oxcar Bertha, told him, with characteristic candidness - "You've just spent a year of you!
             r life making a piece of *censored*." Cassavetes urged Scorsese to stick to his personal vision and not to whore his talents to mainstream studios (or audiences). Scorsese followed this advice and made Mean Streets, which, as much as Easy Rider and The Godfather, helped change the face, and the pace, of the art form. (One might reasonably wonder, however, what Cassavetes would have said of such later Scorsese films as The Colour of Money and Cape Fear.)
             Mean Streets' greatest influence in American cinema was I think not on directors or script-writers (though its influence there was considerable) but rather on actors. The film has Harvey Keitel (as Charlie) at its centre, and it needs the solidity and slight dullness that Keitel (as an actor and a character) provides, in order to keep from spinning off into total anarchy; but it is Robert De Niro's Johnny Boy (Charlie's wild, self-destructive friend whom he looks out for with all the obsessiveness of an older br
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