Word: mafia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Mean Streets a group of dull young men who live in New York City's Little Italy are anxious not to rile the Mafia if they cannot impress it. So they tiresomely hang around bars, pool halls and street corners, punching and grunting at one another until, as their mothers must have warned them, someone gets hurt...
There's the same sense of confinement in Martin Scorsese's brilliant new Mean Streets--the stifling air, the discipline that allows the filmaker a paradoxical liberation. Living with the streetcorner Mafia in New York's Little Italy, Mean Streets' desperation is more brutal, more pulsing and more immediate. People in Lucas' world scurry because a change is about to come; in Scorsese's vision the sky is going to fall...
...rumors flying around Washington this week are further indication of the crisis of confidence. Congressmen are saying that Nixon is about to declare martial law; aides are passing the word that Nixon is starkraving mad and undergoing shock treatment; underlings in the executive are saying that Nixon is Mafia-connected and that's why he paroled Jimmy Hoffa and Gyp DiCarlo. The rumors are terrifying not only for what they say but because we have no means of judging how far-fetched they...
...order to lift themselves out of their installment-plan lives as neighbors in a Queens culdesac. Although they fail to score on their prime target, a vaultful of bearer bonds in a Wall Street brokerage house, they finally lay a solid hit on a secondary target of opportunity-the Mafia-and walk off chortling...
...most praised tricks in Traffic--the superposition of characters on an Edward Hopper painting of a restaurant or a Godfather parody in which the Mafia leader is shot up while eating spaghetti, are heavy-handed by comparison. The device of framing the film with shots of the cartoonist Michael at his favorite pinball machine is intended to serve as a metaphor for Bakshi's brand of East Village existentialism but since Tommy it's a pretty trite trick. The conventional film segments at the end only expose the paucity of the caricatures and if Bakshi is forced already...