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| Images courtesy of Warner Brothers |
The debut film of writer-director Martin Scorsese starring his
frequent leading man Harvey Keitel, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, is
at once a miniscule hodgepodge of disparate shoots and a major announcement of
a new artistic storytelling talent years before making arguably his first true
masterpiece with Mean Streets with which it shares Scorsese’s recurring fixations
on Catholicism. Originally titled Bring
on the Dancing Girls and premiering at the Chicago International Film
Festival in 1967 under the title I Call First following a 1970 re-edit
and reissue under the new title J.R., the film came together as a short
film concerning the titular J.R. (Harvey Keitel) and his good for nothing pals
hanging out together getting drunk or doing drugs partying.
Two years later after conferring with Scorsese’s film
professor who like many others wasn’t a fan of Bring on the Dancing Girls,
Keitel and actress Zina Bethune met with Scorsese to shoot new scenes for a
romantic plot which retroactively got integrated into the prior short with J.R. Further still, when the 1967 version failed
to secure US distribution, Scorsese was introduced to an exploitation cinema
distributor who asked for a nude scene to boost sales. Scorsese complied and despite changing the
title back to Who’s That Knocking at My Door years later the present
version adheres to the 1970 edits. The
resulting film is rather scrappy if not collegiate but nevertheless was the
first foot in the door for the emergence of a major American filmmaker with
many of the interior, distinctly male moral quandaries of faith and character.
New York based Italian-American J.R. (Harvey Keitel) has
remained close to his lifelong friends he grew up with getting into drinking
and partying, wandering the streets and hitching aboard the Staten Island Ferry
where he meets a local young woman played by Zina Bethune with whom he quickly
forms a relationship with. As their
conversations extend into possible marital relations, J.R. grows closer to the
woman but nevertheless declines any kind of sexual interaction with her,
believing her to be a virgin whose purity must be respected. However one night she runs into an
ex-boyfriend who proceeds to rape her.
Upon confiding the details of her ordeal to J.R., the news is a blow to
J.R.’s immature emotional and moral compass and he acts out by receding to his
drinking buddy shenanigans. Worse still,
at one point he tries to propose to her while also laying blame for the assault
at her feet, a move that naturally blows up in his face and sends him reeling
for some measure of his own forgiveness and redemption within the eyes of the Catholic
Church.
While a collegiate student film ranging frequently between
rough handheld 16mm and occasionally stilted immobile 35mm, something Scorsese
would later learn to hone into an innate skill, Who’s That Knocking at My
Door (minus a question mark out of fear of bad luck) is a remarkable and
still stirring directorial debut.
Featuring gritty black-and-white cinematography by eventual Woodstock
director Michael Wadleigh with contributions from Richard Coll and early
variations of what would become known as the Scorsese cacophony of needle
drops, the film has the air of a student street production while also ushering
in the director’s trademark precise and urgent editing from then-newcomer
Thelma Schoonmaker. As an actor/director
team just figuring things out within the framework of the distinctly New York
based New Hollywood independent film, Scorsese and Keitel show very strong
early promise here despite the film itself being comprised of three separate
shoots stitched together.
Made ultimately for around $70,000, this little scrappy New
York indie only took in a meager $16,085 in total on its difficult journey to
some kind of theatrical release. Despite
the problems with finding distribution which briefly landed Scorsese in
Amsterdam where he later directed commercials and struck a distribution deal, the
film nevertheless had its admirers from Roger Ebert to Brian De Palma and John
Cassavetes and prior to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now featured up
to that time the most striking use of The Doors’ song The End on a film
soundtrack. A couple of years after the
film received a 1970 rerelease, Scorsese would find himself entrenched in indie
exploitation again with Boxcar Bertha before reuniting with Keitel to
make their first joint masterwork with Mean Streets. As a Scorsese film, Who’s That Knocking at
My Door is rough around the edges with the quality of the film stock
clearly changing in between shoots. But
as an early peer into what would evolve into Scorsese’s subset of obsessions
and Catholicism and morality, it does indeed show off the master filmmaker and
brilliant actor in the early stages of still finding their respective voices.
--Andrew Kotwicki
