Martin Scorsese achieved critical acclaim with his feature Mean Streets (1973), a film which also began his long collaboration with actor Robert De Niro. The film was an independent production in an era when that meant something different than it does today. It first meant that the film was low budget, and director Scorsese overcame this with strong performances and creative and powerful visuals. The film was also produced in the early 1970s when this sort of socially relevant, dramatically developed film was more the norm than it is today, and independent films had the aura of a counter-culture statement even when they dealt with more mainstream subjects. This film shows how a filmmaker could take what actually was a mainstream subject--the gangster film--and recreate it as a character study that extended beyond what was normal for this type of film. The film came out after the highly successful studio production The Godfather in 1972, and it invited comparisons and weathered them with the critics.
Mean Streets showed at one and the same time the potential of the independent film and its dangers, for while it was highly successful with critics and at festivals, it was not a commercial success. The film was considered a sensation when it showed at the New York Film Festival in 1973, and it was also well received in the Director's Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival. The film did well for the director and the stars, but it did no make money:
The film made [Scorsese's] reputation and confirmed De Niro's status as a fast-rising property, but it was not a huge success. In Hollywood they tend not to pay too much attention to events like the New York Film Festival, and Scorsese was more than a little dismayed to discover that hardly anyone in Los Angeles knew about his picture (Dougan 39).
The picture did good business in New York, so the producer wanted to open the film in 25 cities, following the lead of independent fil...