Word: keitel
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Mean Streets--This is the film that made Martin Scorsese. A rough, startling, excellent glimpse of the lives of a couple of small-time Italian hoods in the Bronx. Robert de Niro sparkles as Johnny Boy, the idiotic, irresponsible galoot who drags his nominally smarter buddy, Harvey Keitel, into some big trouble. This film catches the pulse of The City better than almost any other film of the '70s. A must...
James Toback is the man who wrote The Gambler, a particularly pretentious 1974 James Caan vehicle about a dedicated schoolteacher with a fatal weakness for making dangerous bets. Toback's new film is about a dedicated concert pianist (Harvey Keitel) who runs dangerous missions for his Mafia father. Both movies are cut from the same synthetic Dostoyevskian cloth, but Fingers actually manages to be more obnoxious than its predecessor. Perhaps the reason is that Toback wouldn't stop at writing the new film; he had to go on and direct it as well...
...spaced-out extra on furlough from Blow-Up. Jim Brown, the subject of a 1971 Toback book, is on hand only to act out the script's juvenile racial-sexual fantasies. As the hero, a schizo prone to gesturing with his mouth while banging at the keyboard, Keitel gives the first terrible performance of his career. He is such a bundle of grating mannerisms that one can hardly blame his angry father (Michael V. Gazzo) for telling him "I should've strangled you in your crib...
...seems to have trouble with comedy. Early attempts to wring bitter laughter out of assembly-line conditions and the financial woes of the three central figures (Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto) do not entirely pay off. Still, these scenes help motivate the film's central incident, a robbery of their own union's safe in which the three turn up not the cash they wanted but a ledger hinting at various forms of venality and corruption. Their attempts to capitalize on the information are ambiguous: they would like to blackmail some money out of the union...
...fascinated by obsession, by the kind of craziness carried so far beyond the reasonable delusions of ordinary men that it acquires a kind of grandeur. In The Duellists a young hussar lieutenant named D'Hubert (Keith Carradine), an unexceptional man, collides with another lieutenant named Feraud (Harvey Keitel). Feraud is a strutting, bloody-minded fool, and he challenges D'Hubert to a duel. Though D'Hubert knows that the matter is silly, honor forces him to fight. Feraud is wounded, though not severely, and the affair seems to be well ended...