Martin Scorsese grew up in New York's Little Italy and has made a film about his home neighborhood. This personal impulse, which would not exactly be hot news in any other art, is so unusual in American film that it has already knocked some people sideways…. [Scorsese] has made a previous feature set in lower Manhattan, Who's That Knocking at My Door? His new picture Mean Streets is very much better—more intense, better integrated. Nevertheless its intensity is often theatrical in the wrong way, it's both lumpy and discursive, and it ends up as only a fairly bright promissory note. (p. 229)

I think we're supposed to feel that the plot is not the point, that the film exists for its milieu and texture, but it doesn't come out that way. So much of the script gets mired in the tropes of gangster melodrama that plottiness intrudes; and, conversely, some scenes limp, so the very plottiness is bilked. As for texture the editing is jumpy and irresolute…. The color is garish and flashy in barroom scenes, in the esthetic fallacy of trying to look like what it's about, but abandoning this idea elsewhere…. Scorsese simply hasn't found the objective correlative in his … method…. (pp. 229-30)

The incompleteness of every inner motion affects the film as a whole. When it's over we want to know what it was about. To tell us what life is like today in Little Italy? A twenty-minute documentary could have made the (implicit) point that these former slums have changed inwardly, if not outwardly, into middle-class centers. And is this all there is to life in Little Italy? Is he telling us that everyone there is like this, that there is no escape? If so, just to name one instance, how did Scorsese come out of it? The film gives us no hint. (p. 230)