Young Harvey, Young Jack

You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.

1970s cinema has a canon beloved by film-buffs, movie magazines, and even film writers: Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, but also Jaws and Star Wars. At the same time, films like One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, despite their power and audience affection, remain outside the official story of American film history in which self-involved mavericks took over, only to be usurped by special effects and populism. This article considers a number of films which fit within the Easy Riders, Raging Bulls tradition but perhaps aren't viewed as often as they should be.

The first thing you notice about Mean Streets is how young Harvey Keitel is. From his 1990s renaissance (The Piano, Bad Lieutenant) he is clearly middle-aged, balancing paunch with muscles, still clinging on not to his youthful beauty but to some of his power. In Mean Streets he is slim, immaculately dressed in suit, bright patterned shirt, and large-knotted tie, with a bouffant hairdo and clean-cut good looks. He is a young man, trying to get started in organised crime, trying to find the balance between religion, loyalty, love, and the necessity to project the appropriate image. His girlfriend is unsuitable, his best friend is a lunatic who owes money to every loan shark in town, and he is trying to be a good Catholic not only in church but on the streets. While he's running the rackets.

Scorsese shoots the film with astonishing facility, layering it with constantly-moving camera, incongruous pop songs on the soundtrack, the first 20 minutes bathed in red light. It's the confidence of a young man who for the first time has the total freedom to say what he wants but more importantly knows almost instinctively how to do it. His cast is brilliant - they look like mobsters and mooks, not actors. The script is funny and savage. De Niro steals scenes with a youthful vitality absent from his later films - in Taxi Driver he was already a veteran, and by the time of Raging Bull he was an old has-been. But at the centre is Keitel, a smooth surface that never lets us beneath the clothes he wears like armour. We can only imagine his troubles and the decision he must make between love and success; yet while we want him to choose Teresa (Amy Robinson) over the mob, we equally want him to stop being so soft with Johnny Boy. It's not just about being made in the mob; it's about entering society and becoming an adult.

James Toback's Fingers, which also stars Keitel, is a lesser-known film, or at least until its recent French remake The Beat That My Heart Skipped. Keitel is a wannabe pianist again working as an enforcer for the mob. The job description for his position involves beating up debtors and having sex with - or sometimes raping - their wives and girlfriends. It is a film of dubious morals and astonishing energy. Like Mean Streets it is a film about what it takes to be a man, and yet even more than Mean Streets it ignores so much of manhood that it is a caricature, albeit one of great virtuosity.

The critic David Thomson, later a close friend of Toback, wrote "Fingers is the best first film by an American director since Badlands. Even that is inadequate praise, for whereas Terry Malick's debut was an inventive ballad about innocent energy run amuck, Fingers is ingrowing and wounding. It does not belong to any familiar genre: it is more like a psychological allegory or ordeal." Thompson could not bring himself to comment on any of Toback's later films. Certainly, Toback never made anything else nearly as good as Keitel explaining why he loved the song Summertime Summertime by the Jamies.

There's a long tradition of tough guys in movies wanting to go straight: most mafiosi seem to want to become legitimate business people. But there's a limit as to what jobs they can do: in Paul Schrader's smoother Light Sleeper, Willem Dafoe's drug dealer wants to become a record producer, and in countless films people want to be rappers. But becoming a concert pianist is a little too esoteric for movie cliches. Insofar as they treat classical music at all, movies tell us that concert pianists are weird, effete, stuck-up and rather unlikable. Thomson finds it all "implausible" and points to the schematic nature of Keitel's character's parents - tough guy father, mother in an asylum. Added to that chiaroscuro is former American footballer Jim Brown as a black pimp, a terrifying figure of darkness. The scene in which he bangs two of his girls' heads together, and the noise of the crack, is one of the most horrible in cinema. Becoming like that is the more realistic choice for Keitel.

It's a film that's all about angels and demons. It's ridiculous, unbelievable; nobody in the audience thinks it's possible for Keitel to become a serious musician, even if his fingers make it through everything intact. When Jacques Audiard remade it, he cut down on the evilness of the criminals, and made Romain Duris's dreams of musical success seem more delusional and pathetic, but he lost the insane sense of Augustinian spiritual conflict: that the true battle was not fought with the hero's fists but with his soul.

Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens, both directed by Bob Rafelson and starring Jack Nicholson, are not about the glamour of violent crime on the streets. They are films about fraud, deception, hiding, and escape. Central to both is perhaps the greatest Hollywood actor of the last 60 years. Nicholson, unlike Keitel, remained a star from the 70s to the present day. While he does all the usual hack work of any big star, he has found time for some astonishing performances more recently. About Schmidt (2002), the greatest film of the overpraised Alexander Payne, is one of the best tales of growing old in middle-class America, and for it Nicholson seems to resurrect both the trauma and the tenderness of the youthful roles that made his name. But back to the 1970s.

The King of Marvin Gardens starts with one of the great scenes of 70s cinema: Nicholson sitting alone in a darkened room, telling lies to no one. He is a late-night radio DJ, spinning wonderful if implausible tales, but it is hard to believe there is anybody listening to him. The film is a stylised, almost theatrical piece, in which nobody might exist except the four main characters, with Bruce Dern playing out dreams of property development in a run-down Atlantic City that doesn't seem to have anybody to live in his houses. It's a film about capitalism, about success, but one in which success and failure are both strangely illusory - Bruce Dern in another of his great madman roles is certainly the happiest character. Nicholson for once plays quiet and introverted, coolly intelligent rather than impulsively physical, something he has seldom explored since.

Nicholson made his name with a supporting role in Easy Rider, a shallow but impactful story about the counterculture and their war with America. Five Easy Pieces presents a generational conflict which is far more ambiguous and more specific in its social and economic setting. While earlier filmmakers like Douglas Sirk criticised the American middle class for its philistinism, greed, crassness, and meanness of spirit, Nicholson's character grows up in an exemplary artsy, liberal, upper-middle-class family, and chooses to reject all that in favour of dangerous labour on oil-fields and being cruel to women. This is a film about somebody who doesn't want to be a concert pianist.

Long before Mean Streets or Five Easy Pieces, Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without A Cause alluded to a crisis of masculinity in the American middle-class. Teenager Jim (James Dean) despaired at his hen-pecked father, but it still showed the young man as capable of love and responsibility in his relationship with Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo. In the 1950s, there was a cosy suburbia against which a man could define himself, but by the 1970s this uniform social background was gone, and there was nothing to rebel against. Five Easy Pieces is nihilistic, with Nicholson's contempt for women (and for his family) only equalled by his contempt for himself.

And yet the film recognises the attractiveness of Nicholson's character Robert Eroica Dupea to both men and women. The scene in the diner where he tries to change his order - denied toast he cleverly requests a chicken salad sandwich in toasted bread, but tells the waitress to hold the butter, lettuce, mayo, and the chicken - instantly became a classic for lovers of grumpiness, despite its mean-spiritedness and the way that it's instantly undercut: Dupea saying he didn't get his order despite his verbal skills and his girlfriend suggesting she'd have punched the waitress out instead. This is not rebellion that's big or clever or successful; it's self-destructive and pointless. Nobody gets what they want in any of these movies.

It's clear that what all the films have in common is that the world, no matter how lovingly and accurately described in Mean Streets or how stylised as in Marvin Gardens, is not where the action is taking place. Was this generation of directors - Scorsese, Rafelson, Toback, the last who could make spiritual dramas that can stand with Bresson or Bergman or Tarkovsky? There's something Dostoevskian about it, recognising that Dostoevsky could be tremendously funny and sly as well as dark and prophetic; the urban hell of St Petersburg at night mirrors that of New York. As well as being the first great urban novelist, it sometimes seems that Dostoevsky was the last novelist to believe in good and evil, even if he loved evil more than good and saw both fade away impossibly - Raskolnikov fails at being evil just as Leo Myshkin fails at being good. While nobody in any of these films is exactly good or evil, what these filmmakers did was to recreate some of this old whirlwind of moral debate, to affirm that the most important thing in the world is the decision about how you live your life even if that decision cannot bring you happiness.

Moving forwards 20 years, Scorsese's last really great film was Casino, in which Robert De Niro plays Jewish gambler turned casino manager Ace Rothstein. This is a film about how it's impossible to ever be really successful. What is great about the movie is the way it demolishes the characters' seeming success with terrible precision. It is a film full of ironies, both visual and narrative, and its over-the-top style captures the enthusiasms of its characters, but at its heart is something similar to Mean Streets. This is a film that understands and sympathises with its characters' successes, but at the same time that is willing to destroy them clinically, to pick them apart without sentiment. Goodfellas, a slightly earlier film considered better by many people, managed the clear-headed analysis of its young mobster's rise and fall, but it lacked the kindliness of the later film. Goodfellas is about a young upstart who thinks he can get somewhere, and by betraying his friends ultimately escapes, while Casino is a film about middle-aged failure, the end of dreams that cannot be avoided.

Other planets

David Thomson has written an angry, passionate polemic calling for cinema about ordinary life. In particular, he defends Yasujiro Ozu against modern interpretations of the director as being essentially a formalist, and he attacks James Cameron's spectacular 3D science fiction movie Avatar. Thomson starts with a powerful but probably untrue statement:

Family is where we learn everything, including the sweeping urge to be done with family. Family is a basis of every narrative art, even if it offers us the humbling insight that our lives are all so ordinary and alike as to be worthless or without lofty significance. For most of us, family determines who will be at our funeral, and with what mixed feelings. Family asserts that we are higher than animals, and is the undertone and the consideration that leaves every one of us, if not afraid, then stilled, as we go to bed at night.

(For an opposing viewpoint, recall the Gen X/slacker emphasis on friends as a new family, which reached its apotheosis on the incestuous TV show Friends, or Tim's remarks from the final episode of Ricky Gervais's The Office: "The people you work with are people you were just throw together with. You know, you don't know them, it wasn't your choice, and yet you spend more time with them then you do your friends or your family. But probably all you've got in common is the fact that you walk around on the same bit of carpet for 8 hours a day.")

He is sharply dismissive of Avatar - a spectacular film that has been occasionally lauded for its political theme (by George Monbiot and by opponents of the Chinese government) while being attacked by others for its simplistic storytelling, numerous plot holes, and resemblances to FernGully: The Last Rainforest or Dances With Wolves. Thomson insists on the importance of Ozu's domestic subject matter and plain style in opposition to the 3D extragavance of James Cameron's film, and points to the basic flaw of all computer graphics movies:

I will not dispute the level of spectacle in Avatar. And I am nostalgic enough about the engineering of prolonged battle scenes to concede that James Cameron has not lost the touch with armed struggle that he displayed in Aliens and the Terminator films. But Avatar is garbage, too, and that can only be pinpointed by stressing its abject subject matter and its inability to see that the most spectacular thing the movies ever had to offer (see Renoir, Ophüls, Ozu, Bresson ... well, just keep seeing) is the human face as its mind alters or saddens.

You may say, don't be so solemn, don't pose the history of the movies as that blunt choice – Ozu or Avatar – when clearly there is room for so much more. But I think the cultural dilemma is as acute as this awkward choice suggests, and I fear that a culture – especially a culture of the young – will forget the existence of Ozu, and those whose films were always the fullest engagement of movies with this awkward but irresistible subject matter.

In defending the centrality of family, he launches a rather unfair attack on Paul Schrader: a double failure as a sensationalistic filmmaker who can't even get funding these days - nobody would deny that Schrader's filmography as writer or director is variable, but anybody whose credits include Taxi Driver, Mishima, The Last Temptation of Christ, Raging Bull, Light Sleeper, and Affliction stands not only as a talented film artist but someone who has pinpointed many of the obsessions of his age while dealing with timeless themes of redemption, art, sacrifice, and even occasionally family. There is no reason why a sensationalist film cannot deal with real themes - just as Elizabethan and Jacobean drama did despite the murders and swordfights - though it is true that many filmmakers put in far less effort than Schrader into articulating a personal vision and following it to extremes (perhaps Thomson thinks film should be less personal and more social - although curiously he has in the past championed James Toback, a second-class Schrader if ever there was one).

Thomson's final version of his point is fairer, focussing not on theme (he concedes Avatar addresses many themes) but referring perhaps to the texture or surface of film rather than its depths:

More and more of our movies – I am thinking of mainstream, English-speaking cinema – bear very little reference to life as lived.

Science fiction or realist drama can equally well explore many of the same themes, and surely even Thomson would agree that not all art should be realist (there is surely space in film for Michael Powell or Robert Bresson). But representing life as it is lived, as it is experienced by individuals, looking at family, work, the day-to-day quotidian basis of getting out of bed and keeping going till you can sleep at night, is not a priority for British or American cinema. The recent mumblecore movement seemed to be an attempt, but one which made no attempt to represent lives other than those of its filmmakers, and thus failed to say anything about most people's life. There are filmmakers capable of making this work, but few people seem to go see their movies, and fewer give them money to make new films.

Readers' comments on the article included many accusing Thomson of snobbery and saying ordinary people want escapist nonsense or alcoholic inebriation after a day at work; those saying that many people enjoy depressing small-scale family drama on TV, e.g. Eastenders; and someone pointed out that far from being an honest depiction of modern family life, Ozu's films were right-wing propaganda encouraging women to remain in the family and defending the traditional Japanese order after the turmoil of 1945.