Release Date: October 14, 1973

Scorsese initially considered entering the priesthood, but ultimately decided to enroll in New York University's film school, where he directed a number of shorts before graduating in 1969. It was here that he met two of his most important collaborators: a young actor named Harvey Keitel, and Thelma Schoonmaker, who would become his longtime editor.

In 1967, Scorsese directed his first feature, Who's That Knocking at My Door?, starring Keitel as a young Italian American wracked by Catholic guilt. The film had a palpable sense of place and a soundtrack heavy with contemporary rock, but was occasionally sidetracked by excessively arty touches. Scorsese's second feature, the solid-if-unspectacular Bonnie and Clyde-aping Boxcar Bertha, was made under the tutelage of exploitation maestro Roger Corman. Fellow director John Cassavetes told Scorsese his next film should be more personal, and the result was Mean Streets, a powerful tale of urban sin and guilt that marked Scorsese's arrival as an important cinematic voice.

Keitel stars as Charlie, a low-level Mafioso whose devout Catholicism and loyalty to an old friend, the violent and impulsive Johnny Boy (Robert DeNiro, in the first of his many great performances for Scorsese) fill him with conflict. His love life is no easier: he's torn between Diane (Jeannie Bell), a stripper, and Johnny Boy's epileptic sister Teresa (Amy Robinson), and his lustful feelings consume him with self-loathing. From Mean Streets' electrifying title sequence (featuring grainy super-8 home movies of the characters over Ronettes' bittersweet plea "Be My Baby") to its inevitably grim conclusion, the film provides a far darker, less glamorous tour of the gangster life than The Godfather -- one filled with uneasy alliances, sudden, clumsy violence, and moral dread.