Scorsese's first film, the interesting catastrophe "Boxcar Bertha," marked his birth as a director, but it was with his second feature, "Mean Streets" that we witnessed the birth of an artist. Most of "Mean Streets" is slightly unfocused with a simplistic plot based around a lot of machismo grandstanding and long bouts of boring dialog (occasionally made interesting by DeNiro's off-kilter star-making turn as Johnny-Boy), with spats of visceral violence (far less gory here than in later Scorcese pics), and a visual bravado that seems slightly less disciplined but no less entertaining than your standard Scorsese crime flick.

Despite its drawbacks (mainly due to youth and inexperience), the template was set. The opening credits (done to the tune of "Be My Baby") suck you right into the film, and the rest of the movie is peppered with Scorsese's loving treatment of popular music that would later become one of his most endearing hallmarks. The basic premise featuring Harvey Keitel as Charlie (the young hood with a heart of gold and conflicted internally by the religion of the Church and the religion of the Streets), Robert DeNiro as Johnny-Boy (the equally loved and hated loose-canon brother figure), and Amy Robinson as Theresa (the woman our hero wants to put on a pedestal as a saint but often treats like a whore), is a trifecta of archetypes we see repeated again and again in Scorsese's films (most obviously in "Casino" with the DeNiro-Pesci-Stone characters, and most subversively in "The Last Temptation of Christ" with Jesus-Judas-Mary Magdalene). The religious iconography, the brotherhood of crooks, the attraction to the gangster lifestyle, the keen eye for depicting violence in artistic and startling ways...these are displayed here in "Mean Streets" in their rawest form.

Though flawed in many ways, "Mean Streets" set the stage and laid the the template for the type of film Scorsese would perfect seventeen years later with "Goodfellas." This heralded the arrival of a new talent and a new genre, and the world of film has thankfully never been the same.

Martin Scorsese has made some brilliant movies in his life, but unfortunately this isn't one of them. I can't really call it bad, because the direction and the cinematography just drip with pure talent, but I have some major problems with the plot. Mainly, where the hell is it? The story doesn't just move at a slow pace, it appears to go in incredibly tiring loops. It starts of with Johnny Boy (a solid Robert DeNiro) owing a whole bunch of crooks money, which is a pretty riveting starting point. What does he do about it? What do the crooks do about it? Nothing, and that goes on for two hours. The whole movie appears to be Harvey Keitel endlessly saying he has to pay his debts, to which he refuses, to which he asks it again half an hour later, to which he like, makes up an excuse and goes to the movies, and all of it feels so redundant. The movie finally gets to the point in the end, but that doesn't really save it. It shows the sadness of the bad neighbourhoods in New York wonderfully, but that's really all I can say about it.