Harvey Keitel. Marshall Fine

jobs back to back. The movie he had made had gone nowhere and done nothing for him; nor had he been paid for it.

      Then Scorsese called with the news that he had the money and the backing of Warner Bros, to make a movie and would Keitel be interested in playing the lead?

9

      Most people chart Harvey Keitel’s career from the release of Mean Streets in October 1973. In fact, by the time it was released, he’d been acting for more than a decade. He was thirty-four years old.

      As Charlie Cappa, a would-be wiseguy, he was playing someone years younger than he was. The confused young man was supposed to be ‘the Graduate,’ Mulberry Street-division: a young man about to begin in life, torn between conflicting demands for loyalty, torn by feelings of religion-driven guilt on all fronts.

      Keitel looked the part of the feral young climber trying to advance within the crime family, even as he tortured himself with guilt about the morality of what he was doing. The interior life, however, came from the additional years of experience Keitel brought to the role. He understood Charlie so well because he had already lived the life Charlie was struggling with: trying to balance the pull of family expectations with dreams of his own liberation, clambering to gain a foothold in a profession that offered the cold face of rejection significantly more often than one of warm acceptance.

      ‘Perhaps I got the part of Charlie because Marty sensed that I came from a similar background,’ Keitel ventured. ‘I was new, I was raw, I hadn’t much experience. I don’t think it was my experience at acting that landed me that work, but the experience Marty saw in me. Our neighborhoods said to a young man, “You have a place and you will not go beyond this place because you do not belong anywhere beyond this place.” Marty and I rebelled against it.’

      Scorsese maintained, ‘Nobody was better suited for his part and nobody could have played it better, with more honesty, power and sweetness.’

      Except that he almost gave it to someone else.

      Consider Charlie Cappa: a young Italian-American in Little Italy. Sharp dresser and aspiring operator. Still a deep believer in the powers of God and the devil, as set out by the Catholic Church. Unable to reconcile that with the criminal life he is positioning himself for, running a restaurant for his uncle, a Mob capo. Troubled by his uncle’s demand that he stop spending time with his crazy friend Johnny Boy, equally troubled by Johnny Boy’s penchant for wild behavior that invariably gets him into trouble.

      Now imagine the clean-cut, all-American WASP Jon Voight playing the part. ‘Marty approached Jon about playing Charlie in Mean Streets, with Harvey as Johnny Boy,’ remembered actor Richard Romanus, who played Michael. Coming off Oscar nominations for both Midnight Cowboy and Deliverance, Voight was a star. And he was interested in this story of sin and redemption set against the criminal backdrop. To get his film made, Scorsese was willing to swallow hard and cast him.

      Then Voight decided to do something else (Conrack) shortly before Scorsese was supposed to start production. Scorsese was in New York to take advantage of the scant two or three days of location shooting in Little Italy that was budgeted for the production. He thought of Keitel and decided that, as he had done in Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, Keitel would serve as his alter ego in Mean Streets. He called Keitel and filmed him walking through the conveniently timed San Gennaro Festival in Little Italy, footage that went into the film.

      Even as Scorsese began rehearsing Keitel with de Niro, the casting question remained somewhat up in the air – because de Niro wasn’t sure he wanted to play Johnny Boy.

      De Niro had appeared in more than a half-dozen films at that point, including a trio of Brian de Palma’s early efforts (among them Hi Mom! and Greetings, both of which also starred Allen Garfield), as well as working with Shelley Winters in Roger Corman’s Bloody Mama. He’d just completed a supporting part as a doomed catcher in Bang the Drum Slowly – and now he wasn’t sure he should be playing a supporting role again. ‘I ran into Harvey on the street and he was going to play Charlie,’ he remembered. ‘I told him I thought maybe at this stage of my career, I should hold out for something else. I felt the logical part for me was Harvey’s part, but he already had it. But I wanted to work with Marty.’