UNDERRATED
MARTIN SCORSESE
MOST CELEBRATED Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), GoodFellas (1990), The Departed (2006), The Wolf Of Wall Street (2013), The Irishman (2019)
MOST UNDERRATED AFTER HOURS 1985
After Hours is the tensest comedy you ever will see. It follows Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), a New York computer programmer who travels downtown to meet Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) at her SoHo apartment. He loses his taxi fare and so begins a very long night of the soul that takes in a punk club, S&M, suicide, a baying street mob and more.
Shot for a piddling $4.5m, this screwball comedy can be seen as a companion piece to Taxi Driver. It’s another one of Scorsese’s Manhattan-as-a-state-of-mind movies, and again fuses fantasy and reality as steam rises from subway grates like the smoke of Hades. It is undeniably Kafkaesque, and yet Scorsese maintains “I’d never read Kafka and didn’t know anything about that”. The film’s ending, which brings everything so perfectly, maddeningly full circle, was suggested by Michael Powell, with Steven Spielberg and Terry Gilliam then insisting it was the only way to go out.
After Hours deserves the kind of recognition that has slowly come to Scorsese’s previous film, over the years. Without it, wouldn’t exist, and you can bet Ari Aster’s next movie, which he describes as a “nightmare comedy”, will owe it a debt.
