DC Merryweather’s review published on Letterboxd:
Martin Scorsese's first full length feature is an experimental film shot in black and white over the course of a few years, originally starting life as a student short. The finished piece bears the scars of its conception and is more a sequence of vaguely connected scenes than a linear story.
The overriding theme is Catholic guilt and the psychology of men, particularly in their attitudes towards women. So, already it looks as if Scorsese has come out of the blocks sprinting, except that this isn't quite the dry run for the rest of his career as it sounds. It would be Mean Streets that would truly provide the Scorsese template. Here it still looks as if he's working out his New Wave filmmaking influence; scenes are cut with jolting, elliptical edits, and there are moments of arty abstraction. Plus the way he marries music to striking images is more Kenneth Anger here than anything he would later do.
This approach does provide the film with its standout scenes though, like the moment where there's a flashback to the rape of the female character, which is played with no sound other than an old doo-wop song - which then glitches and stutters, the film doing the same, underlining the moment of when a life fractures.
Harvey Keitel, so young, plays J.R., who is basically a surrogate Martin Scorsese. In a voice that even sounds like Scorsese, his way of chatting up a girl is to talk to her about movies, particularly his favourite westerns. He even takes her to see Rio Bravo at one point (Tarantino's favourite film, incidentally, and Tarantino was never far from my thoughts when watching this. Especially as Keitel's gang of buddies share a passing resemblance to the Reservoir Dogs).
Amazingly it works, but their relationship is soon under strain due to
J.R.'s antediluvian, and hypocritical, ideas about women. He believes that women are divided into two distinct types: nice girls and "broads" (read: Madonna, whore). When he learns that his new girlfriend had been raped in the past - and therefore no longer a 'nice girl' - he flips.
Some great scenes, decent performances, and already the use of pop music, but this is really about a movie nut riffing on his influences and testing the waters. Scorsese was just warming up.