Mean Streets (1973)

Go into any suburban mall or regional junior college across the country, not just in New Jersey or Brooklyn. See those guys--there are always three or four, at least--in the cheesy black-leather car coats, cigarettes dangling, insolently yapping at one another out of the sides of their mouths while waiting in line for food-court nachos? They drop the word mook like it’s a secret password into some brotherhood of shadowy boulevard characters. They may not know it, but these semi-tough guys are aping a style that was defined and given substance in Mean Streets (1973), an early slice of gritty urban thug life from master director Martin Scorsese that set him, along with actors Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, onto the path to greatness. From the Mean Streets lead, generations of American males have followed along, as best they could, in the footsteps of the small-time, Italian American hoods immortalized in the film.