The Martin Scorsese classic that terrified the British: “It frightened them to death”
In the latter half of his career, Martin Scorsese has often found himself attracted to narratives about power and corruption on a grand scale, be it the repulsive opulence of The Wolf of Wall Street or the genocidal destruction in Killers of the Flower Moon. That wasn’t always the case, though, especially when he was first starting out as a filmmaker.
His most prominent collaboration with Robert De Niro, 1976’s Taxi Driver, is often cited as the masterpiece where Scorsese managed to connect the disturbing sphere of the personal with the volatile political landscape. But even before that, he demonstrated a profound understanding of cinematic crime in his 1973 gem Mean Streets.
An antithesis of Goodfellas in more ways than one, Mean Streets wasn’t about the glory of organised crime or the glitz associated with those who make it to the top. Set in New York City’s Little Italy neighbourhood (to which Scorsese felt an intimate connection), it’s about the underlings and part-time thugs scuttling around in the gutters, harbouring perforated ambitions of making it big while caught in a vicious cycle.
Interestingly, although it received a lot of critical acclaim at the time of its release and is now valued even more as a definitive part of Scorsese’s legacy, some distributors were actually scared by the material and did not want to be connected to it at all. In Mary Pat Kelly’s book, Martin Scorsese: A Journey, Michael Powell, whose films Scorsese has always championed, explained the peculiar situation.
Powell said: “I’ve always liked Mean Streets, one of the great films. I just think it’s wonderful, that complete identification of that world, taking part in it. You never feel that anything is staged or done for theatrical effect. Scorsese just honestly stays there inexorably. It’s full of that. The English distributor of the film was frightened by it, like the way my film Peeping Tom frightened them. They didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I think they sold it off to choppers or something.”
The comparison to Peeping Tom, which came out the same year as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, is interesting because the critical backlash completely destabilised Powell’s filmmaking career. Now regarded as an infinitely complex commentary on the unsettling relationship between cinema and voyeurism, audiences and critics were initially taken aback and rejected the movie’s fascinating darkness.
The Red Shoes director added: “Warner Brothers never even asked anybody else what they thought. They just acted on what they saw, and it frightened them to death. That often happens to a good film. That was the attitude of the Rank Organisation toward The Red Shoes in the beginning. At the time he made Mean Streets, Marty was not known, and they could get away with anything.”
Of course, the rejections from English distributors didn’t matter in the end because Mean Streets proved to be a stepping stone for Scorsese, who went on to achieve so much more, but that attitude is still symptomatic of the creative censorship so many incredibly talented filmmakers faced during that time.
