After Hours

Dir: Martin Scorsese

1985

*****

Although I love Goodfellas, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver and all of Scorsese's great films, After Hours has to be my all-time favourite of his. Scorsese had made The King of Comedy in 1983 to much success but had soon found himself in development hell in getting his epic The LastTemptation of Christ to the big screen. After many months of work Paramount dropped the film and Scorsese was left high and dry. This huge disappointment spurred him to look at some smaller independent films to get back to his roots, keep his powder dry and make some money in low risk projects. After Hours actually arrived at Scorsese's feet via his lawyer. He was introduced to Griffin Dunne and Amy Robinson's independent group called the Double Play Company who had a script by Joseph Minion called 'A Night in Soho'. The story was about a young man who meets a woman, follows her to Soho, falls out with her and then spends the rest of the night trying to get home. It's a simple premise but with lots of dark comedy along the way. Tim Burton was actually set to direct but was happy to let Scorsese do it instead after he had gone through so much. I do wonder if this was because he was a great admirer of his or if wasn't that interested in the story himself? Griffin Dunne played the lead role and was joined by a brilliant cast including Rosanna Arquette, Teri Garr, John Heard, Linda Fiorentino, Tommy Chong, Cheech Marin, Will Patton, Dick Miller and Bronson Pinchot. The final story is very similar to the original script but with added bizarre twists and turns, leading to much hilarity. After leaving his mundane job for the day, Dunne's Paul meets Rosanna Arquette's Marcy, a beautiful but mysterious girl. They talk about their shared love of Henry Miller, Marcy then leaves and tells him to visit her some time in her Soho apartment that she shares with her sculptress friend (Linda Fiorentino) who makes plaster of Paris paperweights in the shape of cream cheese bagels. Keen to meet her again and in need of some excitement in his life, Paul catches a cab to Soho that same night and his wacky adventure begins. The film is a montage of brilliant comedy timing, intrigue, suspense, surreal but often dark humour, it is almost dream-like in the way it is filmed, a frustrating nightmare at times but a wickedly funny one at that. Highlights for me include a hate mob lead by an Ice -cream van, the conversation with a punk-club bouncer (which Scorsese is said to have based on one of Kafka's short stories and is a metaphor for the frustrations he felt during the making of The Last Temptation of Christ), Cheech and Chong as a couple of burglars and the hilariously hopeless finale, said to have been suggested by legendary director Michael Powell of Powell & Pressburger productions (Powell was romantically linked with After Hour's editor Thelma Schoonmaker and they married soon after). It hardly made waves on its release but has since become something of a cult classic and is seen as Scorsese's forgotten classic. It was coined the first 'Yuppie nightmare cycle' film (mixing 'screwball comedy' and film noir together) but there really isn't anything else like it. Its influence is huge but it is still an overlooked masterpiece.