Harvey Keitel. Marshall Fine

Kotto, Keitel’s co-star in Blue Collar, recalled, ‘I used to pass him in the street in lower Manhattan when we were all struggling to be somebody. He and James Earl Jones had a working-actor reputation.’

      ‘We would all talk about our dreams,’ Garfield remembered, ‘and about how much acting meant to us. The sixties were a lively, intense time. I remember walking the streets late, talking about theater. We had no thought of doing film or leaving New York. It was a real, exciting, passionate time in the off-off-Broadway movement. It was the most thrilling time to be an actor.’

7

      Meeting Martin Scorsese was like encountering a soulmate Keitel knew and understood instantly, though they’d never met and shared different ethnic backgrounds. The chemistry was instantaneous and, seemingly, lifelong. They would make five films together over the next twenty years and their names would forever be associated with each other. According to Keitel:

      When Marty and I met, it was like two comrades meeting on the way somewhere. I asked him where he was going and we discovered we were trying to get to the same place, so we held hands and got scared and walked along together. Marty and I discovered when we met and became friends that we shared a very similar life. It didn’t matter that I was raised Jewish and that Marty was raised Catholic – our place was beyond local religion.

      I think it’s no different than when a man sees a woman or a woman sees a man and all of a sudden you’re taken by that person. You sense something. Then no matter what happens in the years that follow, you remain family forever, because you’re bound by some inexplicable things that no action can destroy.

      Scorsese, small, asthmatic and hyperactive, saw a surprising doppelganger in the bristling young ex-Marine from Brooklyn: ‘I found him to be very much like me, even though he is a Polish Jew from Brooklyn. We became friends and found we had the same feelings about the same problems. Both our families expected us to achieve some sort of respectability.’

      The meeting took place one day late in 1965. While reading the casting notices in the trade papers – Backstage, Show Business – Keitel came across an ad seeking actors for a student film at New York University. Assuming that any film experience would look good on his still woefully brief acting résumé, Keitel turned up for the casting call.

      The director was a fast-talking young Italian-American, short on stature but in all other ways indefatigable. Scorsese, then a film graduate student at NYU, had put together funding to make a student film, which would eventually grow into his first feature release, Who’s That Knocking at My Door? He asked Keitel back to read for the role a second time, then called him back a third time, before finally casting him as the lead in his film.

      The role, J.R., was an alter-ego for Scorsese: a young man in Little Italy trying to find direction in his life, even as he kindles a romance with a young woman he meets (known only as ‘the Girl’ and played by Zina Bethune) by earnestly explaining his love of John Wayne. They become romantically involved, but he cannot bring himself to have sex with her. When she confides to him that she had, a short time earlier, been the victim of date rape, he is disgusted. To J.R., the fact that she’s not a virgin makes her unacceptable; he must wrestle with his confused and conflicting feelings about her and about women in general.

      It was like tumblers clicking into place in a safe: the combination of the passionate young director with a highly personal film vision, the passionate young actor looking for the key to an acting career – and a passionate time, when movies and acting had suddenly become a vehicle through which one could comment on society as a whole. For Keitel, mightily frustrated by the limitations of court stenography, the chance to make a movie seemed like his ticket to the big-time. ‘He was working with some friends on a student film and it was the most glorious thing to him,’ Garfield recalled. ‘Harvey was on top of the world because of being in a film and working with a young director that he was so excited about.’

      In the film Keitel looks so impossibly boyish, so positively Christian Slater-like, that it’s easy to forget he was almost thirty when he made it. Although one can see the dark, brooding Keitel of the future lurking beneath the surface, this is still a relatively happy-go-lucky Harvey in the early scenes: easy to laugh, easy to joke, just plain easy to be, still unaware of or unable to tap into the inner torment that would mark so many of his roles. His anguish at finding out that the Girl is not a virgin is painfully self-centered: How could she do this to him? Keitel brings brilliant opaqueness to the film’s key moment, when he decides he can live with her past and tells her so by saying, ‘I forgive you and am willing to marry you anyway.’

      This precursor to Mean Streets has Keitel playing J.R. like the younger, more callow brother of Charlie Cappa: coping with feelings he can’t quite express or understand even while trying to ignore them. He doesn’t have as much on his mind as Charlie but he’s similarly confused and willing to exist in a state of denial. The film also contains Keitel’s first nude scene, though without frontal nudity on his part.

      For Keitel, part of the pleasure lay in his ability to plug in so completely, almost automatically, to Scorsese’s vision:

      It was right there when we met: a recognition of a sameness of purpose, of a need to discover and explore what’s meaningful to us and hopefully to become better men. I was asking myself the same questions he was: What is courage? What is fear? The ultimate fear is of being adrift, abandoned and not being able to cope with it. One’s ability to cope with these darker elements will determine the heights one will reach.

      The heights for Who’s That Knocking … ? included frequent trips to the depths as well, as funding for the film came and went. Everyone had other jobs, so shooting was done on weekends. Even then, given weather, schedule conflicts and the ebb and flow of funding, momentum was hard to build. ‘Harvey was very upset because he was working as a court stenographer and we were wasting his time,’ Scorsese recalled. ‘He kept having his hair cut at inappropriate times, so the scenes we shot never matched. I would say, “Harvey, how can you do this?” and back came the answer, “But I have a life, too.”’

      According to Zina Bethune, ‘The story was supposed to take place over the space of three weeks. But Harvey looks different throughout the film. He laughed about the fact that he looked like he had aged quite a bit during the course of the film.’

      Bethune, who was nineteen at the time, had been working as an actress since childhood, most successfully on the TV series The Nurses when she was fourteen. Her agent, Harry Ufland, who was at William Morris and had just begun to represent Scorsese (and who would later represent both Keitel and Robert De Niro), persuaded her to take the role in the up-and-coming director’s film.

      She met Keitel at a screen test and found him a little shy. As she got to know him, however, she said, ‘He struck me as a very sweet individual, a very dear person. That always amused me because most of the characters he’s played are anything but sweet. He has an interesting edge on camera that’s anything but sweet.’

      The film was shot during the frigid 1966 winter: ‘I remember we started shooting in January or February,’ Bethune said. ‘It was bitter cold and there was a lot of outdoor shooting. I don’t ever remember being warm.’

      Scorsese had written the script as the second in a trilogy of films about young Italian-American men (the first, a script called Jerusalem, Jerusalem, was never made; the finale, a script Scorsese called Season of the Witch, was later rewritten and retitled Mean Streets). But this script was sketchy, full of ideas for scenes with suggestions, but in which improvised dialogue was encouraged. As Bethune recalled,

      I kept asking Harvey, ‘What do you think this will mean? How do you think this will finally play out?’ A lot of times he didn’t really answer and I’d have to wait and see how it evolved. A lot of Martin’s direction is through the lens and in the editing room. He creates an environment and lets it evolve and Harvey seemed more used to that. He was always very willing to try whatever Marty wanted. I couldn’t tell what he felt about that.

      Harvey