The Great Movies III

With different filmmakers and other actors, the film might have played more safely, like Adventures in Babysitting. But there is an intensity and drive in Scorsese's direction that gives it desperation; it really seems to matter that this devastated hero struggle on and survive. Scorsese has suggested that Paul's implacable run of bad luck reflected his own frustration during the Last Temptation of Christ experience.

Executives kept reassuring Scorsese that all was going well with that film, backers said they had the money, Paramount green-lighted it, agents promised it was a "go," everything was in place, and then time after time an unexpected development would threaten everything. In After Hours, each new person Paul meets promises that they will take care of him, make him happy, lend him money, give him a place to stay, let him use the phone, trust him with their keys, drive him home-and every offer of mercy turns into an unanticipated danger. The film could be read as an emotional autobiography of that period in Scorsese's life. The director said he began filming without an ending. IMDb claims, "One idea that made it to the storyboard stage had Paul crawling into June's womb to hide from the angry mob, with June (Verna Bloom, the lonely woman in the bar) giving 'birth'to him on the West Side Highway."An ending Scorsese actually filmed had Paul still trapped inside the sculpture as the truck driven by the burglars (Cheech and Chong) roared away. Scorsese said he showed that version to his father, who was angry: "You can't let him die!"

That was the same message he had been hearing for weeks from Michael Powell, the great British director who had come on board as a consultant and was soon to marry Scorsese's editor, Thelma Schoonmaker. Powell kept repeating that Paul not only had to live at the end, but to end up back at his office. And so he does, although after Paul returns to the office, close examination of the very final credit shots show that he has disappeared from his desk.

After Hours is not routinely included in lists of Scorsese's masterpieces. Its appearance on DVD was long delayed. On IMDb's ranking of his films by user vote (a notoriously unreliable but sometimes interesting reflection of popular opinion), it ranks sixteenth. But I recall how I felt after the first time I saw it: wrung out. Yes, no matter that it was a satire, a black comedy, an exercise in style, it worked above all as a story that flew in the face of common sense, but it hooked me. I've seen it several times since, I know how it ends, and despite my suspicion of "happy endings," I agree that Paul could not have been left to die. I no longer feel the suspense, of course, because I know what will happen. But I feel the same admiration. "An exercise completely in style," Scorsese said. But he could not quite hold it to that. He had to make a great film because, perhaps, at that time in his life, with the collapse of The Last Temptation, he was ready to, he needed to, and he could.

LL was the spirit of it-the spirit of the exquisite romantic pain. The idea that the mere touching of a woman's hand would suffice. The idea that seeing her across the room would keep him alive for another year." So Martin Scorsese told me one autumn afternoon, as we drank tea in the library of his New York town house, a house like the ones inhabited by the characters in his film 7heAge of Innocence.

He was explaining why the director of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull had made a film about characters defined by the social codes of New York society in the r87os. We had both read the Edith Wharton novel, and so really no explanation was necessary. We understood that passion and violence can exist in places where absolute decorum rules; that Jake LaMotta, smashing his fists into the walls of his cell in Raging Bull, found a release that Newland Archer could not discover anywhere in the sitting rooms and dinners and nights at the opera that defined his life in 7heAge of Innocence.

Archer was a man who loved one woman and married another, because it was the right thing to do. Or, more accurately, because everyone in his world thought it was the right thing to do, and made sure that he did it. The film employs a narration (read by Joanne Woodward) that reflects the way Wharton addresses us directly in the novel, telling us how Archer was trapped. Listen to her: "They all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world. The real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs."