gospel According to Martin Scorsese. Film as sacrament, musical spectacle, lavish delectation of image and sound. Fellini's vitelloni here have names like Sally Gaga and Smart Joey and keep chafing against each other in a Little Italy neighborhood, floating on macho swagger and bitching ("Shit, I may have to go to China for some Chinese food"). Boy (Harvey Keitel) meets Girl (Zina Bethune) on the Staten Island ferry, a nifty scene build around jittery cinephilia ("How the hell did the French ever get a hold of The Searchers?") and the streetwise pantomime of the lupine young Keitel. Cassavetes and Anger are the stylistic poles, pop music is the favored montage-lubricant: Junior Walker's "Shotgun" pops up as piercing punctuation, Ray Barretto's "El Watusi" becomes a wiseguy bolero with slow-mo horseplay and pistol. A trip to the Copiague hills widens the protagonist's provincial horizons but not his psychosexual Manicheanism—women are either "broads" or "girls," Bethune is untouchable until she reveals she's been raped, suddenly she's "a whore." His orgiastic fantasy has a bed in an empty loft, a circling camera and the climax of The Doors' "The End," her memory of the violation is a roadside nightmare in which "Don't Ask Me to Be Lonely" is distorted to muffle her cries. (Like the filmmaker, the characters always have a narcotizing set-piece reeling in their brains.) A hyper-sensitive film forever luxuriating in sensation, whether it's a finger running over a pair of lips or the febrile editing that makes holy statuary dance. Keitel in church is the concluding image, taken up in Mean Streets. With Lennard Kuras, Michael Scala, Harry Northup, and Anne Collette. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |