A Director Born From the Streets
Martin Scorsese grew up in the Little Italy neighborhood of Manhattan, a sickly child who spent much of his youth in movie theaters because asthma kept him off the street. That biographical fact is not incidental — it explains everything about his cinema. Scorsese's films are the work of someone who both lived in the world he depicted and observed it from a slight, feverish distance. His 1970s output represents one of the most remarkable decades any director has ever had.
Mean Streets (1973): The Debut That Announced Everything
Mean Streets arrived like a fist through a wall. Shot on a tiny budget with a restless, handheld energy, it introduced the world to the Scorsese universe: Catholic guilt, male loyalty, the random violence of street life, and a camera that moved as though it had something to prove. Robert De Niro's Johnny Boy — reckless, charismatic, self-destructive — was an immediate revelation. Harvey Keitel's Charlie, trying to save a man who doesn't want saving, established a moral pattern Scorsese would return to again and again.
The film opens with Scorsese's own voice on the soundtrack: "You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets." That sentence is the thesis of his entire body of work.
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974): The Film That Surprised Everyone
Following the testosterone-saturated world of Mean Streets, Scorsese made a tender, funny, feminist road movie starring Ellen Burstyn as a widow finding herself after her husband's death. It won Burstyn the Academy Award for Best Actress. It demonstrated a range that critics and audiences hadn't anticipated. It is, even now, an undervalued gem in the Scorsese canon.
Taxi Driver (1976): The Decade's Most Disturbing Mirror
Taxi Driver is arguably the defining film of 1970s American anxiety. Travis Bickle — insomniac, alienated, festering with rage and misplaced idealism — drove his cab through a New York City that felt like an open wound. Paul Schrader's script gave Scorsese the material; De Niro's performance gave it a terrifying human face. Bernard Herrmann's final score (he died the night he finished recording it) added a saxophone-drenched melancholy that still haunts.
The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. More importantly, it captured something true about American alienation that journalists, sociologists, and politicians were still struggling to articulate.
New York, New York (1977) and the Stumble
Not every film in this decade was a triumph. New York, New York — an ambitious, overlong homage to Hollywood musicals — was a commercial and critical disappointment. It nearly derailed Scorsese's career. He later admitted to being in a destructive personal period during its production. The film has since been partially reassessed, but its failure was real and important: it showed the limits of pure indulgence without discipline.
The Last Waltz (1978): Documentary as High Art
Scorsese's concert film documenting The Band's farewell performance is widely considered the greatest rock documentary ever made. Using multiple cameras, sophisticated lighting rarely seen in the genre, and his own deep love of music, Scorsese transformed what could have been a simple record of an event into a meditation on creativity, community, and endings.
Raging Bull (1980): The Capstone of an Era
Though released in 1980, Raging Bull belongs spiritually to the 1970s — it was the project that Scorsese and De Niro developed throughout the decade, the one they made to prove something to themselves after the commercial failures. Shot in black and white, structured not as a boxing film but as a character study of a man who destroys everything he loves, it is frequently cited as one of the greatest American films ever made.
Scorsese's 1970s Filmography at a Glance
- 1973 — Mean Streets
- 1974 — Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
- 1976 — Taxi Driver
- 1977 — New York, New York
- 1978 — The Last Waltz
- 1980 — Raging Bull