Mean Streets at the Denver Pavilions

A rare opportunity to view early Martin Scorsese, on the big screen with an audience, the way it was meant to be seen.

Seen after 25 years, “Mean Streets” is a little creaky at times; this is an early film by a director who was still learning, and who learned so fast that by 1976 he would be ready to make “Taxi Driver,” one of the greatest films of all time, also with De Niro and Keitel. The movie doesn’t have the headlong flow, the unspoken confidence in every choice, that became a Scorsese hallmark. It was made on a tiny budget with actors still finding their way, and most of it wasn’t even shot on the mean streets of the title, but in disguised Los Angeles locations. But it has an elemental power, a sense of spiraling doom, that a more polished film might have lacked.
And in the way it sees and hears its characters, who are based on the people Scorsese knew and grew up with in Little Italy, it was an astonishingly influential film. If Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” fixed an image of the Mafia as a shadow government, Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” inspired the other main line in modern gangster movies, the film of everyday reality. “The Godfather” was about careers. “Mean Streets” was about jobs. In it you can find the origins of all those other films about the criminal working class, like “King of the Gypsies,” “GoodFellas,” “City of Industry,” “Sleepers,” “State of Grace,” “Federal Hill,” “Gridlock'd” and “Donnie Brasco.” Great films leave their mark not only on their audiences, but on films that follow. In countless ways, right down to the detail of modern TV crime shows, “Mean Streets” is one of the source points of modern movies. (Roger Ebert)

Tickets available on the Fandango and Regal websites as well as the box office.

4 hours free validated parking in the lot under the Pavilions, entrance on Welton just north of 15th st.

We can head to local venue after if folks are interested!