A New York Boy From the Start
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The lack of a hyphen is deliberate: There’s no separating the dual identities celebrated in “Italian American,” Martin Scorsese’s loving portrait of his parents, Charles and Catherine. From their modest apartment on Elizabeth Street (in what used to be Little Italy and is now the epicenter of super-trendy NoLita), the elder Scorseses reminisce about growing up in a mixed Italian and Jewish immigrant neighborhood, pausing now and then to check on the simmering pot of homemade pasta sauce in the kitchen.
Archival photographs and film clips index this vanished world, but it’s through their vivid, hyper-verbal storytelling that the past comes palpably to life. Watching this loose, affable movie now, a short cab ride away from Issey Miyake’s TriBeCa, WD-50’s Lower East Side, and Starbuck’s East Village, you can’t help but mourn the end of Manhattan as a vibrant immigrant mecca – and yearn for Mr. Scorsese to bring his penetrating intelligence to bear on the tinny soul of new New York.
Less familiar is the rarely screened “American Boy,” a documentary portrait of Steven Prince that’s sharing a double bill with “Italian American.” Lanky and vivacious, Prince jitters and jives all over the room, recalling scenes from his hilarious, harrowing life as a part-time Neil Diamond roadie and full-time heroin junkie. The notorious adrenaline-shot-to-the-heart scene in “Pulp Fiction” was lifted directly from a story he tells.
