Martin Scorsese. When this name’s brought up most people think of gangster films, compelling ones. Goodfellas, Mean Streets, Casino, The Irishman: the authenticity of these mob movies is rightly celebrated. They owe much of their power and authority to Scorsese’s having grown up on New York’s Lower East Side, for decades a Mafia neighborhood.
Though his parents weren’t involved in gangster activity themselves (as the director’s been keen to stress), they taught him necessary caution: don’t ask and don’t tell. But the stress and excitement of a childhood spent cheek by jowl with violent, ruthless and secretive men seems to have given Scorsese a lifelong preoccupation, not only with the criminal underworld, but also with the New York night, a setting he’s returned to repeatedly, outside the Mafia genre as frequently as within it. Among the results is a wealth of memorable images of the nocturnal city at various periods of its history. I think of the way lurid pink and red neon slides over Robert De Niro’s cab and disdainful face in 1975’s Taxi Driver. I think too of Irish immigrants’ ragged, candle- and torch-lit figures in the mid-19th-century urban warrens of Gangs of New York (2002).
Scorsese produced a wealth of memorable images of the nocturnal city at various periods of its history. I think of the way lurid pink and red neon slides over Robert De Niro’s cab and disdainful face in 1975’s Taxi Driver.
And recently, a rewatch of After Hours reminded me how, in that underrated 1985 picture, isolated bars, clubs and all-night diners stand out as beacons of apparent safety on SoHo’s half-derelict, increasingly threatening streets.
In the time since I first watched it as a student in the 90s, After Hours has become a period piece. It tells one of the very many types of story that wouldn’t work in a film set in the 2010s or -20s, the age of on-demand infrastructure (think Uber, Lyft, Venmo, ApplePay). Scorsese’s black comedy is a tale of a man stranded in alien territory, in peril from suspicious, even hostile natives: a one-night, urban Robinsonade of sorts. Like Taxi Driver but in a different register, After Hours is a document of the seediness, glamour and danger of the late 20th-century urban night, and as such is of especial interest today, when the romantic promise of nocturnal adventure—which this film plays with and to some extent subverts—seems to be disappearing from our cities.
Scorsese’s black comedy is a tale of a man stranded in alien territory, in peril from suspicious, even hostile natives.
At the outset of his voyage into SoHo, data-entry clerk Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) has high hopes for the upcoming night. Earlier that evening he met a young woman, Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) who has invited him to her apartment on the curious pretext that he is interested in her friend’s paperweights—sculptress Kiki (Linda Fiorentino) makes and sells plaster of Paris bagels and cream cheese. But things very quickly start to go awry: Paul’s cabbie reveals a penchant for driving at breakneck speed (Scorsese simply speeds up the film, silent movie-style), and the twenty-dollar bill he carelessly placed in the cradle takes its leave out the window. As he explains to the quietly enraged driver, it was his only money.
Although he gets something approximating a warm welcome from Marcy (the signals are mixed), it soon becomes clear to Paul that the quirky young woman has some serious personal problems. Too many for him to handle, he eventually decides, before beating a hasty retreat. But a stroke of bad luck at the local subway station compounds with his earlier carelessness: the fare went up unexpectedly at midnight, trapping him in the district, possibly for the night. Seeking shelter and help at late-night establishments, Paul eventually comes, through a series of coincidences, further unlucky breaks and a tragic suicide, to be taken for a ne’er-do-well alleged to be breaking into properties in the area. For the zealous but incompetent “neighborhood patrol” that pursues their protagonist, Scorsese and screenwriter Joseph Minion surely drew inspiration from the vigilante groups that sprang up in the increasingly crime-ridden New York City of the 70s and 80s.
It’s a little ironic that After Hours’ characters are so preoccupied with burglary and burglars because, it has been alleged, some key source material for the film was itself stolen.
It seems that LA-based radio performer Joe Frank learnt of the film during the production stage and concluded that the scenario and much of the early dialogue had been lifted from his 1982 work Lies, a comic monologue he’d produced for NPR. A recording of the monologue is available on Andrew Hearst’s blog. Even just a cursory listen is persuasive. The sculptress friend, the bagel and cream cheese plaster of Paris paperweights, the money that blows out the cab window: these, and more, are all present and correct. Also very revealing is the fact that Joseph Minion’s original title for his script was, you guessed it, “Lies”. As far as is known, Scorsese was not initially aware of the plagiarism issue, which was eventually resolved with an out-of-court settlement; Frank did not receive credit. However, it’s interesting that Larry Block, who played the reckless cabbie, later appeared on many of the shows Joe Frank recorded for KCRW in the 1990s. Hearst has speculated that Block and Frank may have been friends, and that Block might have been cast as part of the lawsuit negotiations. Whatever the case, the controversy was not widely reported at the time and did not hurt Scorsese’s career. But it seems the same cannot be said for Joseph Minion: the screenwriter has not worked much in the film business since After Hours.
Richard Schickel, a friend of the director, tactfully does not bring up either Joe Frank or Joseph Minion in the After Hours chapter of his book, Conversations With Scorsese. But the reader does learn about sources the filmmaker consciously drew from, and about critics’ responses to the film:
“Martin Scorsese: The picture has direct references to Hitchcock’s style, but as a parody. I also mentioned a connection to Kafka, and I got pummeled for saying it. The picture was torn apart by some.
It was a parody of the visual interpretations of Hitchcock—how guilt plays out a great deal in the camera moves and the cuts.
Richard Schickel: Can you explain that?
MS: Well, in After Hours, when the character walked into a room and it was dark, and he turned on the light, it was important to take a close-up of the light switch turning on—click—as if you expected something to happen but it didn’t. It created a sense of foreboding—until finally he screamed out into the street. He just wanted to come downtown, he just wanted to make love, did he have to die for it? [Laughs]”.
Scorsese goes on to explain how, as in certain Hitchcock films, like The Wrong Man, in After Hours “the camera moves are reflections of the character’s own dread and guilt”, an aspect of the film he feels the critics missed.
Like so many of Kafka’s protagonists, Paul Hackett is a Job-like figure, increasingly persuaded he’s being persecuted by a higher power. Scorsese’s religious concerns would loudly come to the fore two years later in the controversial The Last Temptation of Christ; here they feature subtly and are played for (disquieting) laughs.
Like so many of Kafka’s protagonists, Paul Hackett is a Job-like figure, increasingly persuaded he’s being persecuted by a higher power.
Interestingly, the director has read widely in ancient Greek and Roman history, and in the Conversations book he tells Richard Schickel how fascinating it would be to talk to an ancient, to discover first-hand how differently they viewed the world. Perhaps that helps explain why After Hours seems enamoured of a particular ancient idea: that the night hours are touched by enchantment. Howard Shore’s enjoyably spooky music foregrounds the uncanny aspect of this circular story, with its fateful numbers (phone numbers to be memorized, quantities of money), its piling up of coincidences, its items that keep coming back to Paul like bad pennies (the paperweight, the twenty-dollar bill, the papier-mâché statue). The classical music that plays during the credits and the daytime scenes which bookend the film serves to emphasize this sharp distinction between the rationalist day and the mystical night.
Paul cuts an initially stylish, later a dishevelled figure in his light beige suit, an outfit that keeps him symbolically tethered to the working day. The film’s title does this too, surreptitiously. In fact, After Hours offers a comically bleak commentary on the world of work. No one likes their job, everyone is looking for a way out: there’s the pirouetting cashier in the café; sculptress Kiki who invites Paul to take over her papier-mâché drudgery; Teri Garr’s eccentric waitress who confesses her frustration in a note to Paul; plus of course Paul himself, whose own escapist desire to (pleasantly) lose himself in the night sets the story in motion.
After Hours seems enamoured of a particular ancient idea: that the night hours are touched by enchantment.
Any classic film exploring the phenomenology of night versus that of day is going to be an intriguing watch today, the 21st century having done much to undermine that polarity. Does our extremely online culture really pay much attention to whether it’s day or night? Our relationships, both professional and personal, often span half a dozen time zones. Increasingly, the hour is irrelevant to modern nations’ 24/7 economies. I suspect this growing indifference is a primary reason for the decline of late-night talk shows, of which CBS’s cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is only the most obvious sign. Jon Stewart was moved to broadcast a profanity-laden musical response to the announcement on The Daily Show, no doubt aware his own late-night program may not be long for this world. The energy has gone out of such shows, the shared ritual of tuning in—always key to broadcast TV’s appeal—having lost so much ground.
Something similar has been happening to urban nightlife since the pandemic, if not earlier. Gen Z is by now well known as the generation that doesn’t drink, doesn’t even go out that much, and has unlearned the art of partying. For some years the social life of the young has been migrating online, to social media and dating apps. In town and city centers on both sides of the Atlantic, the resulting drop in revenues has combined with surging rents and energy costs to drive many bars, nightclubs and all-night diners out of business. It may be that the “traditional” concept of nightlife (of course only as old as gas and electric street lighting) is heading for obsolescence. The impulse to congregate after dark appears to be fading.
The behavior of those who do opt for a night out is also changing. Men in particular are becoming more inhibited, a shift surely linked to the #MeToo wave of the late 2010s. Consider the recent viral video of a very attractive young woman on a night out, letting off steam about the timidity of men in public places. No one would take the plunge and chat her up, not even in a bar or club. Perhaps all but the boldest Gen Z men are hoping that, like Marcy suddenly declaring “I love that book [Miller’s Tropic of Cancer]” across the café to Paul in After Hours, a woman will make the first move.
“Paul surely stands apart from other Scorsese heroes in his seeming passivity”. So commented Michael Koresky when he revisited After Hours for magazine Reverse Shot in 2014. This trait arguably makes Paul Hackett a still more relatable protagonist today, when so many struggle to exert agency. After Hours, then, is a rare example of a comedy that has only become more interesting and relevant with time.
