New York Film Festival flashback to 1973: Martin Scorsese scored a hit with ‘Mean Streets’

The 61st New York Film Festival kicks off Sept. 29 with Todd Haynes’ drama “May December” starring Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman. Sofia Coppola’s well-received Venice hit “Priscilla” about Priscilla Presley is the fest’s Centerpiece. Michael Mann’s biopic “Ferrari” with Adam Driver and Penelope Cruz the closing night feature while Bradley Cooper’s portrait of composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein “Maestro,” which had a seven-minute standing ovation in Venice, is the festival’s spotlight gala. Other films screening include Yorgos Lanthimos “Poor Things,” which won the Golden Lion and best actress for Emma Stone at Venice, as well as Andrew Haigh’s “All of us Strangers” and Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest.”

A director came into his own 50 years ago at the New York Film Festival: Martin Scorsese. He’s of cinema’s greatest directors, who has made such landmark films as ‘Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull,” Goodfellas,” “The Departed,” for which he won the Oscar, and “The Irishman.” But in 1973, he was one Hollywood’s Young Turks. A month shy of his 31st birthday, he had directed two low-budget indies: 1967’s ‘Who’s That Knocking at My Door” with Harvey Keitel, who would go on to make five other films with director, and AIP’s 1972’s “Boxcar Bertha.” But his career changed when “Mean Streets,” his third film and the first released by a major studio premiered Oct. 2 at the festival.

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The New York Times’ Vincent Canby was effusive in his praise for the Warner Bros. crime drama: “No matter how bleak the milieu, no matter how heartbreaking the narrative, some films are so thoroughly, beautifully realized they have a kind of tonic effects that has no relation to the subject matter. Martin Scorsese…has now made an unequivocally first-class film.” Both film’s stars Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro, in his first of 10 films with the director, were also singled out by Canby: “De Niro has an exceedingly flashy role and makes the most of it, but Keitel, modest, honorable and doomed, is equally effective as the hood who goes right, and hates himself for the future. “

“Mean Streets” was released in theaters on Oct. 14 and the now 80-year-old Scorsese’s latest film, the epic Western crime drama “Killers of the Flower Moon” with De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone, will be hitting theaters on Oct. 20. That film premiered out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival to strong reviews and is considered one of the top contenders for multiple Academy Awards.

Scorsese isn’t the only filmmaker who is still going strong 50 years after the 11h annual festival. Germany’s Wim Wenders (“Wings of Desire’) screened his documentary “Land of Silence and Darkness” at the fest in 1973. This year, his drama “Perfect Days,” about a Japanese bathroom janitor, is screening at the festival. The 78-year-old Wenders received the Prize for the Ecumenical Jury at Cannes and his star, Koji Yakusho, won best actor.

There were several other now-classic films unveiled at the 11th annual festival such as “Day for Night,” Francois Truffaut’s valentine to filmmaker which was the opening night presentation. The film won the foreign film Oscars and Truffaut earned his only best director Oscar nomination for the delightful comedy-drama. And besides Scorsese, Terrence Malick was second young American filmmaker who enthralled closing night festivalgoers and critics with his exceptional crime drama “Badlands” starring Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen.

Major filmmakers represented 50 years ago were Andrei Tarkovsky (“Andrei Rublev”); Rainer Werner Fassbinder (“The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant”); Satyajit Ray (“Distant Thunder”); Claude Chabrol (“Just Before Nightfall,” “La Rupture”) and Jean Eustache (“The Mother and the Whore”).

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