CREDITS MEAN STREETS, 1973 dir: Martin Scorsese Harvey Keitel Robert de Niro David Proval Amy Robinson Cesare Danova

“You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets.“

The template for so much of Martin Scorsese's subsequent work is here in his breakthrough picture, petty crime and redemption in Little Italy: Catholic guilt, New York in the seventies, visceral direction and an unerring ear for classic pop.

And the sense of intense personal involvement (it's Scorsese himself, not Harvey Keitel, who speaks the interior thoughts).

It comes as something of a surprise to realise that this archetypal picture of Italian-Americans in Little Italy, NY, had only eight days filming in the Big Apple (and that was stretched from a budgetted four days).

And much of that was filmed in Belmont, the Italian community in the Bronx, standing in for the much-changed Manhattan locale.

All the interiors, and plenty of the exteriors too, are in Los Angeles, including the final shooting and car crash. ‘Tonyís Bar’ is a soundstage set in Hollywood. The apartment of Charlie (Keitel) is an office building on Hollywood Boulevard near the famed intersection with Vine Street.

Mean Streets: The churchyard: Old St Patrick's Cathedral, Mulberry Street

The churchyard where Charlie and Johnny Boy (Robert de Niro) have a heart to heart is unmistakeably the real New York though, the Old St Patrick’s Cathedral, 264 Mulberry Street between East Houston and Prince Streets in Little Italy (which suppl;ied church interiors for both The Godfather and Godfather Part III).

Little Italy hangout, the ‘Vulpe’ bar, was 23 Cleveland Plaza, which is now now smartened up as Via Tutto (tel: 212.841.0286), a small Tuscan restaurant just north of Broome Street and the Police Building.

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