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| Images courtesy of Warner Brothers Pictures |
After Paramount Pictures cancelled Martin Scorsese’s 1983
attempt at adapting The Last Temptation of Christ to the silver screen,
the disappointment sent the director veering towards smaller independent
projects while the waiting period to eventually make it in 1987 for Universal
Pictures took place. One of the projects
kicking around turned out to be for Mean Streets actress Amy Robinson
and actor Griffin Dunne’s production company Double Play Company, One Night
in Soho by Joseph Minion.
Originally
slated for Tim Burton before Burton learned of Scorsese’s newfound interest in
the project and respectfully backed out, the film immediately followed the
director’s 1982 dark comedy The King of Comedy but in this case, now
renamed After Hours, the director took audiences down an even darker,
more threatening darkly comic rabbit hole with arguably his most Kafkian or
Lynchian cinematic expression to date.
Not even The Wolf of Wall Street in the pantheon of Scorsese’s
jet-black comedies exudes nearly as much increasing danger.
Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) is a bored and depressed uptown
Manhattan word processor wanting to break away from his humdrum office routine. In passing one night he meets a young woman
named Marcy Franklin (Rosanna Arquette) whom he tries dating, learning she
lives in Soho with a sculptor roommate named Kiki Bridges (Linda Fiorentino)
who makes and sells plaster-of-Paris paperweights. Boarding a cab to her apartment, the cabbie drives
too haphazardly and Paul’s single $20 bill on hand flies out the window,
setting the stage for what will gradually evolve into a comedy of errors
bordering on slapstick and threatening horror with burgeoning tensions that can
be cut with a butcher knife.
Soon his desire to abandon ship and simply go home are thwarted
by one surreal misadventure after another ala O Lucky Man! if it were taking
place in one night. Running into
everyone from a hot-tempered bartender Tom Schorr (John Heard), put upon waitress
Julie (Teri Garr), and a maniacal ice cream truck driver named Gail (Catherine
O’Hara), the insanity and intensity of the night increases when an angry mob
convinced Paul is burglarizing apartments relentlessly pursues him through the
night streets of Soho hounding for his blood.
In spite of a cacophony of comic cameos including Cheech Marin and
Thomas Chong who look like they drove off of one of their Up in Smoke stoner
comedies, Dick Miller, Bronson Pinchot and Will Patton, make no mistake, this
is a seductively sly horror movie that starts out uncomfortably funny and
gradually descends into a full-blown waking nightmare.
Driven by Scorsese’s anger and frustration towards the
battle over The Last Temptation of Christ while functioning as a furtherance
of the director’s fixation on distinctly New York Stories (which, by the
way, likely shared the same set pieces), After Hours is the closest
thing Scorsese has made to a truly surreal darkly comic thriller which remains funny
throughout but ratchets up the tension with slow, sustained turning of head screws. With Goodfellas cinematographer
Michael Ballhaus’ hyperactive camera that barrels towards our hapless
protagonist like a bat out of Hell in the opening shot, an eerily spooky synth
keyboard score by David Cronenberg veteran composer Howard Shore and edited
with a whip by Thelma Schoonmaker who supervised the new Criterion Collection
4K UHD disc rendering, After Hours before examining the context of the
piece is a firestorm of lean mean indie filmmaking.
Take for instance the much-discussed key drop shot in which
Linda Fiorentino tosses her keys from her apartment window down to Paul Hackett
who stands in place to catch them but just barely moves out of the way before
the keys just barely strike him. Between
the camera being tossed down at Griffin Dunne, the keys flying right at the
camera and the soft subtle sound of thunder off in the distance as the keys hit
the pavement, there’s such an overarching sense of menace and threat to this one
exchange of shots without much in the way of dialogue or context, playing
almost like an early warning sign. Then
there’s subtle mini-montage forms of editing like a disturbing little bit where
Paul Hackett rifles through a book of burn victim injuries that comes at you
like a William Friedkin and Bud Smith subliminal sensory assault where you
think you saw something really horrible but can’t quite place what.
Then there’s the production design itself by Jeffrey
Townsend, contrasting the carefully composed office and apartment life of Paul
Hackett before venturing into the neon green-purplish night life of Soho, venturing
into dreamland? Purgatory? Death and/or rebirth? The film doesn’t really tell only that it
keeps getting more and more off and zany.
One of the only films where an ice cream truck with its cutesy harmonic
melody turning a corner spells dread and doom for our, at times, thoroughly
unlikable “hero” with loose leanings towards Edvard Munch’s The Scream involving
a plaster sculpture of a man cowering in fear, After Hours while mostly
using the streets of New York presents perhaps one of the most anxiety inducing
night life terrors predating David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.
Griffin Dunne is probably best known for his recurring supporting
screen appearances in An American Werewolf in London as the hero’s
decomposing deceased friend before moving on to film directing himself on such
projects as Practical Magic and The Accidental Husband but here
he takes center stage and completely dives head over heels into this
nightmarish roller coaster role that continues to go more and more off the
rails for the film’s poor sap.
Rosanna
Arquette, Teri Garr, John Heard and Catherine O’Hara all turn over fantastic
supporting performances and Home Alone fans will note Heard and O’Hara
share some screen time forecasting their eventual roles as the McCallisters. Cheech and Chong more or less play themselves
but their cameos don’t distract and they do find themselves featured in key
plot points. Mostly though, this funhouse
of horrors is largely trained on Griffin Dunne who is tasked with running, frantically
wading through clubs or hallways dodging threatening women or gay male
characters, finding himself in a constant position of emasculation and an
overarching threat of brutal termination.
Released in 1985, the low budget tightly knit masterpiece
came and went theatrically only amassing around $10 million in ticket sales but
the strong critical reception followed by a Best Director win at the 1986
Cannes Film Festival provided Martin Scorsese with the temporary reprieve from
the stress of developing The Last Temptation of Christ he was looking
for. One of the director’s best New York
movies, mixing a mid-80s lightly surreal candy-colored aesthete with his
hyperactive energies and wading through New York apartment settings, After
Hours is also a subtly sly Wrath-of-God movie, replete with the protagonist
dropping to his knees begging the lord almighty for an answer and relief to his
woes.
At once a character study of an
everyman set loose in a Kafkian nightmare, a dark existential fable and an
impeccably crafted masterpiece of technical filmmaking to be raked over with a
fine-toothed comb by cinephiles for years to come, After Hours is one of
the least seen yet most celebrated films of Martin Scorsese’s still ongoing
illustrious career. In other words, buy
the Criterion Collection 4K remaster with confidence!
--Andrew Kotwicki
