With Scorsese, most of the people introduced in those early-movie blitzkriegs turn out not to matter much they’re around for the same reason as the “Look at all my stuff!” montage at the beginning of Wolf Of Wall Street, with a protagonist establishing the wallpaper of his daily life. Here, it just feels borrowed, though it is an efficient way to set up the rest of the story. That follow-shot and the here-are-the-players sequence are such Scorsese signature-seen Goodfellas, Casino, and The Wolf Of Wall Street, just for starters-that it feels like a cliché when Scorsese does it now. Tasha: Even with the introductory narration explaining how Caine was basically born into a society of gangsters, I still didn’t clue into the Scorsese-ness until the sequence where Caine travels through a party with a camera at his back, and comes out on the other side among his peers, whom he introduces in a flurry of names and brief distinguishing characteristics. It’s inescapable, the basic tenor of everyday life. The impression left most deeply for me is the rage and conflict present in virtually every scene. Though the Hughes brothers are following Caine as he’s trying to avoid his parents’ tragic legacy, they take an almost episodic approach to storytelling, treating the film as a slice of life as much as a straight-ahead crime-and-redemption story. The Scorsese-style voiceover narration could stand to be more vivid, but it does a fine enough job of establishing this milieu as a place of constant violence and retribution, from which no one can find quarter.

Seeing it again today, for the first time since 1993, I recognize that I had seen something like it-Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas-and the film is rougher around the edges than it seemed at the time.

Scott: My reaction to seeing Menace II Society in theaters was absolute astonishment-it was so stylish, so uncompromising, so relentlessly despairing in its depiction of hood life, and I’d never seen anything like it.

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