A Very Scorsese Christmas.

Much like the films of the previous Christmas blog post, Martin Scorsese has created a handful of films that seem to be connected with Christmas, or at least winter, as the scope of his sometimes violent street dramas take place over extended periods of time – weeks, months, years.

At first, it was GoodFellas that brought the feeling of Christmas to the cockles of my heart; scattered through the bullet-riddled bloodshed of this gangster story were some fantastic Christmastime set-pieces and set decorations, and an air of celebration permeated nearly all of the film -- gangsters in restaurants, gangsters drinking and laughing and playing cards, gangsters drinking in giallo-lit bars and bashing someone's head into the foot railing... You know, Christmas... And within all this, we have possibly the greatest gangster/mob story ever put to film (it IS the greatest in my opinion). And there are constant reminders of the Christmas season in Scorsese's film, you know, like the frozen-corpse-in-a-meat-truck. Of course all of this frost and snow also serves to divert my attention to the winter and snow-strewn road movie that is The Color of Money, Scorsese's existential follow-up to The Hustler, the original film in which Paul Newman played a loser but passionate poolshark, which unbeknownst to anyone at that time, would lead to Newman playing his own engaging narcissistic old-man-version of the same character nearly thirty years later, in 1986.

Taking place almost entirely in the aforementioned snow and the snowy seasons of the midwest, Newman engages Tom Cruise (as the new incarnation of himself from the old film, The Hustler), and Cruise's on-screen girlfriend, his street-smart but naive manager Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, in a roadtrip scenario that sees them playing 9-ball and hustling across the poolhalls and pool tournaments of 1908s America -- and Americana.

Looping back around to the catalyst of the streetwise cinema of Martin Scorsese, we have the winter-set (but never Christmas-mentioned) underground-epic that is Mean Streets, a film where Harvey Keitel clearly shines out yet Robert DeNiro gets top billing. Shot a couple of years before Taxi Driver, Mean Streets is a reflective exploration-come-love-letter to the gang-ridden streets of 1970s New York City (and its introspective Little Italy) where Scorsese himself grew up; and which ultimately spawned the inspiration to the epic gangster classics GoodFellas and Casino; and yet, because of the mainstream point of view and the critically accepted catalyst of Scorsese's career being the intense (and rightfully) more memorable Taxi Driver, cinephiles have somehow forgotten that is was his previous film Mean Streets that really put Scorsese on the map.

So, to quickly recap Scorsese's winter trilogy (a trilogy that exists in my mind): Mean Streets followed by The Color of Money followed by GoodFellas.

...Can't go wrong with that, right? Merry friggin' Christmas!

-V.