David Carradine – Movie Musings

Scorsese’s calling card is an energetic, gripping, electric mix of themes that would shape his career

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Harvey Keitel (Charlie), Robert De Niro (Johnny Boy), David Proval (Tony), Amy Robinson (Teresa), Richard Romanus (Michael), Cesare Danova (Giovanni), Victor Argo (Mario), George Memmoli (Joey), Lenny Scaletta (Jimmy), Jeanne Bell (Dianne), David Carradine (Drunk), Robert Carradine (Gunman), Martin Scorsese (Jimmy Shorts)

Mean Streets wasn’t actually Scorsese’s film debut but that feels like a technicality. If young Martin had a calling card, it was Mean Streets. It’s a vibrant, electric punch to the solar plexus and a dazzling display of virtuoso skill mixed with grungy, improvisational energy. Mean Streets is an artist finding his voice and screaming his agenda from the rooftops, bringing together a host of ideas, styles and themes that would dominate the rest of his work. Mean Streets remains raw, dynamic and overpowering, a major artistic statement like a punchy companion piece to Terence Malick’s Badlands, another new-found distinctive voice in American from 1973.

Mean Streets was strongly inspired by the environment Scorsese saw around him growing up on the rough streets of New York, crammed with the sort of sin Travis Bickle would later swear to wash away. It’s a world of gangsters and masculinity where boys never grow up, but become immature sharp-suited guys whose conversations end in hasty punch-ups and saving face means everything. Charlie (Harvey Keitel), nephew to the leading neighbourhood Mafiosa, is plagued with Catholic guilt. His idea to deal with this? To ‘save the soul’ of old friend Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro), an impulsive tearaway, in debt to every money lender. Charlie will struggle to curb Johnny Boy’s self-destruction, but with limited success.

Catholic guilt soaks through Charlie, introduced kneeling in Church while we hear the words of a priest (voiced by Scorsese) outlining Charlie’s moral quandaries. Charlie has a morbid fascination with punishment of his sins, never seeing a flame without feeling the urge to dip his hand into it. He claims his hero is St Francis of Assisi (though there is no sign he has read or understood anything St Francis ever said). Charlie continues a clumsy internal monologue with God (hilariously, late in the film he slips into continuing this outload to the confusion of Johnny). He has not time for confession, with its Hail Mary’s: he’s arrogant enough to think, as a real sinner he needs more.

But, like so many of Scorsese’s gangsters, his guilt runs skin-deep. He’s a nice guy, scrupulously polite and well-spoken, only as far as it goes. Charlie may know his guilt springs from his life of crime being full of greed and sin, but never once does he even consider changing it. Just one flash of his uncle casually suggesting he could own his high-class restaurant soon is enough for him to shelve all idea of personal change or real sacrifice. His self-imposed mission to reform Johnny Boy is really a self-aggrandising deflection effort, designed to make him feel better about his horrendous life choices. As if it’s fine to be a low-level rent collector and friendly face of Mafia loan sharks, if he makes one wildcard play by the rules everyone else obeys.

Keitel captures Charlie’s walking contradictions very well, his surface decency hiding his obsessive pride. He may be more articulate about his flaws, but Keitel makes clear Charlie talks a good game, but is obsessed about what people think of him. He considers himself in love with Johnny Boy’s epileptic cousin Teresa (Amy Robinson, very good) – but he’s way too embarrassed to ever let their relationship become public, because of the scorn that will be heaped upon him for dating someone ‘diseased’. Just as the idea of dating Black dancer Dianne (Jeanne Bell) is instantly rejected.

All these low-level gangsters are obsessed with status. Nearly every conversation – most strikingly in a pool room payment haggle – seems about five seconds away from a punch-up over some semi-imagined slight. No one has anything to talk about, other than booze and girls. They are all basically children, giggling over immature jokes or watching films like enthralled toddlers. Only Tony, a surprisingly thoughtful eccentric, seems to have any hinterland (and even he keeps baby lions in his basement). Most of them are useless. Michael, an incompetent loan collector introduced bungling a camera shipment deal, is desperate to look lean and mean in his sharp suits but constantly fails to look like anything other than someone’s dumb younger brother.

The willingness to call out these bullshit self-images is part of what makes Johnny Boy such a dangerous figure. Introduced blowing up a post box for shits and giggles, this is a jaw-dropping firecracker of a performance by De Niro. He makes Johnny Boy a larger-than-life figure with a sociopathic streak, stirring up trouble and conflict simply for kicks. There can be charm to his unashamed insolence – De Niro captures all this has a stunning early monologue, a rambling shaggy dog story excuse that Keitel’s Charlie can’t help grinning indulgently at. But he’s also capable of sudden, thoughtless violence. Just as he can collapse into vulnerable tears when the pressure’s on – tears he can instantly forget when he starts chasing the next thrill, like a dog with a car.

De Niro’s stunning performance beautifully complements Scorsese’s superb direction. Both artists collaborate perfectly for De Niro’s arrival at Tony’s bar – a perfectly paced tracking shot towards Keitel, cut to perfection to The Stones ‘Jumping Jack Flash’. It brilliantly tops Keitel’s own entrance earlier, where the camera followed him in tight close-up from behind (to the tune of The Stones ‘Tell Me’). Mean Streets is full of wonderfully selected rock ‘n’ roll tracks, the action cut to these tunes to perfection. Scorsese understands every beat of this music and how it can maximise impact. From ‘Rubber Biscuit’ to the stunning use of ‘Be My Baby’ at the film’s start, few directors have used pop songs better.

It brings a rocky edge to a film that feels constantly propulsive and wired, despite the fact the plot is strikingly straight-forward. It feels ripped from the streets in places (so persuasive is its energy, you can forgive the multiple obvious continuity errors), full of punchy energy. Sequences like Keitel’s drunken revelry – the camera attached to Keitel makes us feel we are woozing around as much as Charlie. An extended pool-room fight is a masterpiece of energy.

The film is full of masterful edits, immediate tracking shots and whipper-crack roving camerawork. All to see a world of shallow desires, where the characters feel awkwardly out of place as soon as they leave their dark streets (never has anyone looked less comfortable at a beach, than Charlie does here). Every problem is addressed with fists and Charlie is lying to himself when he says he’s less wild and foolish than the others.

Mean Streets builds towards a crescendo, but it’s a masterclass before then of atmosphere. And it’s a major awakening of a great artist – and a major statement of a great actor, De Niro as sensational as Scorsese’s filmmaking as breathtaking. In any other career it would be the highlight: the fact it might only crack the top ten of both, shows the greatness of the careers that would follow.

Beautifully filmed but psychologically and politically un-insightful film, easier to admire than enjoy

Director: Hal Ashby

Cast: David Carradine (Woody Guthrie), Ronny Cox (Ozark Bule), Melinda Dillon (Mary Jennings Guthrie), Gail Strickland (Pauline), Randy Quaid (Luther Johnson), John Lehine (Locke), Ji-Tu Cumbuka (Slim Snedeger), Elizabeth Macey (Liz Johnson), Mary Kay Place (Sue Ann), M. Emmet Walsh (Trailer Driver)

Woody Guthrie was a sort of poet of American folk music, his music influencing a generation of artists, from Bob Dylan onwards. His music spun a vision of the enduring strength of the working man and their rights to a share of the American Dream. It’s mythic stuff, so feels perfectly positioned to be spun into a modern fable in Ashby’s Bound for Glory. Coated in period detail, a sort of Grapes of Wrath by way of Barry Lyndon, it’s a lyrical piece of historical memory making with a nominal grounding in social and political issues. Is it a complete success? Perhaps it’s a film easier to admire than love.

It takes the title from Guthrie’s (David Carradine) biography, and follows his journey from Dust Bowl Texas in the 1930s to the hopes of employment in California, where he joins a mass of not-particularly-welcomed economic migrants. He discovers there an audience for his politically tinged folk music, but steadfastly refuses to compromise his principles. Actually, aside from these broad sketches and Guthrie himself, almost everything in this is essentially fictional. It’s a myth being spun, building a legend of a sort of John the Baptist of American folk music, a nostalgic vision of 30s America which makes little room for Guthrie’s actual politics.

Actually, that’s one of the most fascinating things in Bound for Glory. So keen is this to create a nostalgic view of an America from yesteryear, celebrating the perseverance of blue-collar America, it avoids talking in detail about anything Guthrie actually believed in. Although possibly not a card-carrying member of the Communist party, Guthrie was certainly at least a fellow-traveller. He had sharply left-wing, pro-worker, anti-capitalist views. His music echoed this – ‘This land is your land’ is actually about land ownership. But most traces of this have been carefully rinsed out of Bound for Glory.

That isn’t to say that it doesn’t take a deepe dive into Depression era America than any film since The Grapes of Wrath. Guthrie’s pilgrimage – and there is something distinctly Saintly about how he is presented here, making him more comfortable a figure than a left-wing radical – features plenty of dwelling on injustice and poverty. It opens in the ramshackle poverty of Dust Bowl Texas, where winning a dollar in a bet is potentially life changing. Migrants to California are at hurled from goods trains, then risk being shot (as one of Guthrie’s friends is) when attempting to jump on them as they puff past. They are barred entry on the road to California (in cars weighted down with their few possessions) if they can’t produce $50. The migrant camps are run-down, overcrowded and run by baton-wielding work-bosses who have complete power to decide who works and who doesn’t and don’t hesitate to wield their weapons to enforce their will.

Bound for Glory however avoids saying anything too firm against all this. It can carry sympathy for the plight faced by the working man but, much like The Grapes of Wrath, it’s terrified about saying or doing anything that could possibly be seen as promoting left-wing politics. Guthrie sometimes mumbles vague statements about the working man finding his slice of the American dream, but never anything too pointed about the fact that unfairness and having-and-have-noting is built into the system, like a spine in a body. The bravest shot the film takes is at a complacent priest, who smugly turns a hungry Guthrie away from his large church because he only hands out soup to people who have worked that day. Otherwise, the furthest it allows Guthrie to go is asking his wealthy lover (Gail Strickland in a thankless part) if she feels guilty having so much when others have so little. It’s the washed down, simplistic politics of the playschool.

And, to be honest, it robs Bound for Glory of much of its life and blood. It fails to replace this with a fierce personal story (like The Grapes of Wrath) and it never even attempts to make anything like a political statement as Ashby’s old collaborator Warren Beatty would do five years later with the similarly luminously beautiful Reds. Quite frankly, as Bound for Glory unrolls slowly and deliberately it does so with precious little fire and guts to it and (at times) very little interest. In other words, it’s very possible to sit and watch it and (while admiring it very much) kind of wish you were watching Rocky instead (as the voters for Best Picture at the Oscars that year clearly did).

It becomes instead a triumph of style, photography and design, rather than an enlightening biopic or making a statement about the Great Depression (other than it was tough). David Carradine hasn’t quite got the charisma to bring the vague threads Ashby gives him together. (Almost every single big name actor in Hollywood turned it down, which tells you something). Guthrie remains a vague, drifting blank, whose views and beliefs are undefined and to whom events frequently seem to just happen. Of the supporting roles (several women in particular get dull, thankless parts) only Ronny Cox gets something to get his teeth into as a musician turned union activist.

The real merits of Bound for Glory is it’s Barry Lyndon like recreation of a time and period. A lot of that is due to the breathtaking photography of Haskell Wexler – not for no reason was he the first person billed on the film. Wexler’s work is extraordinary, creating a sepia-toned view of Great Depression America that feels like its been taken straight from a photo library and placed on screen. Bound for Glory also astounded viewers at the time with the first Steadicam shot captured on screen, which starts with an aerial view, glides down to Guthrie and then follows him through a crowd of hundreds of extras to fail to be picked for a work party. It was the cherry on top of the Oscar-winning cake for Wexler.

It’s just a shame that these surface delights are all that really come to life. Other than that, this is distant, reserved and (in truth) slightly empty work from Ashby that presents the basic facts in a mythologised way that you feel removes much of the core truth. It turns a fascinating man of real conviction, into an unknown enigma, an Orpheus of the Dust Bowl who goes on a Pilgrim’s Progress that leads to (if we’re honest) nowhere in particular. It’s a film that strains a bit too hard for high art at the cost of passion or entertainment.