Niro, Robert De 1943- and Scorsese, Martin 1942-

NIRO, ROBERT DE 1943- AND SCORSESE, MARTIN 1942-

Actor

Movie director

Outsiders

Frequent collaborators with an instinctive affinity for one another's ideas, Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese both grew up feeling alienated from their childhood worlds in New York City. Scorsese was born in Queens, but his family moved to Little Italy on the Lower East Side of Manhattan when he was eight years old. Poor health kept Scorsese from participating in the macho world of street fights and sports. Instead, he frequented the cinema with his father, especially the films noirs of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The boy originally intended to become a Roman Catholic priest and even entered a junior seminary, but he failed his entrance examination for a college divinity program and instead entered New York University, where he decided filmmaking was his true vocation and earned a B.S. in 1964 and an M.A. in 1966. De Niro's parents, both artists, separated when he was young, but he continued to see his father and often went to the movies with him. A frail, shy boy, De Niro felt different from other boys in Greenwich Village. Discovering his interest in acting, he attended the High School of Music and Arts and studied acting with Stella Adler and with Lee Strasberg at Actors Studio.

First Movies

Scorsese's first movie to attract attention was the extremely bloody six-minute The Big Shave (1967-1968). He went on to film Who's That Knocking at My Door? (1968) with Harvey Keitel and served as a supervising editor and assistant director on the documentary Woodstock (1970). After working on several more documentaries, Scorsese was approached by producer Roger Corman to work on Boxcar Bertha (1972), an exploitation flick that revealed Scorsese's flair for depicting violence. In the mid 1960s De Niro began working for young director Brian De Palma on a series of low-budget counterculture productions, including Greetings (1968) and Hi,.Mom! (1970). A friend, Sally Kirkland, introduced De Niro to Shelley Winters, who picked him to play her morphine-addicted son in the film Bloody Mama (1970). To look sufficiently emaciated, De Niro insisted on losing an alarming amount of weight for the role. He also attracted attention for his convincing Sicilian accent in The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight (1971). He had paid his own way to Sicily to study the dialect.

Collaboration

Soon after they met in 1971, De Niro and Scorsese realized they had known each other on the streets of Little Italy fifteen years earlier. Scorsese asked De Niro to appear in his upcoming movie Mean Streets (1973), based on a script he had developed seven years earlier. It was to be the beginning of a long and fruitful artistic collaboration. Set in the macho world of the mafia in Little Italy, Mean Streets perfectly merged the alienated urban sensibilities of the director and his actors. De Niro played Johnny Boy, a hotheaded young punk, opposite Harvey Keitel as a small-time hood. The movie received rave reviews, established Scorsese as an important young director, and won De Niro the New York Film Critics Circle Award for best supporting actor. Also in 1973 De Niro captured the attention of critics as a dying baseball player in Bang the Drum Slowly. The following year he was cast as the young Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's eagerly awaited The Godfather, Part II Speaking entirely in Sicilian, De Niro delivered a quiet but stunningly effective performance that meshed well with Marlon Brando's portrayal of the older don in the original movie. De Niro won an Oscar for best supporting actor and was established as a major movie presence. The same year Scorsese departed from his trademark urban violence to direct Ellen Burstvn in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, a role for which she won an Oscar.

Siamese Twins

From 1976 through 1983 De Niro and Scorsese made four memorable, highly personal movies together. Scorsese later commented that he and De Niro became "as close as Siamese twins emotionally." They were able to communicate and to understand one another's ideas almost without words. Taxi Driver (1976) is a harrowing study of an alienated urban man who goes on a violent rampage hoping to rid the New York streets of the scum he believes are corrupting a twelve-year-old prostitute. De Niro's chilling, often repellent portrayal of Travis Bickle earned him an Oscar nomination, and the movie was nominated for best picture. In New York, New York (1977), a highly stylized homage to the 1940s and 1950s, De Niro played loutish saxophonist Jimmy Doyle. Much of the dialogue was improvised by Scorsese, De Niro, and costar Liza Minnelli. Many critics have judged Scorsese's next effort, Raging Bull (1980), the best American movie of the 1980s. De Niro played prizefighter Jake LaMotta, who bullies his way to the top only to wind up embittered, imprisoned, and alone. Scorsese's eerily realistic, almost documentary style found its perfect counter-part in De Niro's utterly believable slob; the actor gained sixty pounds for the role and was rewarded with an Academy Award. Scorsese and the film were also nominated for Oscars. Two years of preparation on the part of both actor and director showed in The King of Comedy (1983), an almost painful study of the deranged fan of a television comedian. The movie was less successful with critics and the public than Scorsese and De Niro's other collaborations, but De Niro's portrayal of the slimy Rupert Pupkin was in many ways as terrifying as his Travis Bickle, and Scorsese's ability to create an aura of underlying violence helped make the movie a cult favorite.

Independents

In his work with Scorsese, De Niro gave many of his finest performances of the 1970s and 1980s, but there were other highlights. He earned another Oscar nomination for The Deer Hunter (1978), in which he portrayed a loner amid a group of small-town friends who are drafted to fight in Vietnam. By the 1980s De Niro's reputation as one of the top American movie actors allowed him to experiment. He appeared as priests in a murder story (True Confessions, 1981), a lush period piece (The Mission, 1986), and a comedy (We're No Angels, 1989). He was a small-time mobster in Sergio Leone's beautiful urban epic Once Upon a Time in America (1984), and he had a big impact in a ten-minute cameo as Al Capone in De Palma's The Untouchables (1987). Mid-night Run (1988) was an enjoyable stab at action comedy. Scorsese's career was no less distinguished; his documentary about The Band, The Last Waltz (1978), was considered one of the best of its kind. During the 1980s Scorsese was the most respected movie director working in America, continuing to challenge audiences with unusual subjects. After Hours (1985) was a comic study of urban angst. In The Color of Money (1986), the sequel to The Hustler (1960), Scorsese directed Paul Newman to an Oscar as the aging pool shark Eddie Felson. The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) raised protests from fundamentalist groups who thought the movie blasphemous. Critics agreed that "Life Lessons," Scorsese's segment in the three-part movie New York Stories (1989), was the best one.

Maturity

GoodFellas (1990) was Scorsese and De Niro's first movie together since The King Comedy. The darkly comic story of mob informant Henry Hyde, GoodFellas was hailed by critics as Scorsese's best movie since Raging Bull He was nominated for Oscars for his direction and his screenplay (with Nicholas PileggiJ, and the movie was nominated for best picture. Joe Pesci won as Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of a trigger-happy thug. After his own nominated performance as a mental patient in Awakenings (1990), De Niro starred as a deranged excon in Scorsese's chilling remake of Cape Fear (1991) and received another nomination. In 1993 De Niro directed his first movie, A Bronx Tale, and met with mixed notices. Scorsese received an equally divided response to his lush adaptation of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1993); some critics thought it among his best works, while others dismissed it as rambling and stuffy. Anticipation was high for De Niro and Scorsese's eighth collaboration, Casino (1995).

Sources:

Douglas Brode, The Films of Robert De Niro (Secaucus, N.J.: Carol Publishing Group, 1993);

Lee Lourdeaux, "Martin Scorsese in Little Italy and Greater Manhattan," in his Italian and Irish Filmmakers in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), pp. 217-266;

Martin Scorsese, Scorsese on Scorsese (London & Boston: Faber & Faber, 1990).