• Scorsese’s debut—a rough draft for Mean Streets
  • It’s pretty ugly to look (16mm) at – shot crudely—but the talent is there behind the camera is clear- such energy and creativity
  • Ebert— “Announcing the arrival of an important new director” in real time here in the 60’s
  • Apparently some of the nudity was thrown in for marketing purposes
  • An active sound design—opens silently on a Madonna, guilt, religion— choreographed fight to rock music just like Mean Streets. Scorsese clearly likes the freedom of not having to sync sound (many of the great auteurs, even in the sound era, dubbed their work like Bela Tarr and Leone) and the film is loaded with rock/pop/doo-wop songs like so much of Scorsese’s oeuvre
  • The Searchers heavy in the text (Mean Streets again), Lee Marvin Liberty Valance, the Rio Bravo still sequence montage
  • blocking the frame with the upside down stools
  • Dynamism in a montage of switches and windows going up in a car. Scorsese isn’t interested in just going from A to B
  • The best scenes are the ones with no dialogue—I think the single best is a series of pans across the kitchen from left to right to pop music with the guys just hanging out laughing and drinking—there are 5 in a row
  • Use of The Doors song “The End”—a nice interlude. Wordless with a prostitute. It’s shot, again, very artistically with a roving camera. A 360 degrees shot. It also starts the long proud history of Harvey Keitel nude in films- haha
  • The film is plotless largely—it’s an exercise and examination of a man (Keitel—very good here in his debut)
  • There are bad sequences, too—a long dull sequence walking in the woods—if you’re an exercise and mood film you can’t have too many of these. Another long sequence of 3 guys at the bar playing grab-ass with the film’s single freeze-frame at the end- bad form
  • a flashback rape sequence with an impressive jump-heavy montage. Scorsese is so playful- he doubles up and staggers the song on the soundtrack to create disorientation
  • Recommend