WHEN ONE thinks of his amazingly diverse screen roles, any comment, apart from acknowledging his always capable and convincing performances, seems redundant.
It is as if the actor wants us to shut up about himself as a ‘film star’ or ‘celebrity’, and just enjoy all his various films as self-sufficient individual works. Fair enough. But then when we consider De Niro’s films together as a group, in succession, we begin to see not so much a theme, which always suggests a social external topic, but rather the exploration of something intangible and inner, like a human temperament, or character, or personality.
Taken as a whole, De Niro’s films, seen say in a mini De Niro film festival, would reveal an enormous achievement in terms of perceptive depth into the complex gestation of the human character in its journey through society, and the world itself.
This elusive, chameleon topic seems to crank the motivational motor driving De Niro’s multi-faceted kaleidoscope of character explorations in film after film.

Tough-guy roles
De Niro is the kind of actor whose so-called popular roles, from the start of his career in the 70s, involved individuals displaying bravery steeped in mental aberrations, or ambitious crimes. An early ability to portray such flawed characters with penetrating truth may have attracted attention to him as a strong noticeable actor from all sorts of ‘shady’ viewers, but the films themselves, such as ‘MEAN STREETS’ of 1973, or ‘THE GODFATHER (Part II)’ of 1974 (his first Oscar) also involved social issues of urban stress, economic competition, and familial security.
This observation is important because De Niro’s roles would begin to expose a wider spectrum of social issues beyond his individual quirky behaviour. This point should make us aware that De Niro is not really a self-centred actor, but one who takes advantage of the traditional cooperative group spirit upon which the glory of Hollywood’s Studio Production fame was built.
De Niro found his niche when he teamed up with fellow Italian-American New York film-director, Martin Scorcese. The unity would produce some of De Niro’s most interesting characters, because Scorcese’s films are brilliantly constructed  psychological metaphors and microcosms of opposing dual identities within individuals, and also paradigms of political and governmental lawlessness mirrored in the group ambitions of businesses or corporations gone astray under undisciplined and corrupted egos.
Scorcese’s first film starring De Niro is the shocking and complex ‘TAXI DRIVER’ of 1976. We cannot simply focus on De Niro as the lonely, stressed-out, mentally unbalanced ex-marine with a repressed sexuality, and a confused conventional vision of morality without understanding the creative cinematic context Scorcese was influenced by in making this film.
‘TAXI DRIVER’ is a more recent continuation of the distinctly American, stunningly visual and psychologically honest Film Noir Hollywood tradition, which emerged and achieved legendary black & white excellence throughout the 1940s and 50s.
Scorcese and De Niro, along with other outstanding recent American actors and directors of Italian ethnicity, such as Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Ray Liotta, Lorraine Bracco, Francis Ford Coppola and Brian De Palma, have shown a necessary respect for classic 1940s Hollywood traditions. No wonder their films are, more than many others, so firmly accomplished.

Scorcese’s influence
Scorcese made his love for classic Hollywood plain in his wonderful little essay, ‘A Box Full of Magic’, first published in Newsweek, then reprinted in ‘The Best American Movie Writing 1999’. In this essay, Scorcese talks of falling in love with cinema-going and great Hollywood movies like King Vidor’s ‘DUEL IN THE SUN’ since a little boy taken to the cinema by his parents in New York’s Little Italy community, where he grew up.
At home later, he would overhear them talking of the films they had seen, and his father would comment upon what should have really happened in certain film stories, then add: “But they can’t do that in movies.” This sparked Scorcese since a child to think: “But what if they could?” This possibility became an objective behind persistently realistic, shocking, and hilarious scenes in many Scorcese films, particularly with De Niro and the usual Italian crew of stars.
Such films, like ‘GOODFELLAS’ and ‘CASINO’, are not only moral, but stylish masterpieces, because Scorcese utilised frank vernacular character voices to tell those films’ stories. This is one of the unique hallmarks of the Film Noir creative tradition.

De Niro’s mentors
De Niro has also spoken of Classic Hollywood’s influence on him, particularly actors like Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and James Dean, also the great social director they worked with, Elia Kazan. Indeed, most of his roles reflect Brando’s simmering anger, Clift’s shy, humble vulnerability, and Dean’s stylish witty languor.
But getting back to De Niro’s popular tough-guy image in his neo-Noir thrillers, if we had to choose a film and role that exemplified a consistent attitude or position in those films, it would be Brando’s role in ‘ONE-EYE JACKS’, which he also directed, and never looked so good in what is probably one of the best Westerns ever made.
Brando’s dualistic role, tracing the adventures spawned by an identity shifting from a larger evil to a lesser one, is the moral model which fits De Niro’s best thriller roles in films like ‘HEAT’, ‘CASINO’, and ‘RONIN’. De Niro received one of his best career starring roles in 1995s ‘HEAT’, directed by the gifted Michael Mann. It is a miracle of a film, with not one flawed role, no matter how small, which includes Afro-Americans and Hispanics.
It is a masterpiece of acting, art, architecture, soundtrack, and even fashion, right down the line. Like Scorcese’s ‘CASINO’, De Palma’s ‘THUNTOUCHABLES’, and Curtis Hanson’s ‘L.A CONFIDENTIAL’, it is one of Hollywood’s greatest recent films in the specific Film Noir genre. De Niro’s role as the smooth professional criminal who likes only to do his robberies without homicides, is thrown into jeopardy by a hastily hired crewmember, who, it turns out, is a psychotic killer and a racist.

Deflating the Fascist ego
De Niro’s character in ‘Heat’, as in ‘Casino’ and ‘Ronin’, personifies the undying spark of human decency and justness which can still exist, even in criminals with a conscience. These are strategic values in Scorcese’s and De Niro’s films which expose, without reservation, the bigotries, cruelties, and vanities of their Italian ethnic lifestyles; also subtle pointers on the side of law enforcement, which suggest better preventions and results at crime-fighting, if we pay close attention to the opinions, attitudes, cultural intake, ambitions and actions of individuals and groups in social environments.
Within this spectrum of De Niro’s thriller roles is his consistent exposure and deflation of fascistic male egos prevalent beyond any particular ethnic identity. These tough roles and themes seem to indicate that crime cannot be defined alone by social and political interpretations which link it to poverty or unemployment, but must also recognize a deeper compulsive human sickness or abnormality, which films like his indentify by their creative exploration of character.

The epic, ‘1900’
In the same 1976 that De Niro made ‘Taxi Driver’, he also made ‘THE LAST TYCOON’ and ‘1900’, Bertolocci’s five-hour-long epic of personal and social upheaval from early to mid-20th Century Italy where it was filmed.
‘1900’ is important to De Niro’s career because of his role as Alfredo, the son of a rich landowner who, during Mussolini’s fascist era, opportunistically sides with the Fascists but endures much private pain and family disintegration. This contrasts with his childhood friend, Olmo, played by French actor, Gerard Depardieu, who is of poor peasant origin but becomes an anti-fascist and pro-communist, yet has a happy personal/family life.
The film is important to De Niro’s career in at least three ways:
(1) It showed the creative possibility of expanding on classic film stories, in this case Richard Brooks’ ‘SOMETHING OF VALUE’ of 1957, which concerns the story of childhood black and white friends, Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier, at the beginning of anti-colonial struggles in Africa.
(2) It showed the creative possibility in new filmmaking of an eclectic mixture with fertile social and intellectual influences, from Marx, Freud, socialist realism, modernism in art, sexual promiscuity and true romantic love.
(3)On a practical productive level, as a radical film of pro-communistic intellectual permissiveness, it was nevertheless financed by American capitalistic sources who understood the new global eclectic era of intellectual and artistic freedom that was dawning after the Cold-War era of secularity and paranoia.

The Last Tycoon
De Niro, like a number of other seasoned stars, would find much mature economic possibilities helpful in founding his own film production company. Perhaps this interest was there already when he starred in the film production of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final and no doubt best novel (even if unfinished), ‘THE LAST TYCOON’. De Niro, as the quiet, dapper but ruthlessly professional film producer, Monroe Stahr reflects the actor’s interest in the professionalism and polemics behind film-production.
It has been said that Fitzgerald’s character, Stahr, is based on the famous Hollywood producer of some of Hollywood’s first outstanding socialistic films, Darryl F. Zanuck, whom Fitzgerald obviously knew from his experience as a Hollywood scriptwriter. In fact, it would be interesting to see De Niro today as the aging washed-up scriptwriter, Pat Hobby in a fickle Hollywood, from Fitzgerald’s hilariously satiric book, ‘The Pat Hobby Stories’, which does not seem to have ever been ‘hot property’ in Tinsel Town.

Hilarious pleasure
By the time we see De Niro in ‘NEW YORK NEW YORK’ (1977), ‘TRUE CONFESSIONS’ (1981), ‘FALLING IN LOVE’ (1984), and ‘GUILTY BY SUSPICION’ (1991), we begin to ask ourselves: Is this the same guy who came in all those extreme, tough and violent roles?
Suave, zesty, loving, caring, and, most of all, hilarious, De Niro is a pleasure to watch in brilliant ‘THE KING OF COMEDY’, where he is an obsessive fan stalking celebrity TV host, Jerry Lewis; or as the quiet, caring New York architect and lover of Meryl Streep in the delightful ‘FALLING IN LOVE’; and once again as the blacklisted  Hollywood director during the philistine 1950s senator McCarthy censorship era in ‘GUILTY BY SUSPICION’, a vital must-see film for all genuine artists worth their salt.
What stays with us is De Niro’s special skill in his look, dialogue, pause, and simultaneous gesture and speech, as in that brilliant moment in ‘Heat’, when he buys a book on metallurgy and begins to read it at a bustling coffee bar, and Amy Brennehan, a stranger, asks what he is reading, and De Niro, a clever criminal abusing the skills of metal sculpture, who will almost ruin this girl’s life with get-rich-quick schemes, says:
“Lady, why you so interested in what I’m reading?”
The superb acting of everyone in ‘Heat’ seems to rest on De Niro’s mastery of his role in this outstanding and perfect film. In De Palma’s classic, ‘THE UNTOUCHABLES’ of 1987, one can see De Niro clownishly relishing his role as Al Capone, with a big fat cigar stuck at the side of his lopsided mouth while waiting on his breakfast tray and morning newspaper in bed. Or in the later ‘ANALYSE THIS’, and ‘ANALYSE THAT’, where he is amazingly funny as the cracked-up gangster opening his dressing gown and flashing to the bourgeois lawyer’s family who takes him in. De Niro is, in fact, sometimes one of the most hilarious actors around today, even when he is serious.
If De Niro’s wish is to master such diverse roles so as to move us with him under the spotlight of everyman’s potential human sensitivity, then he has succeeded brilliantly.