“A carefully matched pair, playing off one another and delineating the extremes of Scorsese’s world.”
– DAVE KEHR

“[ITALIANAMERICAN is] A joyous, tender documentary... a portrait of a marriage, steeped in clan and ethnic heritage, that amounts to a mini-‘Roots’ for urban Americans of Sicilian stock.”
– Michael Sragow, The New Yorker. Click here to read entire review.

Martin Scorsese’s documentary counterparts to his seventies classics Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. In Italianamerican (1974) — “the best film I ever made; it really freed me in style” — the director conducts a freewheeling interview with his parents, the late Catherine and Charles (né Luciano) Scorsese, in their walk-up on Elizabeth Street (now the trendiest block in “NoLita,” then the “mean streets” of his early films), reflecting on 40 years of marriage, everything from courtship to whose mother was the better cook. The irrepressible Mrs. Scorsese (who later got a SAG card after popping up frequently in her son’s films — most memorably as Joe Pesci’s mother in GoodFellas) shows off snapshots from a recent trip to Italy (mostly of family dinners), argues with her husband about home wine-making techniques, and interrupts her son repeatedly to nurse her lateranthologized spaghetti sauce, revealed at breakneck speed in the end credits. Scorsese purposely left the hyphen out of the title, explaining that his parents “are neither Italian nor American. They are one.” In American Boy (1978), Scorsese and cinematographer Michael Chapman (who also shot Taxi Driver, The Last Waltz and Raging Bull) film a raucous autobiographical performance by Steven Prince (Taxi Driver’s unforgettable gun/drugs/Cadillac salesman “Easy Andy”) with his recollected life stories — interspersed with faded 8mm flashbacks and encompassing army brathood, draft-dodging, heroin abuse, a turbulent stint as a road manager for Neil Diamond, even murder — providing a blackly comic mirror image of Travis Bickle. With two of his yarns apparently lifted wholesale by Tarantino (in Pulp Fiction) and by Richard Linklater (in Waking Life), and himself a physical and spiritual prototype for Steve Buscemi’s screen persona, Prince is a movie icon — once removed.

ITALIANAMERICAN has been newly restored by The Museum of Modern Art.
A KINO INTERNATIONAL RELEASE
1:10, 3:15, 5:30, 7:35, 9:40

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Taxi Driver
(Bfi Film Classics)
by Amy Taubin