In this one, by Scorsese, if the guys want ciggies they steal a truck.

In Mean Streets the Italians have moved to New York. Still unemployable because of hubris they knock around as low-level affiliates of the neighborhood wise guys, living off the table scraps of the family while trying to get their own hustles off the ground.

Harvey Keitel plays a good Catholic boy who idolizes St. Francis of Assisi and truly fears the hellfire — but spends his time getting ready for it. His hamartia is that he’s too nice — he doesn’t pick sides. He’s friends with everyone, even people not worth the honor. He’s kind to everyone, even those clearly out to take advantage. He’s a politician in a world where, as his uncle says, politicians can’t survive.

There’s an early example here of the Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels “I just lost at cards” camera — the one affixed to the chest so the subject’s head stays centered and the world spins around them — there’s a name for it I don’t recall. It’s used in a party scene when Keitel gets a little too drunk and needs to take a nice lie down.

Come to think of it (actually, I thought about this last night), Lock Stock is an I Vitelloni among groups of people rather than individuals. The Vitelloni-style is to follow characters around as the group separates and recombines, the Lock Stock-style is to do that, but to also follow disparate groups around as they converge.

Mean Streets uses sound strangely, both to jar the viewer between cuts with loud noises, and to let the camera float free of the action. Occasionally Scorsese mics something for sound and then, say, pans across a silent foreground to it. This gets confusing at least once — you see a group of characters talking but the conversation on the soundtrack doesn’t mesh with the action.

“Fuck,” I thought, “the sync on this copy is messed.”

I was just about to start playing with the audio delay in VLC when the camera panned onwards and suddenly the technique made more sense.

The pacing in Mean Streets is also weird. The problem with Vitelloni flicks is that the characters spend a lot of time being ineffectual, so they have to be inherently interesting to hold the audience’s interest. If you stretch attentions too thin eventually it feels like nothing will ever happen, and Mean Streets slightly falls prey to that infamous “second act lull”.

The resolution explodes on to the screen during the last five minutes, so there’s no time for falling action. This technique is fine, the film goes out on a high note, but it also leaves you with a feeling that you took a very long journey to get to an obvious destination.

I would have liked the situation with DeNiro’s character resolved sooner, in a way that complicated Keitel’s retirement plans (because he “vouched” for DeNiro). Or maybe see a touch more motivation for the Michael character — pressure from above to handle the Johnny Boy situation tonight.

But then it’d be a different film. I like falling action, and I also liked Mean Streets.