America, Michael began as a clean, brilliant young man endowed with incredible resources and believing in a humanistic idealism. Like America, Michael was the child of an older system, a child of Europe. Like America, Michael was an innocent who tried to correct the ills and injustices of his progenitors. But then he got blood on his hands. He lied to himself and to others about what he was doing and why. And so he became not only a mirror image of what he'd come from, but worse". Brando also expressed his agreement with the film's message, saying: "The story is about the corporate mind because the Mafia is the best example of capitalists we have. The key phrase in the story is...'just business, nothing personal'. When I read that, McNamara, Johnson, and Rusk just flashed by my eyes". Inspired by the worldwide success of The Godfather films, in the 1970s Italian films depicted Mafiosi as anti-heroes, men who made their livings via crime, but who possessed a certain nobility and grandeur of character. The two most important Mafia films of the 1970s have been described as The Godfather and Mean Streets. Unlike The Godfather, which was set among the "top" of a Mafia family dealing with its leaders, Mean Streets is set on the "bottom" of the Mafia dealing with its fringes. The principle characters in Mean Streets are not Mafiosi, but rather the "wannabes", a subculture of tough working class Italian-American young men who aspired to join the Mafia. The only major character who is a Mafiosi is Uncle Giovanni (Cesare Danova), a middle-ranking Mafia functionary who works as a loan shark and employs the protagonist Charlie (Harvey Keitel) as a debt collector. In the film, the Mafiosi are whom Charlie and his friends emulate and aspire to be, though the film suggests that none of them will actually enjoy the sort of wealth and power they hope achieve to. Through often compared to The Godfather, the only major similarities are that both films are set in tightly linked Italian-American communities in New York and the character of Giovanni, described as an "Old World gangster, full of cold resolve and ponderous advice" whom could have easily fitted into The Godfather as a Coreleone capo. Unlike the "grand romanticism" of The Godfather, Mean Streets is shot in a semi-documentary style on location in a working class New York neighborhood