[In the following excerpt, Pechter qualifies his praise for Mean Streets by stressing what he considers the limitations of improvisational acting and Scorsese's consequent failure to establish a narrative structure.]

[Mean Streets] begins so beautifully and with such confident control (via a series of vignettes introducing the principal characters) that it establishes a level it cannot itself live up to, and barely ten minutes after it has begun one is aware (during a protracted and at least partly improvised dialogue about some borrowed money which takes place between two of the characters in the back room of a bar) of a frittering away of some of its power. And lively and vital as the film continues to be thereafter, one remains from then on aware of the slow but steady leakage of its power, even, one might say, the ceding of its power by the director, in the name of a quest for that air of spontaneity which the film achieves in abundance, but only at a cost.

Basically, the approaches to improvision in films have been drawn between those of early Godard, giving his actors their lines but only at the last minute to prevent them sounding worked over, and John Cassavetes (taken up by Mailer), allowing the actors to invent their lines guided by their psychological interpretatin of the character, in hopes that some higher truth will emerge from the unpredictable chemistry of the actor-characters' interaction; the differences are essentially those between a director's cinema, using the actor's unpreparedness as one more tool in the director's creative control, and a cinema in which the actors hold an equal partnership in the work's creation. When the latter method works, miracles can happen, but rarely, unless the director's partner is an improvising actor with the genius of a Brando, can such miracles be sustained for the duration of the picture. Mean Streets has some moments touched by this miraculous excitement, and other that simply grind to a halt with that slightly dead, faintly embarrassed sense which always seems to attend actors improvising beyond the limits of their artistic capabilities, and waiting for something to happen. (The hallmark of such scenes is protraction and repetition—"What d'ya mean [the last line then repeated]?"—as the actors pass the buck and stall for time, and the characteristic admission of failure comes with the actors going from their discomfort.) The actors in Mean Streets are all good, but none of them, including Robert De Niro (who is to take over the Brando role in Coppola's sequal to The Godfather), seems up to the creative responsibility he's asked to shoulder; though De Niro comes across here as a far more intelligent actor than one might have expected from his work in Bang the Drum Slowly, even he falls back more often than he should on such effectively ingratiating things as his crazy grin, and the "hey-goombah" bits of stage-Italian business.

So finally, for all its sharp intelligence in both acting and direction, Mean Streets amounts to less than it should. Scorsese has a subject (the conflicting claims of church and street on the soul of his protagonist), and a man character (who previously appeared in his first feature film, Who's That Knocking on My Door?, which I haven't seen), and an ethnic milieu which he clearly knows fully and intimately; and he has (as Cassavetes and Mailer basically have not) a director's grasp of the means of his medium. What Mean Streets lacks, whether owing to Scorsese's limitations or to the priority he gives to improvisation, is a formal structure, an organizing action; without it, all the film's life seems to seep to its margins, to lie in its incidentals and details. The film is right on target, but goes nowhere, and by the movie's end its spontaneity, which, compared with the operatic heaviness of The Godfather, seemed at first the byproduct of Scorsese's greater intimacy with his subject matter, seems less telling than The Godfather's measured effects; indeed, apart from its opening, probably the most wholly successful scenes in the Scorsese film are the most conventionally realized ones with Cesare Danova playing a Mafia don. (Perhaps it owes something also to the Scorsese film's reliance on improvisation that such apparent inconsistencies as its religious-guilt-wracked protagonist's blaspheming at a bar have been allowed to stand, and that the impression it conveys of the passage of time is so blurred that one year's St. Anthony's Festival seems to follow on the heels of another.) Given how little sense Mean Streets generates of knowing where it's going, it's hardly surprising that the film doesn't so much conclude as simply stop—with a meaningless burst of violence (violence being for a director what laughs are for an actor: an easy way out; and this director seems already to know a little too well how to whip things up with effective applications of violent action).

All of which may seem unduly harsh on a work as promising as Mean Streets, though my view of Scorsese has been somewhat jaundiced by my having seen his previous film, Boxcar Bertha, and knowing just how panderingly he can lay on the violence when the exigencies of turning a buck demand it. But in part harshness seems called for just because Mean Streets is a work of real promise, with much that is vivid and brilliant in it which the film as a whole fails to live up to. It's just because, at its best, the stakes involved seem so high, that I resent the way Mean Streets finally leaves one with such small change.