Though it won no Oscar and made no money, many critics considered Scorsese's Mean Streets to be the best American film of 1973. Set in Manhattan's Little Italy, where Scorsese grew up, and based on real-life incidents, Mean Streets was called by Pauline Kael "a triumph of personal filmmaking." Harvey Keitel and Robert DeNiro stand out among the film's protagonists--four men in their mid-twenties who are caught in a kind of perpetual adolescence struggling with the contradictions of their Italian-American birthright. On its world premier at the 1973 Chicago Film Festival, Mean Streets was called "Funny, ferocious, and frightening; it explodes like fireworks in the back alley. Writer-director Martin Scorsese knows the Mulberry Street underworld like the back of his fist, and cuts into its heart with all the unflinching sympathy of a surgeon operating on his best friend. Mean Streets signals both the return of a native son and the arrival of a major filmmaking talent."