Made in 27 days on a very modest budget, Mean Streets is arguably Martin Scorsese's first significant film. A hit at the 1973 New York Film Festival, important popular critics like Pauline Kael and Vincent Canby were taken with its freshness and rough, documentary quality, comparing it to French New Wave films like Godard's Breathless (1959), Truffaut's 400 Blows (1959), or American John Cassavetes' intimate, improvisational Faces (1968) and Husbands (1970). Critic Joseph Kanton even saw the film as part of an indigenous American New Wave which, along with films like George Lucas' American Grafitti (1973), Ralph Bakshi's Heavy Traffic (1973), and Lamont Johnson's The Last American Hero (1973), brought a new "energy and originality" to the American cinema.

Scorsese, however, claims that the film's visual quality, both documentary-like and expressionistic at the same time, derives as much from budgetary limitations as it does from aesthetic choices. Whatever the source of the film's style, it was...