How Martin Scorsese’s mother responded to ‘Mean Streets’
By the time Martin Scorsese secured his first big hit with 1973’s Mean Streets, he’d already released two films, 1967’s Who’s That Knocking at My Door and 1972’s Boxcar Bertha. However, it was Mean Streets that really cemented Scorsese’s position as an extremely promising director. Of course, Scorsese more than fulfilled his encouraging early career, but even today, Mean Streets remains one of his greatest works.
The film stars Harvey Keitel as Charlie Cappa, a young Italian-American from Little Italy in New York, who becomes concerned by his friend Johnny Civello, played by Robert De Niro, who lives rather recklessly and owes money to several loan sharks. The film is jam-packed full of violence, cursing and a kind of grounded reality that would go on to epitomise much of Scorsese’s future works.
Scorsese had once discussed how he wanted to use the language of the streets in his third feature, but that this was diametrically opposed to the kind of language he’d been allowed to use at home in his mother’s house. After all, Scorsese’s mother was a devout Catholic, and bad language was strictly forbidden.
The director explained the difference between the language he heard at home and in the movie. “This is interesting because later on, I see movies about Italian-American; they’re using the F-word, MF, and all that,” he said. “I was like, ‘What is this? Who are these people?’ If we had used – I’m not kidding – if we had ever even ‘fff…’ the start of the word, we’d get hit!”
“Actually, you wouldn’t get hit – the emotional violence, the threat of it was enough,” Scorsese continued. “And my mother – ‘How dare you!?’ ‘Mom, I didn’t say anything’, you know. ‘You were going to say it.’ ‘No, I wasn’t’.” Evidently, even the thought of swearing was considered sinful by Scorsese’s mother, Catherine.
An interesting time arose when Scorsese’s parents went to the screening of Mean Streets and heard all its foul language in all its despicable glory. “So in Mean Streets, I said we’re going to make a film with a vernacular of the gutter talk,” the filmmaker continued, “I don’t know if anybody’s going to see the film anyway. So, we put it together, and my mother and father are there on the opening night. Mean Street at the New York Film Festival.”
“After it was over, it was quite a reaction, a good reaction,” Scorsese added. “And my mother went out into the lobby of Alice Tully Hall, and people were walking up. As she went by every person, she said, ‘I just want you to know we never used that word in the house. I don’t know where he got it from.’”
Scorsese then explained that the attendees of the festival wanted to tell his mother how good her son’s film was. But all she wanted to say was, “It doesn’t matter. I never use that word.” The truth is that Mean Street would have lacked that, well, meanness, had foul language been missing from the script, which captures that brutal reality of New York City street life. As for how Catherine Scorsese felt about the violence of the film, thankfully, we’ll likely never know…
