Micro-fest of two emerging directors! "Mean Streets" and "Manhunter"

While house and cat sitting for my folks recently, my wife and I decided to treat ourselves to a couple of movies courtesy of their ample DVD collection.  My East Coast-born Sicilian girl had a yen to watch “Mean Streets” again, and also fancied revisiting “Manhunter.”  Suddenly we realized that we had constructed a double feature that was a micro-fest of two emerging directors.  “Mean Streets was Martin Scorcese’s second studio feature, and “Manhunter” was Michael Mann’s third.  Although rough around the edges, both films are excellent examples of each filmmaker’s nascent yet distinct style.

“Mean Streets” immediately establishes one of the foundations of Martin Scorcese’s visual storytelling.  The opening credit sequence is comprised of Super 8 footage of Little Italy in New York shotgun wed to the song “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes.  Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound” and Martin Scorcese’s gutter of heartbreak starkly contrast the romantic fantasy of this classic early sixties love song against the gritty reality of modern city life.  This heady concoction creates a striking visual and audio contradiction that would become a Scorcese signature for many years.

Another distinct artistic piece is the long tracking shot which often follows one character or set of characters through an entire scene without any edits.  Several sequences in the neighborhood bar trail just in front of or behind Harvey Keitel’s character Charlie as he struts or staggers his way through the leering, blood-red atmosphere.  Charlie is torn between his gangster ambitions and his Catholic upbringing, and the slo-mo delirium in these shots beautifully yet repulsively evokes his emotional and spiritual conflict.

Though it is an early Scorcese film, “Mean Streets” boasts a terrific cast, with Robert De Niro erupting in a volcanic display of self-destructive narcissism as the compulsive gambler and perpetual loser Johnny Boy.  Charlie’s Catholicism has dug deep roots of guilt into his conscience, and Charlie feels compelled to save Johnny over and over even though both men are ultimately doomed by their flaws.  While some dialogue scenes feel rushed or incomplete, the vitality of the performances and the fresh yet rotten stench of the decaying urban milieu are no less captivating.

As the executive producer of “Miami Vice”, Michael Mann displayed a mastery at combining austere modern architecture, high contrast monochromatic lighting and a simple, throbbing synth soundtrack.  He established an iconic visual style that would make "Miami Vice" a major pop culture trendsetter for over a decade.  This moody but sleek style reigns heavily over “Manhunter”, and it perfectly suits the story of a former FBI profiler lured reluctantly back for one last job.  William Petersen is Will Graham, the man who caught Hannibal Lector, but was nearly gutted during the capture.  Beside the physical pain, Will is also wary of being psychologically compromised by once again adapting his consciousness to the maniac he is pursuing.

Few people knew that Jonathan Demme’s “Silence of the Lambs” was not the first film in which the character of Hannibal Lecter had haunted the cinema with his withering wit and scalpel-like stare.  For “Manhunter”, Michael Mann chose Brian Cox to play everyone’s favorite cunning cannibal, and his portrayal is just as terrifying as the indelible turn by Anthony Hopkins.  Hannibal never leaves the confines of his cell, but his calculating intelligence makes the possibility of escape seem a very real and immediate threat, and the implacable malice that Cox exudes lurks in the shadows of every scene.

Tom Noonan’s role as the current killer-on-the-loose Francis Dolarhyde is mesmerizing, and it is not just his towering physicality and the subtlety of his performance that leaves so potent an impression.  Despite his compulsion for serial murder, Dolarhyde’s character becomes surprisingly sympathetic when it is shown how heartbreakingly close he comes to living a normal life.  Dolarhyde asks a blind co-worker on a date, knowing she cannot see and judge him by his disfiguring harelip.  Yet the decades of self-imposed isolation have made Dolarhyde’s fantasy world too powerful to be subsumed so quickly.  Whether the victim is innocent or guilty, Dollarhyde’s demons must be fed.