Street Scenes 1970

That’s the title of what’s probably Martin Scorsese’s least-known film, even if there’s an asterisk attached: a student-made documentary whose most dramatic event was a moment when street violence between workers and students broke into the open, disappointing progressive dreams of solidarity. Only four months after the news cameras rolled, the finished film opened to some acclaim at the New York Film Festival, Sept. 15, 1970. I bet you’ve never heard of it. More about this to follow.

To far less acclaim, a movie called Joe opened 55 years ago, July 15, 1970. It was a cheapie, mostly forgotten, rather sleazy sex-and-violence hit that played drive-ins and second-run theaters. But due to its timely plot, it got national attention far beyond its shoestring $100,000 budget. It’s an early sketch of a Charles Bronson-style rage and revenge film. At a time of liberal resistance and despair, the movie Joe fed their most lurid fantasies about all the people out there who voted for Nixon. Those fantasies had enduring staying power. They live on today.

The plot of Joe wasn’t exactly Shakespearean. An angry, well-to-do New Yorker kills his daughter’s drug-peddling boyfriend. The impulsive deed impresses Joe, a hard-hat, blue-collar gun collector who dreams of war against hippies, which he (almost needless to say) finds an excuse to start. It was a show-off role for Peter Boyle, who made the most of it. It was also a very early Susan Sarandon film. Not sure she’s eager to have it show up in her resume. Director John G. Avildsen picked up the Best Director Oscar six years later for Rocky.

I met “Marty” Scorsese (as we once knew him) around Easter time, 1969. My mom and I were getting a guided tour of the NYU film school, where I was admitted for the fall semester. I was seventeen. We saw Marty give a class in studio A of the 8^th floor of East Building, and after lunch we saw him again lecturing at a small movie theater, 144 Bleeker Street. He was friendly, sparing a few minutes to chat with me and my mother about film school. When I told him I was a student at Bishop Reilly High School, he said he was a graduate of the Catholic Cardinal Hayes High School, a well-known NYC school that one of my uncles attended. This wasn’t quite the Scorsese you see at the Oscars.

There are doctoral dissertations about “the” Scorsese editing technique, variously interpreted, his patterns of montage, his intuitive sense of tension and release. His work deserves and rewards that level of artistic scrutiny. But there’s another, earlier level of personal style in the editing room that deserves mention: To the interest and amusement of his NYU students, Marty showed them how to “play” a clanky, old-fashioned upright Moviola editing machine with the energy and expertise of an athlete or a musician.

Long before video or computers were factors in film editing, the Moviola was used for about a half century. It was noisy, clattery, and simple, on the tech level of a sewing machine. That method of putting films together was becoming an obsolete craft even then. It was a lousy way to see a movie but an easy, unpretentious way of testing tentative edits, if you knew how to use the foot pedals and handbrake in coordination with a set of toggle switches. Martin Scorsese, master of American cinema, started out as a guy who could jump on the pedals and brake of the editing machine like Roger Daltrey playing pinball in Tommy.

Scorsese edited Woodstock, the documentary concert film that was a hit in spring 1970, working with Thelma Schoonmaker, who’d be his editor for, well, forever. With Street Scenes, although Scorsese supervised the project, he wasn’t there and couldn’t be with all of the scattered film crews. He acted more as generalissimo and chief editor. I doubt that any other feature-length film went from fresh cans of Kodak film to the red carpet of a major festival premiere as quickly.

1970s campuses were already primed to explode. Mine literally did in March, when a homemade bomb killed its radical builder and leveled a Greenwich Village townhouse. When four students were killed at Kent State University on May 4^th, many colleges ground to a halt all over the country.

On May 8, on Wall Street, a flash mob of union workers in construction and other trades attacked a march protesting the Kent State shooting, ultimately beating up crowds of spectators and pedestrians, all caught on the 16mm cameras of Scorsese’s student film crews. It wasn’t a case of “fight back;” this was a brief spark of blue-collar antifa. But at a time when street violence always seemed to come from the other side, even unfairly hitting the wrong target at least felt like hitting back, for some people.

The Street Scenes production was incorporated as New York Cinetracts Collective, a name that now reads as tragicomic Marxiness. Postage for all of its mass mailings that year was generously comped by Scorsese’s agent at William Morris, Harry Ufland, which is why their dramatic anti-capitalist announcements all bore the enthusiastic postmark of “The Agency of the Show World!”

The nationally publicized “Hard Hat Riots” filmed in Street Scenes were swiftly worked into the promotion of Joe. New poster art showed Joe cradling a gun, wearing a hard hat with an American flag on it. He’s also holding a flag in one hand and a target in the other. The slogan was “Keep America Beautiful.” You could put that summer-of-‘70 poster of a murderous rifleman hunting hippies up on a wall in Brooklyn today, and people would instantly claim to recognize it as depicting a Trump supporter.

Americans were tired of Dragnet-style, polite, businesslike cops. Audiences were ready for Seventies-style badasses who’d throw away the rule book to clean up the streets. Dirty Harry didn’t endorse vigilantes, but audiences did.

Strictly from the film marketing standpoint, Joe had some contradictions working against it. The people most likely to go along with the naked and stoned semi-orgy scenes, urban liberals, were horrified by the violence. The audiences most likely to cheer for massacring hippies were shocked by the nudity. But there was enough of a double positive on sex and violence to reap a box office that was 180 times Joe’s budget.

The tumult of 1970 was deeply, lastingly counterproductive for American progressives. Everything they did boosted the poll numbers of the loathed, despised Nixon, whom they felt had won 1968 on a fluke, backed by the country’s haters. They expected 1972 to be a pushover, yet they could see the country was slipping away.

One sign of the growing backlash—that phenomenon had a name now--was meant to be a comedy takedown, All in the Family, first airing in January 1971. Archie Bunker was the dismissive, non-heroic image of the WWII-age veteran: paunchy, casually racist, crudely ignorant. A figure of fun and of scorn. But the creators of the show were bemused that they’d inadvertently made Archie a hero for tens of millions. Of course, I don’t mean “hero” too literally; everybody knew that Archie went too far. That was the whole point of the joke, working-class white-wise. But we ruefully recognized something of ourselves in Archie Bunker.

By 1973, Jack Lemmon won an Academy Award playing a garment industry executive in Save the Tiger (also directed by John Avildsen, of Joe and later, Rocky). It was another, more thoughtful update of the Hollywood image of the WWII vet, truer and more positive.

A minor coincidence: Scorsese’s first paying job on a film crew was being part of a short film that John G. Avildsen made in 1964. He joked later that he thought it might be the only time in his life when he’d ever get to work in 35mm, the Hollywood film standard.

This proved not to be the case.

Marty's low-low budget, years-in-the-making first dramatic feature, 1967's Who's That Knocking at My Door, starring Harvey Keitel. Scorsese did get to film some 35mm scenes, tacky and tacked-on fantasy sequences shot in Amsterdam. It was not, as you can see, always given an art house release.