This Martin Scorsese son of a bitch was already good on his near-masterpiece first feature, made on a budget of about $34 and in black-and-white. Most of what you need to know about him is here. It’s got his Catholic guilt fixations. It’s got his insider’s eye on the young Italian hard-asses of New York City. It’s got his bold use of music. It’s got his energetic camera work and editing that makes every scene hop with life. This is not a director who’s fumbling around or angling for a Hollywood job. No, he’s got something to say—a demon that he needs to exorcise before he can move on—and a story that no one else in movies at the time would or could tell. It’s about what happens when the twisted Catholicism of the goons that Scorsese grew up hearing mouth off on street corners collides with the complex real world. Harvey Keitel gets a kick out of street violence and he sleeps around, but he also regards Catholic rituals as sacred and demands that the girl he marries be a virgin at the altar. When he falls in love with peaches-and-cream Zina Bethune—you can tell he’s in love because he won’t sleep with her; that’s saved for marriage—and she eventually confides in him that she was once raped, there’s no easy solution for the problems that result. Scorsese, so sharp and honest an observer here, a man who watches people as closely as he watches movies, is up to the task. It makes for a major work in American independent films at the time (and it holds up today, too) and the start of a brilliant career.