Martin Scorsese and the American Dream [1 ed.] 9781978817456, 9781978817425

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Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

JIM CULLEN

Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Cullen, Jim, 1962-­author. Title: Martin Scorsese and the American dream / Jim Cullen. Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020041767 | ISBN 9781978817418 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978817425 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978817432 (epub) | ISBN 9781978817449 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978817456 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Scorsese, Martin—­Criticism and interpretation. | Motion pictures—­Social aspects—­United States—­History—20th ­century. | Motion pictures—­Social aspects—­United States—­History—21st ­century. | American Dream in art. Classification: LCC PN1998.3.S39 C85 2021 | DDC 791.4302/33092—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2020041767 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2021 by Jim Cullen All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www.rutgersuniversitypress.org Manufactured in the United States of America

 For the students, faculty, and staff of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, my home of nineteen years

Contents

Preface ix A Martin Scorsese Feature Film Chronology

xv

Introduction: The Provincial Cosmopolitan

1

1

The Elizabethan Era

9

2

Redeeming Dreams

27

3

Impressive Failures

55

4

Dream Critiques

81

5

Recurring Dreams

107



Conclusion: Dream of Life

133

Acknowledgments 139 Notes 141 Index 153

vii

REEL LIFE: Martin Scorsese as an instructor at New York University, 1969. Located on the border between the insular Little Italy and worldly Greenwich Village, NYU would be the crucible of hope where his American Dream of artistic success would come into focus. (Photofest)

Preface

This book explores the intersection of two topics and their impact on American culture. One topic is an idea. The other is a person—or, more specifically, that person’s body of work. The idea is the American Dream. It’s one that’s familiar to virtually everybody (and by “everybody,” I do not mean simply residents of the United States, but indeed much of the world at large). For some, the American Dream is a concept of shimmering possibility. For others, it’s a baldfaced lie. For still others, it’s a myth that may have once been true but has lost its power. Like all big ideas, definitions of this one can vary, as can the assumptions that underlie it. Actually, the American Dream is a more ambiguous and contradictory idea than it appears to be, complexities I have explored in a number of previous books.1 That’s why the introduction that follows makes some effort to establish a framework for the discussion, through which the arguments in the subsequent chapters will be threaded. The person in question here, of course, is Martin Scorsese, a man who, as of this writing, is often referred to as the greatest living American film director—an accolade that’s both unofficial and contestable. Whether or not you actually subscribe to this belief, it’s not hard to make a case that Scorsese has been a major cultural figure for the past half century. His impact can be gauged in terms of commercial success (which, as is true of even the most successful artists, has been uneven), his recognition by his contemporaries (Academy Award nominations for his films have been almost de rigueur, even if they’ve won relatively few), or the longevity of his ix

x  •  Preface

movies as touchstones in the culture at large. Indeed, it would not be hyperbole to suggest that Scorsese has been a household name in families where movie-watching, whether in theaters, via home video, or streaming, has been common—which is to say most families in the past five decades. Actually, it’s precisely Scorsese’s outsize presence that complicates any effort to manageably discuss his legacy, which is why it’s important to make clear what this book does and doesn’t do. It’s not a biography, and it’s not a comprehensive study of his art. There’s already a huge literature on Scorsese’s work that has flowed through a series of media tranches. This includes a steady stream of daily journalism that includes now-deceased contemporaries such as Pauline Kael, Richard Schickel, and Roger Ebert, whose commentary holds its own against any that has followed.2 (It helps, of course, that these people knew Scorsese personally, and were able to talk with him in real time about his movies as they were made.) There’s also a large body of scholarly critiques of Scorsese’s work, ranging from booklength studies to articles in academic journals.3 Finally, there’s Scorsese’s own commentary on his work and that of others, a corpus that’s impressive in its own right. These include book-length sets of interviews that were conducted, collected, and published by a series of writers and editors, as well as works like the A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies, a 1995 documentary and subsequent companion book that documents his encyclopedic knowledge of film history, in which he alternates between the breathless fan—sometimes literally; he’s explained that his lifelong battle with asthma is why he speaks in such rapid-fire fashion4—and an informed artist whose habitual intertextuality deepens the experience of watching his films on both a conscious and subconscious level.5 An additional complication to producing a book about Scorsese is one intrinsic to the medium of film in any form: it’s a huge, sprawling kingdom. There’s an enormous temptation for a former English major like myself to treat movies as if they’re literary texts and talk about them exclusively in terms of plot, character, dialogue, and the like—which is a serious mistake. That’s because there are other dimensions that always have to be considered if one is going to talk meaningfully and credibly about movies, even if it’s impossible to finally keep all the balls in the air at once. These include the purely visual and aural components of cinematic experience; the role of technology; commercial and financial considerations; and others. The Motion Picture Academy isn’t kidding when it dubs itself an

Preface • xi

institution devoted to the arts and sciences of cinema, because movies are really about both (among other things). Moreover, filmmaking is an ineluctably collaborative process. Strictly speaking, calling any movie, as many were labeled at his direction, “A Martin Scorsese Picture” is a misnomer. Writers, actors, cinematographers, and production and costume designers are simply the tip of a celluloid iceberg, which is evident to every viewer who sits through the credits that roll at the end of any film. Insofar as it’s practical to do so, the contributions of such people will be noted in the pages that follow. That said, the premise of this book remains that it still makes sense to speak of Martin Scorsese movies individually as well as collectively. There are two reasons for this. The first, something I say perhaps as a partial confession, reflects my early exposure to that cinematic paradigm known as auteur theory, famously dubbed as such by critic Andrew Sarris, borrowing on the work of French theorists, which considers the director of a film its “author.” The idea is that, notwithstanding the many vectors that converge on any given project’s outcome, it is nevertheless possible to discern clear patterns that reflect the director’s vision, literal and figurative, not only within a film but also across films in the course of a director’s career.6 Like all influential ideas, auteur theory is a historical product of its time. And like all ideas, insofar as they are ever useful as descriptions of reality, the fact remains that realities change. Scorsese grew up in a director-driven world, aspiring to enter the ranks of such people, as indeed he did. And yet even as he did so—in something of a historical accident, he arrived in Hollywood at a time when an industry in disarray afforded him and peers like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas opportunities that would not have been possible before or since—the world shifted again, and swerved away from directors as power shifted to other players, notably agencies, producers, and actors, on whom Scorsese’s ability to make movies increasingly depended. It is sobering to consider what his career might have looked like if, for example, Leonardo DiCaprio was not among his biggest fans: some of Scorsese’s most important movies might never have been made. Which brings us to the other reason why it still makes sense to use a phrase like “Martin Scorsese movie.” Even if one assumes the director is not entirely in control of a project’s outcome, the ability—once one moves beyond mere survival in one’s profession, admittedly something few artists can take for granted—to choose projects becomes in itself a statement in its own right. This is not something limited to directors; I have, for

xii  •  Preface

example, charted the narrative trajectories implicit in the roles various movie stars have taken over the course of their careers and what it says about them and their visions of American history.7 When performing a similar analysis of Scorsese’s body of work, one discerns recurrent themes that surface in projects that at first might seem wildly different, whether they’re gangster movies, historical period pieces, or religious films. This book uses one such recurrent theme, that of the American Dream, as a lens through which to understand particular Scorsese films, his body of work, and American culture as a whole. The Dream is something that a great many American artists have chosen (or perhaps have felt forced) to engage. In the case of Scorsese, the theme is not always obvious, in part because of the sheer variety of stories he has told, but also because Scorsese’s engagement with the Dream is not always conducted primarily on a narrative level. He once, almost dismissively, referred to his Best Picture– winning film The Departed “as one of the few films I’ve had with a plot. And I did my best to destroy that plot.” When pushed on this, he conceded, “I shouldn’t say I don’t do plot. But I do tend to be attracted to stories that are more character driven.”8 In Scorsese’s body of work, the Dream is often most vividly apprehended in a gesture, a remark, or an image rather than a story. So you have to pay closer attention than you otherwise might to see just how pervasive it is across so many of his movies. Similarly, Scorsese has referred to the American Dream many times over the course of his life. But neither he nor the many scholars who have explored his work have done so in anything like a systematic way. The Dream has certainly been a means for him to understand his own life—he is, as much as any American who has ever lived, a poster child for upward mobility—but it is also an idea he has applied widely to a variety of characters and situations. One reason why Scorsese’s engagement with the Dream, however implicit, merits a book-length study is the complexity of his understanding of it. He’s no mere cheerleader; as he told Schickel, “The American Dream, if you dream it intensely enough, will make you nuts.”9 This is something he experienced firsthand during a dark period in his life during the late 1970s. One last caveat. In the interests of clarity and brevity, this book will focus primarily on Scorsese’s feature films. He has been an extraordinarily prolific man, whose reach includes an impressive set of documentaries— Italianamerican (1974) is a gem of personal ethnography, for example, and The Last Waltz (1978) is widely regarded as the best concert film ever made,

Preface • xiii

to cite only two of many examples. He has also dabbled in television, directing episodes of shows such as Amazing Stories (1985–1987) and Boardwalk Empire (2010–2014), a series that owes a heavy debt to Scorsese on the basis of its cast alone; he was also an executive producer for that series. But Scorsese has regarded himself first and foremost as a director of feature films, even as he has wedged countless other projects in between them. And this is likely to be the primary way in which he will be remembered. Remembered: in an important sense, this book is an act of memory, because all works of history are themselves historical artifacts. I have referred to Martin Scorsese as a household name. But that’s unlikely to be true much longer, given the inexorable workings of time and mortality. However, there’s good reason to believe that his work will persist in collective memory—something that I believe should happen, and something to which I, in an admittedly small way, would like to contribute. There is an inevitably personal dimension to this. Scorsese’s films have been a backdrop for my own life: I’ve been going to see them as part of a lifelong habit of moviegoing, a ritual whose future is increasingly in question (one reflected in the making and release of Scorsese’s 2019 film The Irishman, to which I will return in the conclusion). As a native New Yorker with Italian and Catholic heritage, I also feel I have some familiarity with the cultural matrix from which he emerged, even as I can also believe, as someone who has been edified and enthralled by works of art by people from all walks of life, that Scorsese’s work resonates far beyond such demographic identifiers. Finally, as someone for whom the American Dream has also been a powerful idea that has shaped the course of my own life, I must responsibly recognize that it too is a historical construct whose validity and value are more than ever an open question, especially for those of younger generations who might like to believe in it but find that difficult or impossible to do. As such, this little volume may be little more than a document of a vanished world. But one never knows if, when, or how fragments of that world will flicker back to life—or on what kind of screen. Jim Cullen Hastings-on-Hudson, New York December 2020

A Martin Scorsese Feature Film Chronology

Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967) Boxcar Bertha (1972) Mean Streets (1973) Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) Taxi Driver (1976) New York, New York (1977) Raging Bull (1980) The King of Comedy (1983) After Hours (1985) The Color of Money (1986) The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) New York Stories (“Life Lessons” segment, 1989) Goodfellas (1990) Cape Fear (1991) The Age of Innocence (1993) Casino (1995) Kundun (1997) Bringing Out the Dead (1999) Gangs of New York (2002) The Aviator (2004) The Departed (2006) xv

xvi  •  A Martin Scorsese Feature Film Chronology

Shutter Island (2010) Hugo (2011) The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) Silence (2016) The Irishman (2019)

Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

CROSS PURPOSES: Scorsese on the set of his 2016 film Silence, based on the novel by Japanese writer Shūsaku Endō. Scorsese’s entire career has been marked by an effort to grapple with the tension between his parochial upbringing and the global reach of his talents and ambitions. In many of his films, characters navigate between tribal and wider worlds in the pursuit of their aspirations. (Photofest)

Introduction

The Provincial Cosmopolitan

The American Dream is the great myth of U.S. history—and a powerful magnet for its greatest thinkers, doers, and artists. A couple of quick definitions. First, the term “myth” is used here in the anthropological sense, as a widely held belief whose empirical validity can be neither proven nor disproven.1 Second, while the American Dream is a complex and variegated concept, the conceptual base underlying all interpretations of it is one famously articulated by Henry David Thoreau in Walden: “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”2 In this formulation, desire becomes destiny in a nation constituted for the pursuit of happiness. Which is not to say that the otherwise ornery transcendentalist was, or is, right: for every Thoreau insisting on the Dream’s validity, there’s a James Baldwin asserting that “the American dream has become something more closely resembling a nightmare.”3 The power of a myth resides in the arguments it provokes. It’s common, nowadays, to assert that the Dream is dead or dying. But the frequency with which such assertions are made also 1

2  •  Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

suggests the degree to which the question continues to matter, as well as how hard it is to really determine the time of death—or its cause. In terms of common parlance, the term “American Dream” is less than a century old; it’s only been since the 1930s that it has become widespread. (Tellingly, it did so during the Great Depression, a time when its survival was in doubt.)4 But from the very beginnings of the nation’s history, the collective quest to realize individual aspirations motivated the adventurous Virginian no less than the abstemious Puritan, both of whom understood the unique opportunities afforded by the English conquest of the North American continent. The person who embodied the concept most vividly at the moment of the nation’s creation was Benjamin Franklin, a Boston printer boy who reinvented himself as a Philadelphia renaissance man. His archetype, first manifest in the shrewd persona of his alter ego, Poor Richard, coursed through a series of heirs that included the escaped slave–turned-activist Frederick Douglass, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, entrepreneur Madame C. J. Walker, and inventor Thomas Edison, among countless others. But for much of the nation’s history, the Dream has blazed brightest in the imaginative realm of literature, personified by a string of fictional figures who live in the nation’s collective memory: Louisa May Alcott’s Jo March; Theodore Dreiser’s Carrie Meeber; Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlett O’Hara; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby. The Dream is the great engine of countless plots for characters confronting obstacles to its realization from multiple directions. It’s an irresistible literary theme, and it seems fair to say that all major American writers staking a claim to greatness have wrestled with it at some point in their careers. But in no arena of national life has the Dream been more vivid than the movies. To a great degree, this is intrinsic to the medium of film, which so often casts a dreamlike spell over viewers that is at once surreal and lucid. The earliest masters of the genre—Georges Méliès, Fritz Lang, Luis Buñuel—captured the former, but it was in the United States, especially in the climate of interwar Hollywood, that the tactile and material dimensions of the art form were most fully realized. Its often sumptuous clarity was all the more dazzling for its seemingly democratic quality, the notion that ordinary people could achieve worldly success vicariously—and, just maybe, otherwise—on a transcendent scale. This notion animated MGM musicals, larger-than-life westerns, and the civic allure of Frank Capra movies, dubbed “Capracorn” by critics but no less beloved for that.5 By the

Introduction • 3

end of the first half of the twentieth century, Hollywood’s version of American Dream captured a nation and conquered the world.

Ethnically American, Specifically Universal This was the milieu into which Martin Scorsese was born in 1942, inheriting a mythic patrimony on which he founded a career that would lead him to be widely viewed as the greatest living American director. Few filmmakers have engaged the Dream as consistently as he has, or with his vertiginous depth. Sometimes this is a matter of capturing it imagistically in all its shimmering possibility, whether in the form of Cybill Shepherd in a white dress in Taxi Driver (1976) or the dashing Leonardo DiCaprio in a biplane in The Aviator (2004). More often, though, it’s a matter of exposing the brutal underside of the Dream in the slow-motion spill of blood and sweat pouring from aspiring boxer Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) in the ring in Raging Bull (1980), or the dull thud of baseball bats killing the ruthless gangster Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) in Casino (1995). All directors, in collaboration with actors, screenwriters, and editors, are storytellers. But few have the decisively cinematic power that Scorsese does. He gives us figures that literally embody the Dream. This visual sensibility is informed by a personal one. Like many of the greatest commentators on the American Dream, Scorsese brings to his conception of it a double consciousness of the outsider fascinated by, and yet to some degree detached from, the myth. There are a series of components to this. The first is that, to a significant degree, his angle of vision on the American Dream is that of the immigrant. Scorsese himself is native, but his family has deep roots in Sicily, and the parameters of that Italian subculture have been a major factor in the formation of his worldview. This is not only a matter of language, dress, cuisine, and culture, but also values such as loyalty and hostility toward official institutions. These themes figure prominently in Scorsese films—displayed in their appeal as well as their cost—no less than the Little Italy locations featured in many of his movies. Scorsese’s Italian identity interlocks with his Roman Catholic one. Italians and Italian Americans have historically struck a variety of stances toward the faith, ranging from piety to the contempt that familiarity with the Vatican has bred. Scorsese himself was a devout child, something that bemused his parents, who didn’t fully embrace his adolescent aspirations to become a priest. (Their adult son would find himself dwelling squarely

4  •  Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

between the realms of the sacred and the profane for much of his life, at times with a clear tilt toward the latter.) Scorsese has often observed that the rituals of the church have animated his work, fostering a characteristically Catholic vision of God’s palpable presence in a fallen world—his 1999 film Bringing Out the Dead is a case study in this regard—a style that theologian David Tracy has dubbed “the analogical imagination.”6 In addition to the visual manifestations of this sensibility (like his penchant for deploying top shots, colloquially known as “God’s POV” by film crews),7 the imperatives of Scorsese’s faith have also informed his understanding of the American Dream by providing a foil for it, a spiritual skepticism about the allure of earthly things. In Scorsese’s movies we see them in all their glory and in the terrible price they exact on those who sin to achieve them. To paraphrase the old religious injunction, Scorsese’s art lives in the world of the American Dream without ever being entirely of it. By definition, Catholicism—the One True Church—makes claims to universality, transcending borders and cultures. But one of the great paradoxes of Scorsese’s life and work is that his ethno-religious heritage has a highly particularistic character. In contrast to many other Western nations, Catholicism in the United States has always been a minority faith, viewed with hostility by a Protestant (and then later secular) elite that has regarded it as misguided at best and deeply inimical to the health of the body politic at worst, since those who pledged their loyalty to the pope could never be truly independent citizens of the kind required in a democratic society. One more wrinkle here is that after a brief period during the early republic when Catholicism had elite connotations, it largely became a workingclass sect once the Irish began arriving in large numbers about two centuries ago, followed by successive waves of Italians and Germans, among others, most recently Latinos. Ethnic, Catholic, working class: the overlap between these categories has been tight, even inseparable, for much of U.S. history, as it certainly was for Scorsese in the formative years of his youth. In Scorsese’s art, these archetypal elements in his background coalesce into a distinctive view of the American Dream that gets distilled to a striking tension: the potent dialectical relationship between provincialism and cosmopolitanism. Scorsese is the product of a small, insular world, one that looked on outsiders with suspicion, if not outright hostility. And yet his artistry rests on talents that were quickly recognized by a wider world, one in which he has spent most of his life working with a global set of collaborators—actors, writers, set designers, location managers, and the like—who have cast their lot with him in the process of producing some of the most significant cinematic

Introduction • 5

art of last half century. Literally and figuratively, Scorsese sees the American Dream in a uniquely powerful way. Provincialism and cosmopolitanism are the pistons that power Scorsese’s films. They’re there in his first full-length film, Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967), about a young working-class Italian man’s struggle to come to terms with having a bourgeois, blond girlfriend (the scene where he takes in her apartment is priceless). They’re also there in his masterpiece Taxi Driver (1976), in which a severely alienated Vietnam veteran struggles to figure out where he belongs against the backdrop of an anodyne presidential campaign. And they’re there in Kundun (1997), in which the Dalai Lama struggles to preserve Tibetan culture from the threat of the all-absorbing challenge of Chinese communism. The theme stretches not only across space but also across time, from the suffocating embrace of the uptown New York elite that won’t allow true love to escape in The Age of Innocence (1993), to the feral local hatreds of downtown that get steamrollered by the implacable hand of the federal government in Gangs of New York (2002). Amid any number of other complications facing the characters of his films, the provincial-cosmopolitan struggle is almost always at the center of the action.

The Engaged Skeptic This book traces the role of the American Dream in Scorsese’s body of work. It begins with its emergence in his early films, notably his first major feature, Mean Streets, in 1973. “Mean Streets dealt with the American Dream, according to which everybody thinks they can get rich quick, and if they can’t do it by legal means they’ll do it by illegal ones,” Scorsese explained in 1989. “That disruption in values is no different today, and I’m interested in making a couple more pictures on the same theme.”8 Indeed he did, among them Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995), The Departed (2006), and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), which its star, Leonardo DiCaprio, described as depicting “the corruption of the American Dream, and it’s done with a great sense of sadistic humor.”9 Some critics have complained about a repetitive quality in these films, notwithstanding their nuances. Others have wondered whether Scorsese’s fascination with repellent people crosses the line into condoning their behavior (this was particularly the case with The Wolf of Wall Street).10 These are fair questions, even if the answer in this particular study is no. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that the series of films Scorsese has made about (mostly small-time) gangsters, while important, represent

6  •  Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

only one component in his larger body of work—and only one component in his larger exploration of the American Dream. For example, in his 1974 feature Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Scorsese explores the yearning of very ordinary people—in particular the cramped life of a widow movingly portrayed by Ellen Burstyn—and their struggles to win small dignities for themselves amid multiple forms of adversity as they live their lives against the wider backdrop of American mythology (in this case, The Wizard of Oz, whose iconography frames the story). In New York, New York (1977) we observe a dream of success centered in the realm of art, and its cost in terms of trying to achieve and maintain romantic stability. In his 1983 film The King of Comedy, Scorsese focuses his lens on yet another version of the American Dream—the obsession with celebrity—and how the pathology of a deranged talk show fan is emblematic of a wider dysfunction in collective national consciousness. “[The] King of Comedy is my coming to terms with disappointment, disappointment with the fact that the reality is different than the dream,” he has explained.11 Overall, Scorsese is a skeptic of the American Dream, notwithstanding his grasp of its appeal and its relevance for his own experience of sharp upward mobility. But it’s important to understand that the critique he makes in his body of work is a multifaceted one. Like many on the left, he’s attuned to the social structures of inequality that inhibit the quest to realize the Dream, structures rooted in forms of demographic bias like sexism and racism. Like many on the right, he also emphasizes that individuals are moral agents who have the power to make choices, and he shows the price bad choices exact on those who make them and on those around them— not only in terms of a formal legal system that has its own corruptions. But Scorsese also demonstrates a profound understanding of the (often irrational) psychological forces that govern our fate and complicate what we think we want most. So it is, for example, that we’re given the brilliant impresario Ace Rosenthal of Casino, who destroys what he describes at the outset as a dream come true by insisting on the fidelity of a woman he knows never loved him. Or the brutish, irrational fury of Jake LaMotta of Raging Bull, whose repeated incantation, “I’m not an animal,” is at once ironic, pitiable, and haunting in its reminder of our own human limitations even as we try to transcend them in pursuing our dreams. It’s essential not to oversimplify the trajectory that’s being traced here, to insist that the line is straighter or more unbroken than it really is. Martin Scorsese is an immensely gifted man. His movies are about a lot of

Introduction • 7

things—which is why so many people have had so much to say about them. The American Dream is only one strand in his tapestry. It’s one worth tracing, but not at the cost of losing sight of the larger picture. Fortunately, his body of work is readily available for those who seek other patterns or meanings than the ones presented here. It’s also important to remember that Scorsese has not always been the master of his own fate. Like many artists, cinematic and otherwise, the choices available to him at any given time are finite. Financial and other considerations often shaped, if not determined, what projects he undertook and how they turned out. In terms of understanding the arc of his career, Scorsese’s 1972 film Boxcar Bertha was at least as much about getting the opportunity to direct a Hollywood film under the tutelage of producer Roger Corman as it was about any particular set of ideological or artistic preoccupations. In The Color of Money (1986) Scorsese was consciously aiming for a box office hit. Cape Fear (1991) was a matter of discharging debts, contractual and monetary. Hugo (2011) presented the opportunity to work with 3-D technology. And yet, over and over again, Scorsese has been able to explore his preoccupations, especially those related to the American Dream, even in projects where the connection might initially seem remote. When he remade the 1962 version of Cape Fear three decades later, he and screenwriter Wesley Strick rewired the script by threading a vein of corruption into Nick Nolte’s character that helped explain the rage of the ex-con hell-bent on destroying a suburban idyll. Hugo is a film set in 1930s France, but one way of thinking about the story is as an attempt to locate the origins of cinema and the fabulous possibilities of a medium that would ultimately be tapped by the Hollywood dream factory (and, of course, Scorsese himself). And, as already indicated, the dilemma faced by the Dalai Lama in Kundun— saving a way of life threatened by the supposedly benevolent hand of progress—is one that would be readily recognized by Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, whose violent, racist American Dream perished in the Civil War. As dreams sometimes do. It’s important to see that they do, why they do, and how, for better or worse, other dreams live on, whether or not they’re ever realized. Scorsese helps bring such questions, and such truths, into focus. He’s one of a number of great American artists who can help us understand the dynamics of this myth. That’s why it’s worthwhile to pay close attention to what he shows us at the close of a career that will likely live on as the American Century comes to an end.

DREAMY: Harvey Keitel and Zina Bethune in Scorsese’s first feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967). The work of a fledgling director who would have struggled with a full array of professional resources if he actually had access to them, the film nevertheless displays unmistakable signs of an auteur in the making in his camera work and his evocative use of locations, notably the Staten Island Ferry and interiors in Little Italy. (Photofest)

1 The Elizabethan Era

What’s a Nice Girl like You Doing in a Place like This? • It’s Not Just You, Murray! • The Big Shave • Who’s That Knocking at My Door • Boxcar Bertha In the world into which Martin Scorsese was born, three dreams—three forms of aspiration in a culture largely marked by scarcity and barriers— beckoned those seeking a better life. One was a dream of upward mobility (whose primary avenue was education). Another was a dream of power and pleasure (whose primary avenue was force). The third was a dream of wisdom and transcendence (whose primary avenue was the Roman Catholic Church). Though it was not immediately obvious what road he would travel, Scorsese eventually pursued, and attained, the first of these aspirations— after a fashion. Which is to say he became an artist, an aspiration that has traditionally lurked at the edge of the middle-class respectability that’s the most common form of upward mobility. But the other two dreams have shadowed, even haunted, his imagination for his entire life. Ultimately, Scorsese’s upward mobility would result in wealth as well as fame, and he would become a powerful figure in Hollywood (and an influential film historian as well as filmmaker). He would also retain a strong sense of Catholic spirituality. But he became, and remains, first and foremost an artist. For Scorsese, all of these dreams stemmed from the immigrant experience in America—more specifically, the Italian experience, and more specifically 9

10  •  Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

still, the Sicilian experience. Scorsese himself was born in the United States, as were his parents. But all four of his grandparents hailed from small towns outside the Sicilian capital of Palermo, arriving in the New York City neighborhood of Little Italy, where they settled on one of its main thoroughfares, Elizabeth Street, which today is considered Nolita, as in “North of Little Italy.” Scorsese’s father, Luciano (1913–1993), known as Charlie, worked as a presser, a kind of garment worker whose wages were good but at times irregular. His mother, Catherine, one of nine children, took a job making doll clothes rather than go to high school before taking a position at a dress factory where she worked for thirty-nine years. The two began courting in the early 1930s, when Charlie played guitar for Catherine, who lived across the street, and the two took walks in nearby Washington Square Park (“I always looked at the N.Y.U. college buildings and I used to say, ‘I hope some day one of my sons will go there,’ ” she said). They married in 1933 and their oldest son, Frank, was born in 1936. Martin came along in 1942.1 Little Italy had been an Italian enclave since the turn of the twentieth century, when an influx of immigrants, mostly from southern Italy, began displacing the Irish, with whom they would jostle through the early postwar period. Like many immigrant neighborhoods, Little Italy replicated elements of the old world even as its residents—and especially their children— embraced the new. Coming from a region of Italy that was widely regarded as impoverished, crime-riddled, and clannish, Sicilians were often seen as an insular people who, in the words of Scorsese biographer Vincent LoBrutto, “treasure family and are wary of government. They live by a code of honor known as the omerta. The rules of the omerta are strict but unwritten, passed down from father to son, mother to daughter. They define respect, retribution, and right and wrong.” Scorsese described this worldview in more concrete terms: “Where I came from was a Sicilian village re-created on the Lower East Side. It’s not very evolved, but the reality is that on a certain level you grow up full of mistrust. And I’m sorry, it was pounded into me. It really was. My parents were good people, were hardworking people, weren’t in organized crime. But there was that attitude toward the world.”2 For a while, it appeared Scorsese would be leaving the world of his grandparents decisively behind. By the time of his birth, his parents had relocated from Little Italy to the Queens neighborhood of Corona—a move toward the leafier frontier of suburbia that signaled the Scorsese family’s growing affluence and confidence about its future. Their (rental) home was a twofamily house with a yard, near a park. Young Martin spent the first seven

The Elizabethan Era • 11

years of his life there, and remembers it fondly. But there were complications. One was Scorsese’s health: he was asthmatic, and his childhood was marked by medical anxiety. A tonsillectomy when he was four proved psychically traumatic and only made the condition worse. He necessarily became a sedentary child, one forced to observe rather than participate. His family hit upon a way to compensate: “I wasn’t able to participate in children’s sports or games, so my parents took me to the movies. My brother did too. It became a place to dream, to fantasize, to feel at home.”3 The first cinematic image Scorsese recalls seeing was a trailer from a Roy Rogers film in which Rogers jumped from a tree to a horse—and the saturated color process (which he later learned was Trucolor) that made the image so indelible. It marked the beginning of a lifelong love affair. The other setback was apparently financial—and tangled up in family and ethnic tensions. It appears that Scorsese’s paternal uncle Joe was the proverbial black sheep of the family and that Scorsese’s father, Charlie, periodically had to intervene on his behalf with “sitdowns” to prevent Joe’s murder by the local mafia. It also appears—Scorsese is cryptic about this, though he sometimes claims he will make a movie about it—that the family home in Corona was procured with the help of a local crime family, much to the displeasure of their landlord, who resented Charlie for reasons that included his relationship with the landlord’s brother, Charlie’s sharp couture (which was coded as mob-connected), and Charlie’s friendliness with the landlord’s wife. A confrontation between the two escalated to the point of a fistfight, whereupon the landlord picked up an ax. It was the intervention of women, especially Scorsese’s maternal aunt, that prevented the situation from turning deadly. This incident, which may have also been combined with what has been described as “business problems,” led the Scorseses to leave Corona and return to Little Italy. They lived for a spell with Charlie’s parents before getting their own apartment on Elizabeth Street, where Scorsese would spend the remainder of his childhood.4 The move landed Martin squarely back in the tribal world of his clan, which would have fateful consequences for his development. One would be more, rather than less, exposure to the forces that had led to the family’s flight from Corona. “The neighborhood was very violent—the gangs, the fights,” Scorsese’s brother Frank recalled. “It could break out instantly. In the middle of the night, you could hear all kinds of fights and violence. You would pull the shade down and go back to sleep because ‘this was none of your business.’ ”5

12  •  Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

Young Scorsese would sidestep getting tangled in such affairs by keeping his eyes averted and his head down. He recalled a childhood incident when he and his brother came across a crowd huddled around a fallen man whose head was bleeding. “My brother took a look at him, and then he turned to me and said, ‘Oh, he’s only a Jew.’ And that is one of my earliest memories.” The bigotry extended in multiple directions. “It was unheard of for any of us to call a cop, unless it was to give him some graft. Cops were always Irish, always drinking, and always had their hands out. We used to bribe them so we could play stickball in the street.”6 Part of the complication here is that Scorsese was also the beneficiary of tribal protection. “I grew up with a lot of tough guys. They took care of me, and later, after they died, I found out they were monsters—bloodsuckers, horrible! But they were very sweet to me.” Still, the dominant mood was one of fear. “It was like being in occupied France,” he recalled later. “I lived in a world where if you did the wrong thing or said the wrong thing you didn’t know what would happen. I mean, I saw things happen.” He recalled a moment in late adolescence when he and a friend were dropped off on Elizabeth Street, after which the car he had just been in was blocked by a gang claiming the street was their turf. The driver was shot in the eye. The incident furnished the basis of Scorsese’s breakthrough film, Mean Streets.7

Catholic Tastes Given his frail frame and his parents’ desire for respectability, inhabiting this world for long was never much of an option for Scorsese. His street nickname was Marty Pills, an indication of his medical frailty. “The problem was that I could never survive in that group. I was a semi-outsider there, because you had to be somebody who could handle yourself in ­situations”—that is, you had to have “a certain kind of bravado that you should back up.”8 Scorsese observed such bravado closely, and it remained with him, animating much of his best work. But he sensed early, if perhaps not consciously, that he would have to take a different fork in the road. “In my neighborhood, the people in power were the tough guys on the street, and the Church.”9 So Scorsese turned his attention to Roman Catholicism. This is a little surprising. Scorsese’s family certainly thought of themselves as Catholics—in their milieu it was hard not to—but they practiced their faith at a discreet distance. For many Italians, the Vatican was regarded with

The Elizabethan Era • 13

(hidden) disdain. But from an early age, young Martin was enchanted by Catholicism—not so much as a matter of doctrine, but rather one of ritual, endowed as it was with so much visual richness. Of particular importance was the local parish church, (old) St.  Patrick’s Cathedral, which occupied four sides of a city block. “I went to Catholic school and the nuns taught us that this terrific thing happens; at 10:30 God comes down to the altar and it’s great [Scorsese is referring to the Catholic belief in transubstantiation, in which bread and water literally become the body and blood of Christ]. . . . ​ The rituals were dramatic. The liturgies were beautiful. The Stations of the Cross were very dramatic. This colored my whole sense of God.” Scorsese was an altar boy at St. Pat’s, serving at masses at five and six in the morning. He would also go on church retreats, which concerned his mother. “When he would come back, I’d say to my husband, ‘I wonder what they do on retreat.’ He said, ‘I don’t know.’ I would ask Marty, ‘Tell me, what do you do on retreat?’ and he said, ‘None of your business!’ I said, ‘That’s a good answer!’ ” Scorsese’s parents were startled by the depth of their son’s animist imagination, indicated by the pair of eyes he painted on the wall of his bedroom (more typically, he had a crucifix above his bed). “He was a different kind of kid,” Charlie noted—clearly meant as an understatement.10 Scorsese also fell under the spell of a young parish priest, Father Frank Principe, who made a life of faith seem appealing and credible. (It helped that Principe also liked movies.) “He was incarnational in his approach to religion; he was able to find God in things,” Principe recalled of his acolyte. “To him, as to most Italians, religion is incarnational, earthy. The worst sins are not of the flesh, but in pride. The sins of the flesh are signs of human weakness. But pride, putting man in God’s place, that was very serious business because it’s a direct rejection of God.” This precept would indeed go on to be a theme that ran through many of Scorsese’s often lurid, violent, and yet morally engaged movies.11 In early adolescence—and to an ebbing, but lingering, degree for a long time afterward—Scorsese believed he wanted to become a priest. While a Catholic vocation was widely regarded as an excellent path for upward mobility in many ethnic working-class communities, this was less true among Sicilians. “My father was very concerned,” Scorsese explained. “ ‘What if he’s not a real boy? Maybe there’s something different about him, you know.’ ”12 Nevertheless, when he turned fourteen, his parents sent him to a junior seminary, Cathedral College, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the first step on the road to a Catholic vocation. That didn’t last, however—he was too

14  •  Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

interested in girls and rock and roll music—and he transferred to Cardinal Hayes High School, a prestigious Catholic prep school in the Bronx. The hope was that Scorsese would earn good enough grades to attend a good Catholic university such as Fordham. But that didn’t happen, either. There were a few reasons for this. One is that Scorsese was not coming out of a home, or a culture, that placed particular stress on academic achievement. A second is that the usual allurements of adolescence were competing for his attention. There were also intraethnic tensions in his education: the incarnational Italian Catholicism of his childhood did not always mesh with the more puritanical Irish Catholicism he encountered— and at least partially internalized—in the classroom. This was especially problematic when church teachings bumped up against street realities. The Scorseses’ apartment was only half a block from the Bowery, and while the sight of bums on the streets fighting with broken bottles was not necessarily an invalidation of Christianity, he did have experiences that gave him pause. “The first sexual thing I ever saw at night: two derelicts performing fellatio on each other and then vomiting up. I was about thirteen years old but I will never forget the images. Never forget them.” The conflict became more acute over time. “To take a religion like that seriously, and then to hit those streets that are full of lawlessness, that’s another story. You want to know how to combine it and try and put those two together. And this is just a microcosm of the world, isn’t it?”13 Scorsese never resolved the contradiction. But he never forgot about it, either. Nevertheless, by the time he was in late adolescence, it was clear to him that neither the way of the priest nor that of the gangster would be for him. He knew he was expected, and desired, to escape the world of his origins. “Please get out if you can,” he says of the message he heard. “But be decent, be basically a decent person, like my parents were.”14 The question was how. The answer, at least before he finished high school, was far from obvious.

Moving Images In the meantime, there was the movies. The passion that had so animated the sickly child in Corona continued upon his return to Manhattan and deepened considerably. There were multiple streams feeding that passion— consequential ones that would go on to have a major impact on Scorsese’s vision as a filmmaker.

The Elizabethan Era • 15

One major influence was foreign films, which came to him in the most American of ways: the Scorseses were among the first families in the nation to acquire a television set, which they did shortly after their return to Little Italy. Television broadcasters, voracious for content and lacking access to a Hollywood that regarded the medium as a mortal threat, resorted to screening foreign films, which in many cases were butchered to fit in fixed time slots and to allow time for commercials. So it was that this cloistered child was introduced, however haphazardly, to a world of auteurs and neorealists, Ealing Studio comedies and documentaries. He experienced Truffaut and Fellini the way kids today do South Park and The Simpsons—mental wallpaper not so much analyzed as absorbed. Once the Hollywood studios came to see television as an outlet rather than a rival, such fare was supplemented by broadcasts like The Million Dollar Movie, which screened a film twice nightly over the course of a week. Such sustained exposure would prove to be a remarkably fertile seedbed for an impressionable child. But—and this is important—Scorsese remained a devoted moviegoer, an experience with multiple dimensions. His most frequent companion was now his father in a ritual that would be indelibly stamped on his childhood (they would sometimes go twice a day). There was also a convergence between a movie house and God’s house. “There was a sense of peace there,” he said of the Loewe’s theater he attended in the neighborhood. “You had faith when you went to church. And you had faith when you went into a movie theater, too.” In the companion volume to Scorsese’s 1995 documentary series A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies, he elaborated on this idea: “I don’t really see a conflict between the church and the movies,” he said. “Obviously there are major differences, but I can see great similarities between a church and a movie house. Both are places for people to come together and share a common experience. I believe there is a spirituality to films, even if it’s not one that can supplant faith.”15 The synergy between the two became complete when Scorsese saw Catholic classics like Going My Way (1944) and The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945), as well as biblical epics like Quo Vadis (1951) and The Robe (1953). Overall, though, Scorsese’s experience of the movies was a secular one. And an Americanizing one. He was mesmerized by westerns, particularly the work of John Ford—his 1956 film The Searchers would be a touchstone of Scorsese’s career—but also classics like Fred Zinneman’s High Noon (1952) and George Stevens’s Shane (1953). The psychic crucible of his cultural development coincided with the climax of the Hollywood studio

16  •  Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

system’s glory days in films like Stanley Donen’s musical Singin’ in the Rain (1952), whose cultural resonance transcended their aesthetic merit, which Scorsese incorporated “in [his] bones.” Similarly important was King Vidor’s 1946 western A Duel in the Sun and Elia Kazan’s 1955 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, powered by James Dean’s iconic performance. In that tale of a presumably remote world of early twentieth-century Northern California, Scorsese nevertheless identified with the archetypal drama of good sons and bad sons wrestling for their father’s approval, as he and Frank did with Charlie, and Charlie and his brother Joe did with their father.16 The intensity of Scorsese’s immersion in the studio system would prove ironic, as he would come of age in the shadow of its collapse.

Uneducated Guesses “As early as I can remember, the key issue for me was: What does it take to be a director in Hollywood?” Scorsese said at the turn of the twentyfirst century. “Even today I wonder what it takes to be a professional or even an artist in Hollywood.”17 It was virtually impossible for the adolescent Scorsese to view his fascination with film as anything more than a passionate hobby, one he indulged by storyboarding imagined films like “The Eternal City,” which he designated as “Directed and Produced by Martin Scorsese.”18 Such pursuits were more palpable and arresting to him than schoolwork, at which he was never more than merely adequate. And yet his parents nevertheless sensed their child was destined for bigger things. But it was hard to see where—or how. “You’re the eldest daughter, the eldest son—move,” he said of the ethos of the neighborhood. “You come and dig ditches with me at Con Edison. That’s it. You can’t be a CPA. And so with that kind of harshness—the conflict with the New World, the conflict with America—they didn’t know how to take advantage of opportunity. They didn’t know. But with me they [his parents] saw something. But they didn’t know what the hell to do with me.”19 The answer seemed to be education. Marty would go to college and be an English major. He would read literature and become a teacher and, in so doing, achieve middle-class respectability, that most alluring—in large measure because it seemed so realizable—of American Dreams. But even as he was charting that course, Charlie and Catherine’s son was beginning

The Elizabethan Era • 17

to forge another plan, a variant that to some degree would represent a rejection of it: the dream of the artist. The key was New York University. At Cardinal Hayes High School, Scorsese had taken business classes, which he hated. English seemed better, but he wasn’t much of a reader. He discovered in looking at an NYU catalog that it was possible to enroll in a program known as Television, Motion Pictures and Radio, which was part of the liberal arts curriculum (there was no NYU film school at the time). The university had no admission requirements beyond the ability to pay tuition. His parents, unaware of his plans to minor in film, were willing to pay for his undergraduate education, and so in the fall of 1960 he began making the fifteen-minute walk to Washington Square as a commuting student.20 Which was a walk into another world. “NYU was in the Village; it was America, and I was becoming more American,” he explained. “It was not Elizabeth Street.” While not the academic powerhouse it would become, NYU was a well-established bastion of middle-class striving for young men and women seeking to vault into the professional class. (Its early nineteenthcentury origins were as an institution created by, and for, the city’s mercantile elite as a breeding ground for talent.) Yet Scorsese now had something else in mind, something that crystallized in his freshman year when he took a required first-year course in the TMR program on the history of cinema. The course was taught by a charismatic Armenian professor, Haig P. Manoogian, whose four-hour Thursday afternoon classes proved to be a turning point in Scorsese’s life. Manoogian, author of the textbook The Film-Maker’s Art, screened films in his classes, followed by a lecture.21 Many students regarded the course as a snoozer, and were routinely ejected; Scorsese’s class started out with two hundred, which was winnowed down to a fraction of that who would go on to become student filmmakers. Scorsese regarded him as spellbinding. “Haig came in and he would just rattle off, talking faster than me [which is fast indeed],” Scorsese remembered. “He forced you to be dedicated to the exclusion of practically everything else in life, and I think that was important.” Scorsese later noted that the point in time that he was taking the course was significant in its own right. “In Haig Manoogian’s classes in 1960—I always point this out—you only had maybe a little over forty years of cinema to catch up with. Which was very doable.”22 With this foundation, Scorsese was ready to embark on a path to become a filmmaker himself. He had had a good support network. Manoogian would become an important mentor in the years that followed, while Mardik

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Martin, an Armenian who fled Iraq and came to NYU in 1959, would become a close friend and collaborator on a number of projects (he died in 2019). Notwithstanding their anxieties about his career prospects, Scorsese’s parents would continue to be stalwart supporters, whether in providing cash for his projects and meals for his crews, or performing as actors in his movies (which they would do for the rest of their lives). Such champions, combined with the material resources NYU had to offer, furnished the means for Scorsese to complete a directorial apprenticeship over the course of the sixties.

Reel Beginnings The first landmark in this journey was his 1963 film What’s a Nice Girl like You Doing in a Place like This? This nine-minute debut had all the hallmarks of a student film in its brevity, relatively low production values, allusions to the prevailing masters of the moment (in this case, the New Wave cinema of masters such as Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, as well as Mel Brooks, whose 1963 comic short, The Critic, won an Academy Award), and slangy title that refers to nothing in particular. The screenplay, written by Scorsese himself, has a simple premise inspired by the work of British ghost writer Algernon Blackwood. The protagonist of the film is named Algernon, known colloquially as Harry, who becomes obsessed by a painting he buys for his living-room wall (the rather prosaic image features a man, who appears to be Scorsese himself, standing on a gondola-like boat on a stream). Yet even at this very early moment, Scorsese exhibits tremendous visual flair, evident in the aggressive jump cuts he uses, for example, to show the decoration of Harry’s apartment in a sped-up fashion (which may have also economized the use of film). For our purposes, what’s notable about What’s a Nice Girl like You Doing in a Place like This? is the way it documents Scorsese’s efforts to— sardonically—grapple with the American Dream. Harry repeatedly informs us, in voiceover dialogue that would become a signature Scorsese technique, that he’s a fledgling writer of great sensitivity. The picture he buys, which he says he doesn’t even like, increasingly dominates his consciousness. “I figured all of this was because of my intense sensitivity and because I have a vivid imagination,” he explains. “Even my friends say it.” This line of dialogue is followed, as are a number of them, by a cut to a gangsterish friend of Harry’s who repeats what he says, which has the effect of underlining the foolish pretension of his artistic testimonial.

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Harry is able to interrupt his descent into madness by throwing a party in which he meets a girl with whom he falls in love and goes on to marry. It appears he’s been saved by realizing a dream of middle-class respectability. “There we were, back home and all, living a normal, married life,” he explains in voiceover as the camera shows Harry reading and his incongruously stylish wife knitting. He says that he’s a writer and she’s a painter—one who takes that haunting painting out of its frame and replaces it with one of her own, a seashore scene that puts Harry under the spell of obsession all over again. But this time he literally goes over the edge and, in a visual pun, actually disappears into the frame within the frame. The gangster, who hears the splash, gets up from the chair where he’s been repeating lines from Harry’s psychoanalyst, and asks what happened. Harry, now in the picture waving his arms around in the water, notes there was another line the analyst told him: “Life is fraught with peril,” which the gangster duly repeats. The film thus ends on the absurdist note it has sustained all along. And yet it’s possible to discern a moral to the story in that final line: a real artist takes the plunge, recognizes uncertainty, and abjures the comforts of security. In that direction madness may lie, but so too liberation and achievement. Scorsese’s second film, It’s Not Just You, Murray! (1964), made in his senior year at NYU, engaged the American Dream from a different direction, satirizing the self-made myth of the mobster—a myth that valorizes both independent action and tribal loyalty at the same time. Once again, we have a protagonist of dubious credibility named Murray—a common name for Sicilian gangsters23—telling his life story largely in voiceover. Actually, he’s making a movie, repeatedly breaking the fourth wall, which is not always as an artistic choice because he periodically bungles the execution and wants to reshoot scenes. The prematurely balding Murray unwittingly signals his questionable judgment at the outset in his ingenuous materialism. “See this tie?” he asks, gesturing for the cameraman to track him. “Twenty dollars. See these shoes? Fifty dollars. See this suit? Two hundred dollars.” A cut to a white Cadillac: “See this car? Five thousand dollars.” He later sums up his ethos: “What matters is this: I always want to live good.” There’s no doubt what “good” does, and doesn’t, mean. It’s Not Just You, Murray! is ostensibly a narrative of a businessman’s rise to wealth, power, and influence in tandem with that of his best friend, Joe. “In this life, you need help in trying to obtain for yourself the best possible life for yourself,” he says by way of explaining the role of his partner in crime. “Motel chains have been affected by us,” he states, part of an

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awkwardly expressed litany that includes undertakers and foreign aid (meaning gun sales). The Murray-Joe partnership extends to funding a musical with the savagely funny title Love Is a Gazelle, which furnishes Scorsese with an excuse to add a musical number in the middle of the film. In fact, Murray’s mock-documentary is the story of a credulous smalltime mobster repeatedly manipulated by his best friend. “If it weren’t for Joe, I wouldn’t be where I am,” Murray says, a line with unintended irony. “After all, he did set me up in business.” Set him up, all right: it’s Joe, not Murray, who manages to avoid arrest when their Prohibition-era bootlegging operation is raided by the police, and it’s Joe who exchanges significant glances with the woman who will become Murray’s wife before and after their wedding. Actually, it appears Joe is the father of “Murray’s” children; “Everything we did, we did together,” Murray notes in a voiceover. But it appears that the very process of making the movie is engendering uncomfortable awareness on Murray’s part. “Cut the sound!” he shouts as Joe explains himself, allowing it to resume with lame explanations that appear to reassure a Murray who’s anxious to hear them. The film ends with a Felliniesque sequence of Murray throwing a seaside party for family and friends, though it’s Joe who takes the megaphone, and it’s Murray who gets flashed out of the image when a photographer takes a picture of the two of them in the final shot of the movie. It’s not just you indeed, Murray. (In one final bit of irony, the credits roll to the sound of “Pomp and Circumstance.”) It’s Not Just You, Murray! is a remarkably accomplished piece of filmmaking for a college student, all the more so when one considers that Scorsese made it without the technical shortcuts available to any contemporary undergraduate with a good laptop. The film won a Producers Guild Award for the best student film of 1964, which entitled Scorsese to a six-month internship at Paramount Studios that was revoked when the program was canceled. This setback augured tough sledding ahead; Scorsese ended his undergraduate career at NYU in 1965, graduating with a vocation to become a filmmaker but lacking a clear path forward as to how to realize this dream.

Opportunity Knocks The imperatives of adulthood beckoned in other ways as well. It was also in 1965 that Scorsese was married for the first of five times, to an Irish Jewish woman, Laraine Marie Brennan, a somewhat abrupt move given

The Elizabethan Era • 21

that he’d been involved in a four-year relationship with a Sicilian neighborhood girl of whom his parents were fond. Scorsese’s first child, Catherine, was born later that year. Their brief marriage was troubled from the start—Scorsese’s weakening relationship with the Catholic Church appears to have severed entirely during this period—and points to the way his emerging commitment to his art appears to have precluded a stable family life. Scorsese has acknowledged that he has failed to be a parent the way his parents were for him.24 Like a lot of young people struggling to find their way in postcollege life, Scorsese cobbled together an uncertain existence that would allow him to hang in there long enough for something to catch on. He enrolled in a still-emerging master’s program in film at NYU and began working on a set of treatments that would capture the world of his childhood. His student work had been shot on 16-millimeter film, the stock of amateurs; he now made his first professional-grade (35  mm) project, Bring on the Dancing Girls, which was widely regarded as an incoherent failure. In 1967 he made a prize-winning short, The Big Shave, which consists of a man turning a routine morning task into a literal blood bath (there is no dialogue, only the musical accompaniment of jazz musician Bunny Berigan’s 1936 instrumental track “I Can’t Get Started”). Many observers saw the film as an oblique allegory of the Vietnam War, and it’s not hard to see why, with the film arriving at a moment when U.S. engagement in the conflict was cresting—and with the words “Viet ’67” appearing at the bottom of the credits. But Scorsese has also said the film draws more on a sense of personal alienation than geopolitics.25 Actually, the obvious commentary seems to focus on the contrast between gleaming—but hard—white porcelain and bathroom fixtures and the pulsing corporeality of the human body, suggestive of the tension, and inextricable connection, between middle-class respectability and everyday violence, a theme that would become a fixture of Scorsese’s subsequent work. Scorsese faced a key fork in the road in 1966–1967, when he got a job editing news footage for CBS. After a few weeks as an assistant editor, a producer he describes as a notorious stickler pulled him aside and offered him a job—a real job, the kind of rung on the professional ladder on which secure careers are built. “Well, you see, I have it in mind to make features,” Scorsese recalls replying in declining the offer. “Look, you’re young yet,” the producer said. “And many things in life you may want when you’re young, you may not be able to get. And I’m giving you something very tangible

22  •  Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

here.” He warned Scorsese a dream like his doesn’t always come true, but to no avail. “I hope it does in your case,” he said. “But it may not. Know that.”26 Scorsese hardly needed reminding. He spent the second half of the sixties trying to make and distribute his first full-length feature, a tortuous process marked by false starts, bad acting, and money troubles. The original version, starring the first of his important collaborators, Harvey Keitel, was called I Call First. It premiered in 1967, when it was featured at the Chicago Film Festival and praised by a young reviewer named Roger Ebert at the start of what would prove to be a distinguished career as a film critic. But Scorsese could not get the movie into wider release until a distributor offered to take it on—if he added a nude scene. Scorsese shot new footage in Amsterdam starring the now noticeably older Keitel, and the film was re-released as Who’s That Knocking at My Door in 1968. It was re-released again about a year later as J.R. without Scorsese’s permission; it is now commonly remembered by its second moniker. Who’s That Knocking lacks the insouciant charm of Scorsese’s student films, in part because it’s a significantly more complex undertaking by a fledgling director who would have struggled with a full array of professional resources if he actually had access to them. Still, there are unmistakable signs of an auteur in the making in his camera work and his evocative use of locations, notably the Staten Island Ferry and interiors in Little Italy. The movie is also notable for Scorsese’s use of a top shot while JR tells a story, which would become a signature element in his visual repertoire. Plot-wise, the film is dated to a cringe-worthy degree. Keitel’s Italian working-class character, JR, falls in love with a young, college-educated, blond, middle-class woman (Zina Bethune, an experienced actor whose casting was something of a coup) known only as “the Girl.” Their class differences, however challenging, seem surmountable until JR learns the woman has been raped, which makes her damaged goods in his severely Catholic eyes. When she understandably rejects his attempt to “forgive” her the violation, the film ends with JR wandering outside the bar where he’s been drinking to stare at a crucifix at a local church, apparently struggling to overcome his crippling morality. It appears that Scorsese, who wrote the screenplay, means to condemn JR’s provincialism, but the very seriousness with which he takes it makes the movie seem hopelessly sexist from a contemporary standpoint. What’s more durably relevant about Who’s That Knocking is that it marks a pivotal moment in Scorsese’s evolving understanding of the American Dream. What’s a Nice Girl like You Doing in a Place like This? and It’s

The Elizabethan Era • 23

Not Just You, Murray! took a sardonic stance toward it, reflecting the satirical perspective of an adolescent who hasn’t really experienced the dilemmas he satirizes. In Who’s That Knocking, by contrast, the sense of conflict is acute—and taken seriously. JR sees the Girl through the lens of a retrograde sexuality, but there’s an entirely separate, if overlapping, class component to his perception of her: she represents a vision of upward mobility that attracts him even as he clings to the homosocial world of workingclass masculinity represented by his buddies in club settings and on a hiking trip they take upstate. In a pivotal scene toward the end of the film, he attempts a rapprochement with the Girl and visits her apartment. While she makes him breakfast, he wanders through her living room—spare and modernist in sensibility with its abstract paintings. He’s bemused by her record collection, which is dominated by modern jazz like Stan Getz. He’s stunned to learn that she doesn’t have a television, that ultimate device of mass culture. Yet however alien he may find this world, he seems prepared—or prepared in his own mind, anyway—to cross over into a world of middleclass respectability, for which the Girl can be a vehicle despite the fact that she has been sexually compromised in his eyes. Her rejection of his terms thrusts JR back into his old milieu, but the movie ends with an uncomfortable awareness of his provincialism—a theme that will soon become a major one in Scorsese’s body of work. Scorsese himself had been moving beyond his own provincialism through his experiences at NYU, and especially the relationships he had formed in the years that followed. It was at the university, for example, that he met another filmmaker, Thelma Schoonmaker, who would go on to become the editor of his greatest films. He befriended documentary filmmaker Michael Wadleigh, who hired Scorsese to work on Woodstock in 1969, though his contribution to that project was minimal. (“I’m not a country person, I’m allergic to everything,” remembered Scorsese, who wore a white dress shirt with cufflinks to the music festival. “I was complaining, a lot of us were bitching and moaning. But still, it was a transcendent experience.”)27 He got a gig lecturing at NYU, where one of his students was future director Oliver Stone. He also fell in with Jay Cocks, the future film reviewer for Time, with whom Scorsese would collaborate on The Age of Innocence and Gangs of New York. In the years to come, Scorsese’s professional circle would continue to widen. But the intersection of his old and new worlds was not always a smooth one. “Coming from a very tribal place, the real bond for me was one of blood, of family,” he later explained. “When I made the crossover to New

24  •  Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

TRACKING: Von Morton (Bernie Casey) looks on as “Boxcar” Bertha Thompson (Barbara Hershey) hustles Rake Brown (Barry Primus) onto a train in Boxcar Bertha, a crime lark set in the South during the 1930s. The movie, produced by Roger Corman, was essentially Scorsese’s apprenticeship in Hollywood filmmaking. (Photofest)

York University I brought that expectation with me. I expected that the people around me, the new people I met from all different parts of the world, would become family. I don’t think they saw it that way. I expected things from them that they couldn’t provide.”28 His professional aspirations continued to be a struggle. Scorsese thought he had made a breakthrough in 1968 when he was hired to direct his second feature, The Honeymoon Killers, an independent production released in 1970. This was to be a fast-paced, cheaply made true-crime story, but Scorsese stumbled when trying to square his artistic aspirations with the imperatives of a work-for-hire production and found himself fired—a severe psychological blow. He headed out to Hollywood, where he picked up a job editing a concert movie, Medicine Ball Caravan (1971), and befriended peers like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, and Francis Ford Coppola. But Scorsese found Southern California to be an alienating experience, one aggravated by health problems. He did get a break, however, when he met Roger Corman, the legendary producer known for getting good, cheap movies out of up-and-coming filmmakers. He

The Elizabethan Era • 25

offered Scorsese the chance to direct Boxcar Bertha, a loose sequel to Bloody Mama, which had been released the previous year (and which featured a young actor named Robert De Niro). Boxcar Bertha, a period piece about a labor organizer in the 1930s, starred David Carradine and Barbara Hershey, who introduced Scorsese to the Nikos Kazantzakis novel The Last Temptation of Christ, a project that would come to fruition a decade and a half later. Boxcar Bertha was strictly a B-movie enterprise in which Scorsese had little direct input on the script, one that ironically climaxed in the crucifixion of Carradine’s character—the kind of thing Scorsese would have written into such a movie. But he had wide latitude in how to implement the parameters he was given. The movie was shot on location in Arkansas, in color, and had a real budget (at least as far as an erstwhile film student was concerned) of $600,000. The final product was nothing remarkable, but it was watchable and reasonably successful.29 Scorsese had crossed a threshold both as a matter of filmmaking and in terms of earning a coveted membership in the Directors Guild, an essential credential. John Cassavetes, a significant influence and mentor to Scorsese, applauded him for his achievement but added, “You spent a year of your life working on a piece of shit. You’re better than that stuff, you don’t do that again.”30 Following Boxcar Bertha, Scorsese took a job editing the concert film Elvis on Tour (1972). It was the third rock documentary with which he had been affiliated, and it would not have been hard to imagine him settling into such a groove in a way he might have in the news division of CBS. (And in fact, he would go on to make a series of rock documentaries on the Band, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and George Harrison.) But he held fast to his dream, hustling to procure funding to make another feature, one closer in spirit to Who’s That Knocking but more polished and sophisticated. He wanted to return to the world of Little Italy, and pitched the idea to Roger Corman, who thought it would work better with an allBlack cast (this being the heyday of the Blaxploitation pic). Scorsese, dismayed by this idea, found a producer, Jonathan Taplin, a road manager for the Band, who would finance the picture if Corman would distribute it (the film would ultimately be distributed through Warner Brothers; Robbie Robertson of the Band would end up supervising the music of many later Scorsese films). Scorsese set out to work with the crew he had used on Boxcar Bertha for the new project. It was to be called Mean Streets. Scorsese’s Elizabethan age was over: he had left the world of his childhood for good. But his youth was about to enter the realm of myth.

MASS APPEAL: Charlie Cappa (Harvey Keitel) prays for clarity in the pursuit of divergent objectives in Mean Streets (1973). “You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it,” Scorsese says in a voiceover at the start of the film. (Photofest)

2 Redeeming Dreams

Mean Streets • Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore • Taxi Driver With the release of Mean Streets in late 1973, Martin Scorsese embarked on a decade-long stretch of filmmaking creativity that holds its own with that of any of his impressive peers. Not all of these movies were commercial hits (in fact, none of them would qualify as a blockbuster, a status routinely attained by the films of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg). Nor were all of them unquestionable critical triumphs; while Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980) have been considered masterpieces since the time of their release, New York, New York (1977) was, and still is, considered a subpar piece of filmmaking, as was The King of Comedy (1983), though its reputation has grown somewhat since. But whether you actually like these movies or not—and in their vertiginous intensity and sudden explosions of violence, they’re clearly not everyone’s cup of tea—you can’t really watch a Scorsese film from this period and not feel that you are experiencing a powerful artist’s vision of the world. Spielberg, who has described himself as in “a bit of awe” of Scorsese, aptly captures what the experience is like. “Both of us make movies that provoke strong reactions,” he said back in 1991. “The difference is that Marty does this all on his own terms . . . ​he makes movies about things that a lot of us are afraid to admit we even think about.”1 This fearless honesty has sometimes led to Scorsese being accused of condoning, even endorsing, appalling attitudes and behavior. 27

28  •  Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

But his primary motive has always been a necessarily incomplete attempt to capture the world as it is, an effort that can seem shocking to those of us who would prefer to think of it in terms of—well, in terms of what we would prefer. One dimension of Scorsese’s remorseless clarity involves his vision of the American Dream. As we’ve seen, his first efforts as a director involved a playful sarcasm about his protagonists’ presumption of upward mobility, broadly construed, in What’s a Nice Girl like You Doing in a Place like This? and It’s Not Just You, Murray! In the case of Who’s That Knocking at My Door, these tensions were taken more seriously. What makes Mean Streets and the films that followed notable is that what has been a largely implicit understanding that the American Dream exists in different versions is now more clearly foregrounded: we’re much more aware of different dreams, different problems with those dreams, and different outcomes. What’s more, these variants—that of the gangster and the believer; the artist and the wage earner—are often in direct conflict with each other. And more still: the achievement of any of these dreams is an uncertain proposition both in the likelihood of their realization and in their value. Scorsese’s Catholicism serves as a hedge against too ready an embrace of any form of secular salvation, even as the tantalizing allure of earthly versions of the American Dream are ever in view. Scorsese is riveted by the force of this allure and literally dramatizes it through the power of his artistry. In short, there’s an amazing intensity to an early Scorsese movie; it’s not something to be undertaken lightly, and the experience can be as exhausting as it is illuminating.

Sogno Americano It should be said that Mean Streets, which most regard as Scorsese’s first major work, is a movie about many things. Most obviously, and perhaps importantly, it traces the struggle of a young man to honor his faith, his friends, and his family in a world of crime and violence. Less obviously, but certainly importantly, it is an audacious piece of filmmaking by an emerging director who is simultaneously signaling his influences even as he stakes out his own turf. Those influences include Italian neorealists such as Roberto Rossellini, as well as American filmmakers like John Cassavetes, whose 1959 film Shadows was a touchstone for Scorsese. Thematically speaking, Mean Streets calls to mind classics like Federico Fellini’s I Vietelloni

Redeeming Dreams • 29

(1953) and Delbert Mann’s Marty (1955) in its focus on the tension between boyhood ties and romantic commitment. But from the opening moments of the movie, when Harvey Keitel’s Charlie Cappa2 wakes up to the strains of the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” we enter a singular artist’s world. That world is of a particular ethnic sort. “Mean Streets was the first American film to present Italian-Americans as they really lived, away from the Hollywooden and public stereotypes as garlic-eating, hot-headed but loveable, passionate people connected either to middle-class trades as barbers, shoemakers, and fruit and vegetable vendors or as evil but charismatic members of organized crime known as the Mafia,” Scorsese biographer Vincent LoBrutto writes. “It is a brutally honest film that in the [ James] Joycean tradition is so specific about a particular group of people living on a handful of blocks in a neighborhood that it teaches us about the larger world really made up of turf, neighborhoods, and tribal communities that exist within a [larger] social structure that has little or no influence on how its people conduct their lives.”3 The persistence—and dominance—of local values in the context of a wider world is a tension that really crystallizes in Mean Streets, and would remain an important theme in Scorsese’s work for the next half century. The most obvious foil for Mean Streets—because it had been released the previous year and had been a gigantic hit—was Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, especially since the two men were Italian (though Coppola had a far more elite background than Scorsese did) and the two directors, who were friends, were both emerging stars. But Mean Streets stakes out significantly different cultural turf. Roger Ebert captured the difference between the two films succinctly: “The Godfather was about careers. Mean Streets was about jobs.”4 Mardik Martin, who wrote much of the screenplay with Scorsese in the latter’s car, remembered, “At the time, The Godfather was [novelist Mario Puzo’s 1969] book. To us, it was bullshit. It didn’t seem to be about the gangsters we knew, the petty ones you see around. We wanted to tell a story about real gangsters.”5 Scorsese could tell that story because he had seen it up close. To do so, he worked with elements that gave it an authentic flavor, like his footage of the annual San Gennaro festival in Little Italy, which is the film’s setting over the course of a few days. (By the late sixties, the festival had become at least as much a tourist attraction as a community event; at one point in the movie the character Johnny Boy expresses relief that the festival is over, because the streets have been so hopelessly clogged.) He also used locations like the

30  •  Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

old St.  Patrick’s Cathedral, which looms large in the psyche of Charlie’s character. Perhaps the most important resource in this regard is a new face that entered the picture for Mean Streets—and many pictures to come: Robert De Niro. De Niro, who had grown up a few blocks away from Scorsese (the two recognized, but didn’t really know, each other as adolescents, though they had mutual friends), had begun acting around the same time Scorsese began directing, with roles in an early Brian De Palma movie, The Wedding Party (1969), and Roger Corman’s Bloody Mama (1970), the prequel to Scorsese’s Boxcar Bertha. De Niro also had a starring role in John D. Hancock’s 1973 drama Bang the Drum Slowly, in which he played a majorleague baseball catcher of limited intelligence who is dying of Hodgkin’s disease. It was while De Niro was making that film that Scorsese recruited him for Mean Streets. De Niro was initially interested in the Charlie Cappa role, for which Jon Voigt had at one point been attached (something hard to imagine now), but which had actually been written for Harvey Keitel, who ultimately played the part. De Niro came around to accepting the supporting role of the volatile Johnny Boy in one of his signature performances. The troika of Keitel, De Niro, and Scorsese would, in various permutations, be a potent one in Mean Streets and then Taxi Driver before the three were reunited in The Irishman four decades later. In other respects, Mean Streets was a typical (low-budget) production. With the exception of some interior locations and the San Gennaro festival, most of it was shot in Los Angeles, where Scorsese spent the decade of the seventies. Johnny Boy’s antagonist Michael was played by Richard Romanus, an actor who hailed from Vermont, not Little Italy (“I mean, I used to play in a forest,” he later remembered, apparently still dazed that he had wandered into the project).6 Scorsese procured distribution for the film from Warner Brothers, giving the project the imprimatur of a major studio, even if it would never have the status of a major release (Warner’s paid $750,000 for Mean Streets; it spent $14 million on its immediate contemporary, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, which would become both a huge hit and a classic).7 So it was that this document of a parochial world was refracted through the lens of global Hollywood machinery. This fusion of small world and big picture is what made Mean Streets so startling for the relatively few people who saw it at the time of its release: there was nothing else like it in the fall of 1973. Pauline Kael, an early champion of Scorsese—an excerpt of her review was included in the

Redeeming Dreams • 31

film’s trailer—described her experience of watching it with revealing clarity: It has its own hallucinatory look; the characters live in the darkness of bars, with lighting and color just this side of lurid. It has its own unsettling, episodic rhythm and a high-charged emotional range that is dizzyingly sensual. At the beginning, there’s a long, fluid sequence as the central character, Charlie, comes into a bar and greets his friends; there’s the laying on of hands, and we know that he is doing what he always does. And when the camera glides along with him as he’s drawn toward the topless dancers on the barroom stage, we share his trance. At the end of the scene, when he’s up on the stage, entering into the dance, he’s not some guy who’s taken leave of his senses but a man going through his nightly ritual.8

The movie seems almost primitive; indeed, the opening credits roll against a backdrop of a fake home movie in which we see a stagy Charlie shaking hands with a priest at a family baptism and at the party that follows. What follows are sequences that border on disorienting in their documentary immediacy before we realize we’re watching a series of characters going about their jobs: Charlie, an employee of his uncle Giovanni, working as a loan shark and political fixer, glad-handing on the streets during the San Gennaro festival; Tony (David Proval) ejecting a junkie shooting up heroin from the bathroom of the bar he owns; Michael (Romanus) trying to fence what he believes are Japanese lenses that fell off the proverbial truck but that turn out to be essentially worthless adapters. And then there’s De Niro’s anarchic Johnny Boy Civello, who tosses an explosive into a mailbox for no apparent reason other than to gratify his impulsive temperament. Much of the next one hundred minutes or so consists of a series of incidents that seem to unfold with little in the way of narrative logic. There’s Johnny introducing Charlie to a couple of Jewish girls he’s brought to Tony’s bar before Charlie pulls him away for a conversation about his spending habits—one that includes the now-famous improvised “Joey Scala/Joey Clams” dialogue redolent of Abbott and Costello. And then there’s Michael and Tony defrauding a couple of rich boys who have come downtown to buy fireworks (they hail from the wealthy Bronx neighborhood of Riverdale). And Charlie with a posse of pals who visit a pool hall to collect on a debt from the previously mentioned Joey Scala, only to have the room erupt into a brawl thanks to Johnny’s uncontrollably

32  •  Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

irascible tongue (in a memorable sequence enacted without the help of stuntmen). The seeming aimlessness of these incidents underlines that of the world in which these characters live, sealed off from the values and mores of the city around them. The title Mean Streets, suggested by Scorsese’s friend and future collaborator Jay Cocks, comes from a famous Raymond Chandler essay, “The Simple Art of Murder”: “Down these mean streets a man must go.” Locals with whom Scorsese interacted in making the film didn’t like the title; “There’s nothing wrong with these streets,” they would tell him. Scorsese considered Mean Streets a working title for much of the production, but ultimately stuck with it. Notwithstanding the West Coast origins of the phrase, it seems apt to describe the setting and action of the film.9 Scorsese has summed up the plot, such as it is, very simply: it’s about a man “who is trying to live morally in a world that’s not moral.”10 We see Charlie in church in one of the first scenes of the movie—a location to which he returns repeatedly—and we hear his thoughts, often biblical verses, which come to us in Scorsese’s voice. Charlie has, for reasons that are never entirely clear, taken on Johnny Boy as his personal project. The two are clearly childhood friends—their boyishness is on full display in a night scene where they joust with the lids of garbage cans—though they have their frictions. The most important one is that Johnny is constantly borrowing money irresponsibly, and the key narrative tension in the story is Michael’s growing impatience to be repaid on usurious terms of interest. His resentment is clearly about the money, but there’s more to it than that; you sense an undercurrent of anxiety in the possibility that Johnny will renege on the debt in a way that will humiliate (emasculate?) Michael. Charlie mediates their conflict, trying to soothe Michael, but in ways that merely displace, rather than resolve, the tension. Indeed, for all his solicitude, one senses that Charlie merely manages Johnny more than truly caring for him, in part because Charlie wants to stay in his uncle’s good graces—and Giovanni dislikes Johnny. When a contemptuous Johnny finally tells Michael he was a fool to ever lend money that Johnny clearly never intends to pay back, the movie heads toward a violent climax. The American Dream angle of Mean Streets is largely submerged for the first hour or so of its 112-minute running time, but it becomes increasingly important to the resolution—or lack thereof—in the story. The pivotal character in this regard is of course Charlie, who considers himself, and is treated as, his uncle’s heir apparent by all those around him. Giovanni

Redeeming Dreams • 33

hints at one point that Charlie may acquire a business whose owner is deep in hock (“You like restaurants?” he asks his nephew at one point). Charlie clearly has his eye on this prize of upward mobility, mentored by a relative who collects debts and metes out justice after a nasty murder at Tony’s bar (one that seems to come out of nowhere—which is very much Scorsese’s point). Charlie also nurses hopes of starting his own nightclub, which he’ll call Season of the Witch, the name of a song by the mid-sixties folk singer Donovan—and an indication of the dark elements that hover around his bright dream. Of course, Charlie faces a series of complications. The biggest is his faith, which collides directly with the life he’s living in ways he fitfully acknowledges. This conflict is foregrounded orally in the opening line of the movie, which is uttered by Scorsese in voiceover against a black screen: “You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.” Early in the film we see Charlie alone at St.  Pat’s, kneeling at the altar in prayer. “Lord, I’m not worthy to eat your flesh, not worthy to drink your blood,” he says with typical Sicilian carnality. He puts his hand over a holy candle flame, in what seems like a form of masochistic penance. And then he’s off to the bar, where he will reap the earthly rewards of collecting discounted cigarettes stolen from the back of a truck—much of the scene rendered in slow motion to accentuate Charlie’s sense of immersion and mastery in a world of sin (those topless dancers, among them the African American Diane, with whom he will make a plan later). And yet Charlie is not a total hypocrite: he does try to honor the moral imperatives that haunt him by taking on the self-imposed burden of serving as Johnny’s keeper—a thankless task if ever there was one. Charlie’s problem isn’t simply that he has religious longings that impede his pursuit of his dream; it’s also that he has to contend with competing dreams of both himself and others. These two problems converge in the character of Johnny’s cousin, Teresa (Amy Robinson, who would go on to be a distinguished Hollywood producer), with whom Charlie has been involved in an ongoing relationship. This is problematic because Teresa is epileptic, and Giovanni does not approve of her, referring to Teresa as “sick in the head.” His disapproval at one point leads Charlie to break up with her in clumsy fashion. Amid all this remains the problem of Johnny, an anarchic force who sows chaos into their relationship, as he does with just about everything else.

34  •  Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

Unlike other Scorsese women, who embody versions of upward mobility (Zina Bethune in Who’s That Knocking at My Door; Cybill Shepherd in Taxi Driver), Teresa hails from the same world as Charlie does. But we get clear signals of her outward orientation, among them her clothes (jeans and sweaters that are in marked contrast to the fancier outfits worn by the women who attend the bar), and her unselfconscious sexuality, suggesting a degree of emancipation that stands in marked contrast to Charlie’s tortured prudery and racism. We get another angle on this in Charlie’s conduct with Diane (Jeannie Bell), the topless dancer whom Charlie wants to recruit as a hostess for his prospective nightclub. He invites Diane to have dinner with him to discuss the idea, but when his cab arrives at the restaurant where they’re to meet, he chickens out over what he internally calls a “crazy” notion. Charlie seems to have a desire to relate to women on their own terms but is too culture-bound and conflicted to successfully do so, and this does not augur well for the prospect of achieving the things he wants. But the biggest challenge that Teresa poses for Charlie is that she seeks a competing American Dream—a dream of escape from their parochial world to an apartment uptown that is figuratively a thousand miles away. Such a resettlement has little appeal to Charlie, except that it’s increasingly clear that it’s the price of keeping Teresa. The crucial scene in this regard is a conversation about Teresa and Charlie’s future that takes place on a wintry beach—a startling departure from the decidedly urban settings that characterize the rest of the film. Charlie, whose urban wear is almost comically out of place for the setting, makes a list of all the things he hates about the seashore—sun, ocean, beach, grass, trees, and heat. He goes on to list the things he likes (Italian food prominent among them) before ending by telling Teresa, “I like you.” But it’s hard to see how this relationship is going to work. When Teresa complains about her cousin, Charlie instinctively comes to Johnny’s defense— “Who’s going to help him if I don’t?”—invoking St. Francis of Assisi as his role model for caring for Johnny. “Saint Francis didn’t run numbers,” Teresa responds, dryly. Charlie can only make an empty denial that he does. Charlie, then, is being pulled in a lot of different directions. He responds with a kind of self-serving passivity—soothing the increasingly agitated Michael about Johnny’s debt; stalling with Teresa; biding his time with his uncle Giovanni. Not surprisingly, it’s Johnny who forces Charlie’s hand in his contemptuous renunciation of his debt to Michael, who is now bent on murderous revenge, recruiting a hit man played by Scorsese himself with impressive sangfroid. Charlie decides that he needs to flee with Johnny; Teresa insists

Redeeming Dreams • 35

on coming along. They attempt to make their escape via Brooklyn, but barely make it over the bridge. Mean Streets ends in a hail of bullets, its bloody climax ending interspersed with (camera) shots of Tony in his bar’s bathroom, Diane in a coffee shop, and Giovanni, in a nice allusive touch, watching Fritz Lang’s classic 1953 noir The Big Heat on television in his living room: life goes on.11 What’s not clear is how (if?) it will end for the renegades: we see Charlie, kneeling on the street as if he’s praying, eventually helped into an ambulance; Johnny walking aimlessly as the police arrive, trying to stop the blood springing from his neck; and Teresa, her hand dislodged from the windshield by firemen at the scene and emerging from the car with a bloody head. “They’re all of them damned at the end,” Scorsese said years later. “None of them die, which is worse, because they might as well die. The worst thing that could be—and it happens to all the characters at the end of Mean Streets—is that they wind up humiliated, not killed. Humiliated.”12 One is reminded of a parallel world, this one conjured by Bruce Springsteen (mother’s maiden name: Zirilli) in his contemporaneous 1975 epic song “Jungleland,” whose protagonists “wind up wounded, not even dead.” In the world of Mean Streets, then, the American Dream is a dead end. It’s not altogether clear why—or perhaps more accurately, there are multiple reasons why. For Teresa, the problem is clearly structural: she’s trapped in a patriarchal society from which there’s no obvious escape. Charlie perhaps has more agency than Teresa, but he fails to act on it decisively and casts his lot with Johnny, who seems like a proverbial bad seed (ever in an existential now, he doesn’t seem to dream, only act on impulses). Charlie’s passivity is striking and surprising, given the importance of personal drive in the American Dream—and as the typical narrative engine of most movies.13 Looming over it all is the force of the church, which both casts doubt on secular hopes and actively impedes them. Having captured the allure of the American Dream in both a universal and highly particularistic kind of way, Scorsese tips the scales in favor of his Catholic fatalism. While those scales will be periodically recalibrated in the decades to come, the weight of the One True Church will always be a factor in his calculus of the Dream.

A (Woman’s) Western Mean Streets is a deeply personal film. Generally speaking, the ability to  create a work of art on one’s own terms is the ultimate—often

36  •  Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

elusive—goal of a career in the popular media, where considerations of cost and audience expectations often determine the limits of possibility. In Scorsese’s case, however, the next rung up on the ladder was being able to make a true Hollywood movie, the kind of movie he loved as a child. Boxcar Bertha was a step in this direction, but it was a B picture that was part of Roger Corman’s enlightened exploitation approach to assembly-line moviemaking. With Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Scorsese crossed into the big leagues. As noted earlier, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist—a film whose box office returns left Mean Streets in the dust and that remains one of the highest-grossing pictures of all time—was released in 1973, a couple of months after Mean Streets. Even before it was released, the star of that film, Ellen Burstyn, found herself in a position of considerable leverage on the strength of the positive buzz surrounding what was shaping up to be a blockbuster. Executives at Warner Brothers were sending her potential projects that she found unappetizing. “The scripts were full of stereotypes— the woman as victim, the woman as helper—so my agent started looking for scripts for me to bring to Warner.” One in particular, by fledgling screenwriter Robert Getchell, caught her attention: Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. It told the story of a suddenly widowed mother of a twelve-yearold son who decides to realize her dream of becoming a professional singer. But Burstyn wasn’t quite satisfied. “Most scripts need to be polished, but this one needed to be ‘roughed up,’ ” she remembered.14 Executives at Warner Brothers agreed to greenlight the film and asked Burstyn who she wanted to direct it. Burstyn called Francis Ford Coppola, telling him that she wanted someone who was “new, exciting, and unknown.” Coppola told her to see Mean Streets. Burstyn saw the future, and its name was Martin Scorsese. She did have one question, however. “I told him how much I liked Mean Streets. Then I asked, ‘What do you know about women?’ And he said, ‘Nothing. But I’d like to learn.’ I thought that was a wonderful answer.” In addition to its strong female cast (which included the reliably excellent Diane Ladd), the ensuing project included Marcia Lucas as editor, Toby Carr Rafelson as production designer, and Scorsese paramour Sandra Weintraub as associate producer. All these women—and a prepubescent Jodie Foster, on the cusp of great things15—would compile substantial canons of work in Hollywood. And Burstyn’s shrewd instincts would pay off handsomely: she would win the 1974 Academy Award for her leading role in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. (Because she had a

Redeeming Dreams • 37

APPETIZING: Alice Wyatt (Ellen Burstyn) flirts with David (Kris Kristofferson) in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974). Burstyn, a star with leverage in the midseventies, chose the rising Scorsese to direct the film. “I told him how much I liked Mean Streets,” she explained. “Then I asked, ‘What do you know about women?’ And he said, ‘Nothing. But I’d like to learn.’ I thought that was a wonderful answer.” (Photofest)

stage gig, Scorsese accepted the award on her behalf.)16 Getchell would get the nod to develop a hit sitcom, Alice (1976–1985), based on the film, in which Vic Tayback would reprise his role at the owner of Mel’s diner (Linda Lavin would take the title role, and Polly Holliday would take on the role of the foul-mouthed waitress). Given its settings in New Mexico and Arizona—which ranged from faceless hotels and gas stations to a horse ranch, property of the character played by Kris Kristofferson in an iconic role—Scorsese was eager to visualize Alice as a kind of western, an opportunity to pay homage to personal heroes like John Ford, Fred Zinnemann, and Anthony Mann in the way they used landscapes as a form of storytelling. But he also understood the limits of where he was coming from. “For me, Alice was like a New Yorker’s view of the West,” he later explained. “When I was little, I remember being very, very obsessed with Westerns. I guess because of the scenery and the horses and the animals. Of course, I was totally allergic to animals. I couldn’t touch any animals. So the more I couldn’t, the more I saw these beautiful Westerns in Cinecolor and Trucolor. And then, of course, the

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great Westerns, too with beautiful Technicolor. . . . ​And I liked them, I guess, because of the outdoors and the sense of western life. Of course, where I lived was exactly the opposite.”17 This combination of fascination and distance resulted in the distinctive opening sequence of the movie, a stylized prologue that invokes and subverts Hollywood mythology—as well as that of an American Dream deeply entwined in it. The film begins with the Warner Brothers logo, rendered in its credit style of the World War II era, to the accompaniment of one of the period’s leading ladies, actor Alice Faye, singing her Academy Award–winning rendition of “You’ll Never Know,” from the 1943 film Hello Frisco, Hello. The ensuing establishing shot depicts a farmhouse scene that evokes a series of classic films, in particular The Wizard of Oz and East of Eden. Scorsese spent $85,000 constructing the set, the first time he had the luxury of building one from scratch. A title card explains that the eight-year-old girl we see is the title character as a child in Monterey, California. Alice comes over the bend of a hill down a road bounded by a post-hole fence. A man is feeding chickens outside as the sun sets; inside the farmhouse a meal is being served. A Depression-era car is parked outside. The setup satirizes The Wizard of Oz, a film that was a shared point of reference for Americans born anytime in the second third of the twentieth century. What makes the scene distinctive is the red-filtered light that suffuses the frame—lighting reminiscent of production designer William Cameron Menzies, who used a similar approach in Gone with the Wind. But while Menzies deployed the tactic to create the effect of brilliant sunsets, the garish red of Alice calls attention to its own artifice.18 The Wizard of Oz offered a compelling vision of an alternative dream world; Gone with the Wind offered a compelling vision of a lost dream world. But Alice, reflecting the sensibility of its director and the ironydrenched culture of the 1970s, subverts this mythology at the very moment it harks back to it. “Wait—no, wait. I can do that better,” young Alice says as Alice Faye finishes “You’ll Never Know,” and begins singing it herself. “I know I can sing better than Alice Faye,” she says, cradling a doll in her arms. “I swear to Christ I can.” This unexpected profanity is followed by Alice’s mother telling her to come in the house for dinner “before I beat the living daylights out of you.” Alice pauses and looks down at her doll again. “You wait and see,” she says. “And if anybody doesn’t like it they can blow it out their ass.” She finishes the song, whose last word—“now”—turns into an echo chamber, at which point we cut to twenty-seven years later and a long

Redeeming Dreams • 39

shot of Socorro, New Mexico, mountains in the distance, to the raucous strains of Mott the Hoople’s 1973 hit “All the Way from Memphis” (“You look like a star but you’re still on the dole,” goes a key line in a song about the challenges of realizing a dream). As the camera moves into the home of the now-married Alice Wyatt, we realize that the diagetically rendered music is being listened to, loudly, by Alice’s eleven-year-old son, Tommy (Alfred Lutter), much to the irritation of his father, Donald (Billy Green Bush), a trucker. Clearly, we’re not in Kansas, in any sense of the term. In a way, the opening scenes of Alice invert the logic of the prologue: if we are first presented with a dreamy image of a mythic life that is rudely broken, here we are presented with a picture of an unhappy home— estranged husband and (house)wife, as well as a state of mutual hostility between father and son—in which it’s possible to detect a strain of resilience and affection in Alice’s sarcastic banter with Tommy. “How did I get such a smart-ass kid?” she asks him. “You got pregnant,” he replies. But Alice extracts a reprisal a moment later when she playfully trips him on her way to the kitchen. “What are you doing on the floor, kid?” But such efforts at aggressive good cheer cannot overcome Donald’s relentless negativity. (“My husband hates me,” she tells a grocery employee in despair; a subsequent amorous invitation is followed by what appears to be perfunctory lovemaking). About the only truly joyous relationship Alice has at this point in the story is with her neighbor, Bea (Lelia Goldoni), in a movie where female friendship looms large. But their easy banter gets shattered when Alice gets a phone call telling her that Donald has been killed in a truck accident. Any sense of liberation this might afford seems minor compared with the sudden burden of widowhood and single-motherhood for a woman who must now be the sole breadwinner in her family. What’s surprising—and more than a little audacious—is how Alice proposes to address this crisis: by reigniting the tentative singing career she had before she married Donald. She sells off her worldly possessions, packs up her beat-up station wagon, and begins a summer-long road trip back to her roots in Monterey, Tommy in tow. Along the way, she plans a stint in Phoenix, where she checks them into a cheap motel and begins looking for work (the contrast between the splendor of the western landscape and a more placeless one of fast-food restaurants, gas stations, and parking lots is a strong visual motif in the movie). Getchell’s screenplay is grimly realistic in showing how hard it is to get a job, any job, for an anonymous single woman, and Alice quickly becomes aware just how quixotic it is to think

40  •  Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

she could ever get one as a singer. But a kindly restaurant owner ends up giving her an audition, and we hear Alice perform. Lightning doesn’t strike. In a conversation with Scorsese, critic Richard Schickel tersely assesses the quality of the performance we hear: “She’s fine, but she’s not great.” His response: “No, but for a lounge singer, she’s great.” This exchange actually points out an important truth about the American Dream: it’s not always about reaching the apogee of success. Sometimes just having the privilege of practicing one’s craft for minimal pay is enough (“It was, you know, better than whatever the hell she was doing,” Scorsese notes).19 Relatively few people get to be stars, and if that were the criterion for the American Dream’s validity, it would have died long ago. Democratic dreams are typically small: businesses owned; educations acquired; nice work when you can get it. Which is not to say such modest dreams are easily attained—or sustained. As Alice learns painfully, they’re not only hard won, but can also be quickly lost. The biggest snakes in her garden are men. There’s the potential employer, for example, who upon meeting her asks, “Would you mind turning around for me?” “Turn around for you?” she asks. “Why?” “I want to look at you.” “Look at my face,” she replies, irritated. “I don’t sing with my ass.” She leaves. In this case, at least, Alice knows what she’s dealing with. A much bigger problem is Ben Eberhardt (Harvey Keitel), a young man in a cowboy hat who hits on her during a break between sets at the bar and whom she regards as little more than a pest. But he’s a charmer who wears her down, and before long the two are dating. Things are looking up until Ben’s wife, Rita (Lane Bradbury), shows up at the hotel, making Alice (and Tommy) aware that she’s a mistress, not a girlfriend. This unhappy discovery is followed by the arrival of a furious Ben demanding to come in, which he does by breaking down the door and trashing the room. He literally kicks Rita out—she flees for her life—and when Alice tries to calm him down, he threatens her: “Goddamn it, Alice! Don’t ever tell me what to do!” Terrified, she quickly assents to his request that they meet later. But in the next scene we see Alice and Tommy hastily cramming their belongings into a suitcase and abandoning the debris-filled room. Alice’s singing career in Phoenix is over. Her next stop with Tommy is Tucson. Her recent defeats lead her to suspend her quest to perform in favor of mere survival. To that end, she

Redeeming Dreams • 41

takes a job as a waitress at Mel and Ruby’s café, presided over by the titular Mel (Tayback), the foul-mouthed Flo (Ladd), and the timid, semicompetent Vera (Valerie Curtin). Alice dislikes Flo’s profanity, and the two settle into mutual hostility until Flo exasperatedly replies to Mel’s demand that she tell him where the missing Vera is by saying, “She went to shit and the hogs ate her!” Alice covers her face in such a way that Flo is genuinely sorry for offending her until she realizes that Alice’s tears are ones of laughter, and the two embark on a lovely friendship captured in scenes of easy camaraderie. Tommy, for his part, has been enduring long days of boredom, but Alice agrees to guitar lessons, which allows him to befriend the subversive, larcenous, and genial Audrey (Jodie Foster). Alice also makes a new friend: the lanky, easygoing, but persistent David, played by Kristofferson, embodying a masculine archetype that’s literally and figuratively thousands of miles away from the men of Mean Streets. A horse rancher who’s as adept at fixing his truck as conversing at the diner, he takes an interest in Alice—and takes on an eager Tommy hungry for a male role model. The relationship between these three develops quickly in the last third of a 112-minute movie, but it has an easy, unforced quality (one Tommy clearly regards as about the most natural thing in the world). But the narrative logic of the story suggests there has to be a final crisis before the climax, and this one takes the form of a spat between David and the ever-bumptious Tommy that leads David to discipline the boy by hitting him—something that Alice regards as beyond the pale. There is of course the climactic scene, where David shows up at the café and tries to reconcile (a drama within a drama, as their decisive exchange occurs as the customers look on). And it’s here, it seems, that the various parties involved in making Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore found themselves grappling with a thorny problem: How should this movie end? Little in the narrative logic of this iconoclastic movie suggested it should have a conventional happy ending, and indeed Getchell’s original script did not. But Warner Bros. studio chief John Calley, mindful of conventional audience expectations, mandated a change. “Marty and I were disgusted,” Burstyn recalled. “The end they wanted was a movie ending, not a real ending— which is why Marty had everybody in the restaurant applaud, because that was his way of acknowledging that this was the movie ending.” The actual outcome of the romance as shown takes the form of a compromise suggested by David: that he would offer to sell the ranch and go with Alice and Tommy as she pursued her dream in Monterey. But that would prove

42  •  Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

to be unnecessary, because Alice decides that she can as easily pursue her dream in Tucson as she can in Monterey (and Tommy is delighted to stay put, in part because he likes the idea of going to school with Audrey).20 In an indication of where the center of the movie’s gravity ultimately rests in terms of the men in her life, the final scene is one of Alice and Tommy conversing on a city sidewalk—with a sign for the aptly named Monterey restaurant looming in front of them. Scorsese claims this was coincidental. If so, it was quite serendipitous.21 “It’s really about her and her son,” he says of the ending. “She finds another man, and she moves on with her life. It was not for feminists. They felt that because she took another man, or got involved with another man, it was undercutting the independence of the woman, I guess, the empowerment of the woman. But that’s the movie I made.”22 It’s not clear to whom Scorsese is referring here, many years after the fact (though he has made similar comments all along).23 But there certainly were feminists who critiqued the film. Perhaps the most important was Molly Haskell, who reviewed Alice for the Village Voice at the time of its release. “Alice is presented to us, in Robert Getchell’s screenplay, as the victim of Hollywood brainwashing, men, and the American Dream, but I would suggest she is a victim of a new, more fashionable fantasy. Her strings are not pulled by men, but by something called Raised Consciousness, in whose name she is enjoined to uproot herself and make herself over, reinvent herself by repudiating her past,” Haskell wrote. “What we have,” she concludes in the final paragraph of her review, “is someone who, while pretending to be a little person, is much larger than the life described and thus is a betrayal of its severely circumscribed possibilities. If Burstyn— and Kristofferson, and Diane Ladd, and Harvey Keitel, and Alfred Lutter— didn’t leap out of the film, we probably wouldn’t enjoy them the way we do. But let’s not call that realism. And let’s not pat ourselves on the back for having come such a long way from poor old Hollywood!”24 Haskell is correct in arguing that Alice is at best incomplete in its repudiation of a myth of autonomous self-realization, feminist or otherwise: the story as told here is just too damned appealing. Certainly, Scorsese gives a strong indication that it is part of his intention to debunk myths in this movie, just as he did in Mean Streets. But however lamentable either may find it, the film does show the remarkable resilience of the American Dream even in a skeptical era, and even for artists who may want to repudiate it. Alice doesn’t need a man. But it appears that she does need a dream,

Redeeming Dreams • 43

a hope that will sustain her as a lover and mother, even if it’s far from clear it will ever be more than fitfully realized. That, finally, is what her widowed liberation appears to mean. But Scorsese was not done plunging into the breach. His next film would be his most resolutely antimythic of all.

A Dream of Hell At first glance, it’s hard to see how Taxi Driver has anything at all to do with the American Dream: a story about a psychopathic Vietnam vet who tries to kill a presidential candidate and ends up murdering a pimp and some other players in the sex trade hardly seems like a tale of mobility of any but the most sordid sort—as in a descent into hell. But on closer examination, one can fairly say that the film depicts an American Dream of a particular kind: a religious one. And more specifically still, a (warped) Dream of redemption. Which is hardly surprising once one considers the project as an intersection between Scorsese’s Catholic imagination and the Puritanical heritage of the film’s screenwriter, Paul Schrader. Schrader grew up in Michigan in a deeply religious Calvinist Christian Reformed household, a denomination with roots in the seventeenth-­ century Dutch Church. He didn’t see his first movie until he was seventeen years old, but proved to be a quick study; after earning a bachelor’s degree at Calvin College, a seminary in Michigan, he made his way to UCLA, where he earned a master’s degree in film studies on the recommendation of Pauline Kael, who mentored him. Schrader wrote film criticism before trying his hand at writing a screenplay with his brother Leonard; that project, The Yakuza, prompted a bidding war that ultimately earned the pair over $300,000 (the film was helmed by the seasoned professional Sydney Pollack and released in 1974). But Schrader was in a bad place by the midseventies. He had lost his wife and his professional momentum, and was close to losing his sanity. Living out of his car, he sustained himself on a regimen of alcohol, junk food, and pornography before checking himself into a local hospital with an ulcer. While speaking to a nurse, he realized it was the first time he had uttered words in weeks. “That was when the metaphor of the taxi cab occurred to me,” he later remembered. “That is what I was: this person in an iron box, floating around the city, seemingly alone.”25

44  •  Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

Schrader began writing a screenplay in which he drew on Fyodor ­ ostoyevsky’s classic 1864 novella Notes from Underground (principally in D its use of an unlikeable protagonist) and the diaries of Arthur Bremer, who had attempted to kill Democratic presidential candidate George Wallace in 1972 (Wallace spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair). Schrader took as its epigraph a line from an autobiographical sketch by novelist Thomas Wolfe: “The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.” It was this suggestion of universality— a strange and even disturbing assertion that the film’s central figure, Travis Bickle, is Everyman—that Scorsese latched onto and repeatedly affirmed for decades after making the movie. “When I read Paul’s script, I realized that that was exactly the way I felt, that we all have those feelings, so this was a way of embracing and admitting them, while saying I wasn’t happy about them.”26 This idea of desperate alienation carried straight through to the marketing of the movie at the time of its release in 1976. “On every street there’s a nobody who dreams of being somebody,” reads the copy on a poster promoting the movie, depicting a forlorn Robert De Niro walking outside a pornographic theater in Times Square. “He’s a lonely forgotten man desperate to prove he’s alive.”27 Taxi Driver came to Scorsese through his friend Brian De Palma, who worked with Schrader on their 1976 project Obsession. De Palma liked the script, but couldn’t see how it could ever be made. Besides Scorsese, however, there were a few other people—people in a position to make things happen—who liked it as much as he did. One was De Niro, who had just won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Part II (1974) and as such was something of a hot ticket. Two others were the husband-and-wife producer team of Julia and Michael Phillips, fresh off their Best Picture Oscar for The Sting (1973). Yet even with such powerful industry players behind the project, it was hard to get funding. They did manage to wring $1.3 million out of Columbia Pictures, which would make it a low-budget enterprise. The film was shot in Manhattan in the summer of 1975—a brutally hot and humid one that also coincided with a strike by sanitation workers (“Everywhere I aimed the camera, there were mounds of garbage,” Scorsese remembered). The image of dirty steam rising from the city’s streets is one of the most indelible visual motifs of the movie, beginning with the establishing shot of a taxi emerging from the mist rising from a sewer.28

Redeeming Dreams • 45

MEDIUM SHOT: Travis Bickle in the bloody climax of Taxi Driver (1976). At first glance, it’s hard to see how the film has anything at all to do with the American Dream. But on closer examination, one can fairly say it depicts one of a particular kind: a (twisted) dream of redemption. (Photofest)

Like its contemporaries The French Connection (1971) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Taxi Driver is a remarkable document of New York City at its seventies nadir—a vivid portrait of a gritty, decaying metropolis adrenalized with feverish energy. The film’s locations include familiar sites like Columbus Circle, as well as archetypally seedy apartments like Travis’s residence in a building on Columbus Avenue and West Eighty-Ninth Street, which was scheduled for demolition shortly after the shooting for the film ended (this was the moment just before the Upper West Side would undergo its dramatic gentrification). “I’m telling you, 42nd Street, Eighth Avenue, that was hell, shooting in those places,” Scorsese said of Times Square, then a magnet for pornography. “That was like biblical in my mind—hell and damnation and Jeremiah, and someday a real rain was going to come.”29 The irony—and it’s a disturbing one—is just how anonymous Travis Bickle is, inserted into this pulsing urban environment. His very name

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seems somehow lacking in any clear ethnic specificity. In Mean Streets, Scorsese made a movie whose characters were marinated in their native milieu, something he also tried to do, albeit with more conscious effort, in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. But Travis is chilling in his inconspicuousness. We know nothing about him when we meet him other than the fact that he’s a Vietnam veteran, that he suffers from insomnia, and that he wants a job driving a cab—even if it means working in the worst neighborhoods in the city in the middle of the night—so that at least he can make his sleeplessness pay. At one point we hear him write a letter to his parents, apologizing that he will be unable to visit them because he has a job to do for the government (a lie, or perhaps a delusion). But we never learn where he’s from, what he did before or during his military service, or exactly why he seems so radically alienated. We do see him make some attempts to connect with other people, but these fumbling efforts are uniformly awkward. There’s the young Black woman working the concession stand (Diahnne Abbott) at the pornographic theater whom he hits on in a way that’s more painful than it is lecherous (she makes short work of him in any case, scaring him away by yelling for the manager). He has halting conversations with his fellow cabbies, notably Wizard (Peter Boyle). Sometimes he’s experienced as hostile even when he’s not trying to be, which is the initial reaction of the man who eventually hires him. Scorsese made a point of isolating his protagonist visually as well. “Whenever I shot Travis Bickle, when he was alone in the car or whenever people were talking to him . . . ​the camera was over their shoulder[s]. He was in everybody else’s light, but he was alone. Nobody was in his frame. As much as possible, I tried to stick with that.”30 Travis’s primary interlocutor is himself. The narrative arc of the movie is traced in voiceover diary entries that stretch from May through July of an unnamed year. Sometimes his words are disturbing in their pathos: “I believe that someone should become a person like other people,” he says early in the film. Other times, his thoughts are ominous in their implicit violence: “Someday a real rain will come and wash the scum off the streets.” There’s a brooding quality in the early scenes, which are both aimless and intense. The plot of the movie clicks into place when Travis sets his sights on Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a gorgeous young woman who works as a staffer for the fictive presidential candidate Charles Palantine (Leonard Harris), whose comically inane campaign slogan is “We are the people.” (At one point, Palantine rides in Travis’s cab, and he patronizingly tells Travis, “I’ve

Redeeming Dreams • 47

learned more riding in taxicabs than all the limos in the country,” though one of Palantine’s more attentive handlers riding with him is disturbed when Travis offers the opinion that he’d like to take all the ugliness in the city around him and “flush it right down the fucking toilet.”) We see Betsy interact with a colleague, Tom (Albert Brooks), who is obviously, but unsuccessfully, seeking to engage her romantically. “I’ll play the man in this relationship,” he says self-effacingly, a line that does little to engender confidence in him. Betsy notices Travis staring at her from across the street, but she seems to find him more intriguing than unnerving, and when he boldly makes his move to ask her out, he actually succeeds in convincing her to join him at a coffee shop. “I don’t believe I’ve met anyone quite like you,” she says after a somewhat disjointed conversation that nevertheless appears to feed her interest in novelty. And so it is that she agrees to go on a date with him. (In something of an inside joke, we learn that Betsy is a Kris Kristofferson fan—Kristofferson of course was a star of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore— and Travis buys her one of his albums as a gift.) The date is a disaster. Travis takes Betsy to one of his usual pornographic haunts, where the Swedish movie seems on the screen more like a squirminducing biology documentary than a tawdry sex film. Betsy, disturbed and appalled, leaves behind an uncomprehending Travis as she gets in a cab. Travis tries to win her back—one of the most haunting scenes in the movie is his attempt to reconnect with her by payphone as the camera wanders away from him into a soullessly empty hallway—but to no avail. He sadly concludes that she is “cold and distant, just like the rest of them.” Travis drifts in an ominous new direction. “I just want to go out and do something,” he reports in one of his voiceovers. “I got some bad ideas in my head.” He makes an attempt to reach out to Wizard, who seems incapable of responding effectively. “A man takes a job and that job becomes who he is,” he says to Travis, largely apropos of nothing, groping to help him. “Go on, get laid, get drunk,” he finally says. “You got no choice anyway. We’re all fucked.” Travis is brutally frank in response. “You know, that’s about the dumbest thing I ever heard,” a remark Wizard takes in stride. “Don’t worry, killer,” he says in an ironic prophecy. “You’ll be all right. I’ve seen enough to know.” This is not a response that breeds confidence. It’s important to note that Travis’s descent takes place against a bleak urban landscape where his loneliness and alienation are not exceptional, but rather symptomatic. This point becomes vividly clear in a short scene that’s tangential to the story but potent in terms of its impact on the mood

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of the film. Travis picks up a cuckolded husband (played by Scorsese himself in a truly memorable performance) who demands that Travis keep the meter running once they reach his destination at the apartment building where the woman is apparently conducting an affair with a Black man. The language this diminutive but agitated man uses—deeply racist, misogynist, and violent—is shockingly repellent (indeed, it’s hard to imagine it ever being used in a contemporary film) without entirely wiping away our sympathy for a pathetic figure who is essentially paying Travis to be his front-seat therapist. What may be even more unnerving is Travis’s unmoving silence in the face of this diatribe. Scorsese makes a devastating cut, in which he reverses the camera angle and shows us the back of Travis’s utterly still head. It’s hard to say who’s more callous: the man who purveys murderous rhetoric or the one who silently absorbs it. This is the turning point of the movie. “It was the back of his head that did it all,” Scorsese said later. “I’d say something a little more outrageous and he still wouldn’t move. It was getting him crazy. Because what I was saying was going to instill in him the violence. That was the idea. So I kept thinking of more outrageous things to say [much of the scene was improvised], and the words came out, and that was it.”31 Travis now acts on a suggestion from another cabbie that he get a gun to protect himself, and ends up buying a virtual armory from an illicit gun dealer that includes a .44 Magnum, the firearm Scorsese’s character talked incessantly about. We see Travis methodically master his new weapons (among them knives) and develop devices to aid their rapid deployment. He increasingly focuses his energy on Palantine as a plan to assassinate him takes shape, and he stands before a mirror, imagining hostile exchanges with imaginary enemies—hence the famous (improvised) line “Are you talkin’ to me?” that he repeats as a prelude to drawing a weapon. Travis starts hanging out around Palantine headquarters, attracting the attention of a Secret Service agent who engages him in a conversation where their mutual suspicion of each other is apparent but unstated. Upon the agent’s request, Travis gives his name as Henry Krinkle of Fairlawn, New Jersey; when the agent points out that he has offered a six-digit zip code, Travis apologizes and says he was thinking of his phone number (which of course would be seven digits). It’s important to note that the rage building inside of Travis Bickle is not one of pure nihilism. One can discern a thread of longing to break out of this isolation, to somehow connect and accomplish something worthwhile.

Redeeming Dreams • 49

His plan to kill Palantine—in order to impress Betsy?—is a warped manifestation of this desire to do something meaningful. “Listen you fuckers, you screwheads, here is a man who would not take it anymore,” he says in voiceover. “A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is someone who stood up.” He accidentally finds himself with—and seizes—an opportunity to pursue vigilante justice when the convenience store in which he’s shopping is robbed. Travis, who’s behind the man who holds the owner at gunpoint, shoots the assailant. He leaves the scene of the crime because his gun is unregistered. If there’s justice here, it’s rough and incidental. We may take visceral pleasure in crime not paying, but the scene—harsh lighting, prosaic setting, an owner who’s friendly to Travis but enjoys beating his apparently dead assailant with a bat—is hardly romanticized. We know something’s not right here. But not entirely wrong, either. Here we must turn to a secondary plot line in Taxi Driver that seems almost random but moves into the foreground as the story proceeds. Early in the movie, a child prostitute (Jodie Foster, in the breakout performance of her career) jumps into Travis’s cab, clearly agitated. Before he can fully absorb what’s going on, her pimp, Sport (Harvey Keitel), comes over and coaxes her out of the cab, throwing a twenty-dollar bill onto the front passenger seat as hush money for Travis. Travis carries around that twenty-dollar bill as a kind of evil talisman, tucking it into his jacket but not putting it with the rest of his money, where he will periodically find it in his daily activities. A couple of other incidental neighborhood encounters with Foster’s character, whose name is Iris—a flower, and also a lens—follow, among them almost hitting her with his cab when she’s crossing the street. Travis finally acts on his curiosity, accosting Iris and a friend on the street. She tells him to talk with Sport, who’s down the block standing in the doorway of an apartment building, to arrange a more substantial encounter. Travis approaches Sport, who finds Travis suspicious—is he a cop?—before proceeding to a hard sell, promoting Iris’s sexual prowess in brutally clinical terms. Scorsese pays for her time and takes her to a neighboring building with a bedroom for such trysts. But Travis has no interest in sex; he’s appalled by Iris’s exploitation and remonstrates with her that she needs to get out of this situation. Iris doesn’t share his urgency but, recognizing his interest in her welfare, agrees to meet him for breakfast the next day. (On his way out the door, Travis gives the twenty dollars as a tip to the intermediary who manages the trade between prostitutes and their

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johns.) The ensuing scene between Iris and Travis is marked by some truly marvelous acting, much of the dialogue improvised, in which Travis has the one authentic conversation of the movie that is literally framed as such. “He’s the scum of the earth, the worst sucking scum I have ever, ever seen,” Travis says of Sport, trying again to talk Iris into running away. Iris, whose slathering of jelly on her toast and sucking of a lollypop underline the child who persists amid an all too great worldliness, speculates that it might be nice to join a commune in Vermont. She suggests they go together. Travis replies that communes don’t strike him as very clean—a motif of obsession amid his life of squalor—and that he, in any case, has to do “something very important for the government.” Their encounter ends inconclusively. Travis is hurtling toward a climax. He burns the flowers he sent to Betsy that had been returned; he kicks over his television, destroying it, while watching a soap opera. He sends his parents a garish anniversary card, apologizing that he can’t see them but stating that he is going with a girl and doing government work. He writes a note to Iris: “This should be enough for your trip [to the commune]. By the time you read this I will be dead.” He puts the note and $500 into an envelope. We hear him say, “Now I see it clearly. My whole life has been pointed in one direction. I see that now.” And then, bearing a Mohawk haircut—the warrior on the warpath— he heads off to kill Palantine. Travis Bickle is trying to realize a dream of redemption. “Travis really has the best of intentions; he believes he’s doing right, just like St. Paul,” Scorsese later explained. “He wants to clean up life, clean up the mind, clean up the soul. He is very spiritual, but in a sense Charles Manson was spiritual, which doesn’t mean that it’s good. It’s the power of the spirit on the wrong road. The key to the picture is being brave enough to admit having these feelings, and then act them out. I instinctively showed that acting them out was not the way to go, and this created even more ironic twists to what was going on.”32 The assassination attempt fails. Travis is too visible a figure at the Palantine rally he attends, and attracts the attention of the Secret Service (notably that agent he met earlier), who close in on him. But Travis escapes, and apparently on instinct, he makes his way back to the site of his encounter with Iris, where he again encounters Sport in the doorway. Sport regards Travis—whom he initially doesn’t recognize—warily, recognizing Travis’s barely concealed air of aggression, telling him to “get back to his tribe.” But he’s nevertheless surprised, as are we, when Travis suddenly shoots him.

Redeeming Dreams • 51

The bloodletting is just beginning. Travis proceeds up to the apartment where Iris has her room. He shoots the manager whom he gave the twenty dollars, blowing digits off his hand. He shoots Iris’s customer. He (again) shoots Sport, who has reappeared, gun in hand. Travis himself is shot as he lurches into the bedroom of the terrified Iris. He wants to shoot himself, but he’s out of bullets. When the cops appear, he mimics the act of shooting himself with his fingers, the blood dripping off his hand. The camera cuts to a top shot, retracing the steps of the bloodbath we’ve just witnessed back down the stairs to the gathering crowd in the street. Travis has finally made his statement. Scorsese groped to explain the fundamentally religious character of Travis’s quest at the time of the film’s release in 1976: “He said, I’m gonna go up on that cross and it’s going to be a human sacrifice. . . . ​Do you understand my point? The idea of Christ coming to fulfill . . . ​not to destroy but to fulfill, you know the prophecy of the idea was, you know, no more ritualistic blood sacrifice of lambs.” “You mean, Travis thought if he did that killing, New York City would be clean?” his interviewer asked. “Yeah,” Scorsese replied.33 But Travis’s quest for redemption—his bid to put his demons behind him by saving Iris—is drenched in irony. After the cathartic release at the apartment, the scene cuts to Travis’s empty apartment, where the camera moves across a wall of newspaper clippings that declare him a hero. In voiceover, we hear the voice of Iris’s father in a letter that’s also tacked to the wall: Dear Mr. Bickle, I can’t say how happy Mrs. Steensma and I were to hear that you are well and recuperating. We tried to visit you at the hospital when we were in New York to pick up Iris, but you were still in a coma. There is no way we can repay you for returning our Iris to us. We thought we had lost her, but now our lives are full again. Needless to say, you are something of a hero around this household. I’m sure you want to know about Iris. She is back in school and working hard. The transition has been very hard for her, as you can well imagine, but we have taken steps to see she never has cause to run away again. In conclusion, Mrs. Steensma and I would like to again thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Unfortunately, we cannot afford to come to New York again to

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thank you in person, or we surely would. But if you should ever come to Pittsburgh, you would find yourself a most welcome guest in our home. Our deepest thanks, Burt and Ivy Steensma.

The stilted quality of the letter, combined with what we know of Iris’s worldly ways, makes it hard to accept at face value. These people, however well meaning, appear to be idiots. Heroism has become something of a joke. In this regard, Taxi Driver is very much a movie of its moment. A series of films from the era, among them Midnight Cowboy (1969), The Exorcist (1973), The Conversation (1974), and Network (1976), exposed the ugly underbelly of American culture, subverting, if not mocking, suppositions of goodness or innocence in national life. Taxi Driver was as scabrous as any of these, but it took seriously the mythology it dissected, in this case a heroic one. “That’s the question for most of my pictures,” he said. “What is a man, and what is a hero? Does might make right? Or is it somebody who makes everybody reason things out and work it out? I think that’s harder.”34 Pauline Kael recognized the powerful ambiguity of the film’s mythic engagement in her review of Taxi Driver. “The violence in this movie is so threatening precisely because it’s cathartic for Travis,” she wrote in the New Yorker. “I imagine that some people who are angered by the film will say that it advocates violence as a cure for frustration. But to acknowledge that when a psychopath’s blood boils over he may cool down is not the same as justifying the eruption.”35 We do get a coda with Travis. We see him with his fellow cabbies outside the St. Regis Hotel, fitting in a little better than he did before. It’s his turn to get a fare—“Take it slow, killer,” one tells him as he leaves—and his customer turns out to be none other than Betsy. She expresses admiration for his heroism; he says it was really nothing. Travis tells her the fare is on him; she thanks him with feeling. “Maybe I’ll see you again sometime, huh?” she says implausibly but warmly. “Yeah, sure,” he says kindly. And then Travis pulls away. But as he does, he does a double-take in his rearview mirror. What did he see? The monster, it appears, waiting to return. The movie ends with Travis’s taxi cutting through the smoke of the streets, just as it began. “It’s a real slap in the face for us when we see Travis at the end looking pacified,” Kael notes. “He’s got the rage out of his system—for the moment,

Redeeming Dreams • 53

at least—and he’s back at work, picking up passengers in front of the St. Regis. It’s not that he’s cured but that the city is crazier than he is.”36 For the moment, though, Travis has achieved his goal. In so doing, he demonstrates that the realization of dreams involves an assertion of will. And as such they can be aggressive, even violent, whether they’re achieved or not— and whether they’re viable or not. Scorsese shows the power of aspiration even as he shows just how awful it can be. Few American artists in any genre have dared to go as far in showing this as he did with Taxi Driver. It’s a movie you go to experience, and to endure. It’s not easy to watch, but it’s utterly riveting. Just like the most powerful dreams. “I didn’t think anybody was going to see it,” Scorsese said decades later. The reaction among those who did was not uniformly positive. Richard Schickel, who would later publish a book of interviews with Scorsese, found the film tedious when he reviewed it for Time in February 1976. He called Travis “more a case study than a character,” and the movie “all too heavy with easy sociologizing to be truly moving.” But this was a minority view; Roger Ebert was among those who hailed it as a “masterpiece.” The film was nominated for four Academy Awards, among them Best Picture and a nod to De Niro for Best Actor. Neither won, but the film established Scorsese as a player in Hollywood—especially because, improbably enough, it was financially successful.37 Scorsese now had the leverage to reach the pinnacle of Hollywood success—to make big-budget movies with the best talent that money could buy. By that standard, he blew it: the next few movies he made were largely commercial failures, and critical ones, too. But along the way he also made at least one masterpiece and figured out ways to make his realized dream last for decades to come. Like Charlie, like Alice, like Travis, he was a survivor, albeit of a decidedly different kind.

SWINGING: Liza Minnelli and Robert De Niro as Francine Evans and Jimmy Doyle in New York, New York (1977). A tale of artistic striving by a pair of diverging lovers, the project brought the hard-driving Scorsese to the brink of personal destruction. (Photofest)

3 Impressive Failures

New York, New York • Raging Bull • The King of Comedy • After Hours • The Color of Money • The Last Temptation of Christ By the mid-1970s, Martin Scorsese was living a dream—a quintessentially Hollywood dream—come true. Mean Streets, a modest film, had been a critical sensation; Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore was a discreet and successful step into mainstream moviemaking with big stars. And Taxi Driver managed to square the circle of uncompromising artistic vision and box office success—made for less than $2 million, it brought in fourteen times that.1 The film won the Palme d’Or at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor. Though Taxi Driver lost out to One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest that year (and De Niro to Jack Nicholson for his performance in that movie), Scorsese had essentially attained royalty status in Hollywood—which, among other things, meant the freedom to pursue projects that were his heart’s desire, along with relatively easy access to the financing with which to realize them. It almost killed him. Literally. Scorsese’s arrival in the big time occurred in the aftermath of—and because of—a breakdown in a Hollywood order that had prevailed for most of the twentieth century: the studio system.2 When it assumed recognizably modern outlines in the 1920s, the studio system was a highly organized 55

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interlocking oligopoly consisting of a few players (Paramount, MGM, Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, and RKO) that controlled production, distribution, and exhibition. The machine ran smoothly until the 1950s, when it began facing a series of challenges that included legal action by the Justice Department, the growing power of actors and agencies, and (especially) the rise of television. The studio system didn’t collapse overnight, but its hollowing out over the course of the sixties resulted in an institutional vacuum that was filled by a generation of young directors that included Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg.3 (Scorsese was friendly with all of them.) With greater or lesser degrees of daring, they scored early successes— Coppola with The Godfather (1972), Lucas with American Graffiti (1973), Spielberg with Jaws (1975)—that put them on the cusp of superstardom. All of these directors would then be trusted with much larger projects and go on to reach even greater heights. Lucas’s Star Wars (1977), Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and their joint collaboration Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) forged the new order of the blockbuster that in many ways remains with us still. Each of them would also go on to produce colossal flops. For Spielberg, it was 1941 (1979); for Coppola, it would be One from the Heart (1982); for Lucas, it would be Howard the Duck (1986). Michael Cimino, who soared to success with The Deer Hunter in 1979, followed it in 1980 with Heaven’s Gate, a revisionist western so disastrous that it wrecked United Artists, the storied studio that financed it. Commercially speaking, Scorsese never went so high or so low. Taxi Driver was a hit by most generally accepted standards of the time, though nothing he ever did remotely approached the box office heights of Coppola, Lucas, or Spielberg.4 But in the midseventies, he was at least as highly respected as any of them, and that respect extended to studio executives who could reasonably believe he would prove to be a solid investment. So when Scorsese decided to pursue his instincts, the resources were his for the taking. Tellingly, he placed his bet on an attempt to resurrect the big-time Hollywood musical that had enchanted him in childhood—with a twist (of course). The result was New York, New York (1977). It’s an excellent bad movie.

Classic Subversion Three converging elements shaped New York, New York. The first was Scorsese’s fascination with—along with that newfound ability to access—the

Impressive Failures • 57

scale of classic Hollywood moviemaking. The second was his physical and mental health, which were deteriorating, even as he retained his outsize talent. The third was his desire to inject a modern sensibility into a traditional mode of moviemaking, thereby achieving a unique synthesis. Scorsese’s love of film is a house with many mansions. Prominent among them were the studio musicals of midcentury, notably those of director Vincente Minnelli and George Cukor’s 1954 remake of the 1937 film A Star Is Born, which starred Minnelli’s ex-wife Judy Garland. Garland’s daughter with Minnelli, Liza, was also a huge acting and singing talent on stage and screen. Though she struggled to find her place in the post-studio order, Minnelli found notable success in her Academy Award–winning turn in Cabaret (1972). When Scorsese successfully recruited her to join his project to star alongside the white-hot De Niro, it seemed like a match made in heaven. Their synergy was further enhanced by the legendary songwriting team of John Kander and Fred Ebb, who wrote the title song for Minnelli that culminated in the film’s final big production number, and went on to become a staple of Frank Sinatra’s canon. This was all a heady combination, and expectations were high not only among Scorsese’s intimates but in the industry as a whole. It would be hard for anyone to maintain one’s equilibrium under such circumstances, and it proved particularly hard for Scorsese. Always a driven personality, and always hobbled by the persistence of his asthma, he also indulged in classic sybaritic Hollywood fashion, which included the new drug of choice of the seventies, cocaine. Scorsese’s romantic life was also a complicating factor in the project. He was in his second marriage, this one with producer Julia Cameron, with whom he collaborated before she struck off on her own as a writer. The twining of art and life became more complicated still when Scorsese and Minnelli embarked on a surreptitious affair while he was still married to Cameron. Such struggles were paralleled by the plot of the film, which traces the arc of the relationship between saxophone player Jimmy Doyle (De Niro) and pop singer Francine Evans (Minnelli) at the end of the big-band jazz era in the 1940s. The two are involved in a quest for romantic, artistic, and material success that Doyle defines as “the major chord”: “When everything in your life works out perfectly. When you have everything you could possibly want. Everything. You have the woman you want, the music you want, and you can live comfortably—that’s the major chord.” Scorsese spelled out the connection between art and life: “I wanted to make a

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different kind of film about a struggling band in the forties trying to make it, one that was totally personal. I thought there was really no difference between a struggling band in the forties and myself, trying make it in this business with all the pressures. It’s also about two creative people who are struggling.”5 That desire for creativity was the third vector operating on the outcome of New York, New York. It shaped the screenplay, which while credited to novelist and screenwriter Earl Mac Rauch and longtime Scorsese collaborator Mardik Martin, was heavily improvised by Scorsese, De Niro, and Minnelli (who was working outside her comfort zone in doing so). The patter can be lively but also labored, as in a key opening scene where Jimmy tries to pick up Francine at a nightclub on V-J Day and is spurned in a seemingly endless loop of entreaties and rebuffs. Such unconventional techniques were mashed up with deeply traditional ones, complicated by the fact that union rules made it difficult for iconoclasts like Scorsese, whose work habits could be irregular, to proceed in ways that were comfortable to him.6 Part of the conceit of New York, New York is that it is a loving tribute to the city filmed entirely in Hollywood. The movie’s artifice intentionally calls attention to itself in some of the sets, notably an outdoor scene supposedly taking place in Asheville, North Carolina, where Francine is touring, and in a street scene that evokes On the Town, the celebrated 1944 Leonard Bernstein musical that became a classic Gene Kelly film five years later. Such moments are beautiful, but there are far too many of them. The movie’s cost was double its original budget, shooting went on over a third longer than its planned fourteen weeks, and its first cut came in at over four hours. The final cut was well over two and a half, and the European version a little over two hours.7 This tension between modernity and tradition went to the heart of the movie, reflected in Jimmy’s desire to pursue his vision of a hard-edged bop-style artist (Bruce Springsteen saxophonist Clarence Clemons plays a trumpet-playing band leader). The racial implications of a white man playing a Black man’s game are glossed over lightly, something that would be impossible today. Francine, for her part, moves more fluidly toward mass success, but she has her own challenges, notably a desire to maintain a career while sustaining a stable family life—not something typically depicted in stories about the early postwar era. Jimmy does marry her, albeit in an impulsive, aggressive way, and she does have a son with him, though his arrival finally dooms their relationship, as Jimmy can’t handle

Impressive Failures • 59

limits on his prerogatives. He leaves the hospital without ever seeing his child. The movie’s difficulty in reconciling its musical dreaminess with its seventies iconoclasm—and its more general difficulty in resolving its stance toward the American Dream—culminates in “Happy Endings,” a Kander and Ebb production number that’s essentially a twelve-minute musicalwithin-a-musical. In it, Francine plays a movie usher who’s discovered by a Broadway producer, leading to fabulous success that’s then revealed as a fantasy—and then not. “Happy Endings” ends with Jimmy ruefully watching it in a movie theater. By this point, he and Francine have achieved success on their own terms, and it appears their family might be reunited. George Lucas (whose wife, Marcia, edited New York, New York, as she did Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver) told his friend Scorsese that the movie would make an additional $10 million if he gave it an actual happy ending. But Scorsese couldn’t bring himself to do it.8 The film ends where it begins: with a shot of Jimmy’s vagabond shoes, longing to stray. The biggest single problem with New York, New York, however, is Jimmy’s character. He’s a monster: a selfish, bullying womanizer. As Scorsese biographer Vincent LoBrutto and others have noted, “Jimmy has an edge almost as intense as Travis Bickle.” Even that wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, except that it’s hard to see why Francine would ever love him. (There’s supposed to be erotic magnetism between them, but a shot of the two kissing while getting out of a cab makes Francine look more like a prisoner of, than a participant in, Jimmy’s passion.) Travis at least has a moral compass, however twisted, that Jimmy lacks. LoBrutto puts his finger on the problem: unlike with Bickle, “Scorsese seems to validate the reckless, arrogant behavior in Doyle’s character.”9 Actually, insofar as New York, New York is salvageable from a thematic point of view, it works best to view it as Francine’s story, not Jimmy’s (which cuts against the grain of the film’s point of view). She’s a far more likeable character than he is, and Minelli’s talents as an actor, singer, and dancer are effortlessly apparent and a pleasure for any listener or viewer to experience—which, in some fundamental sense, is the whole point of what the movie is about. Francine can also be viewed as a protofeminist figure in her attempt to balance family and career. A tremendous buzz surrounded the release of New York, New York, but it was quickly received as a bust, barely breaking even and washed away in the tsunami that was Star Wars, released the previous month.10 Even

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longtime stalwarts like Vincent Canby of the New York Times and Pauline Kael of the New Yorker expressed disappointment. Kael called it “an honest failure” that “suffers from too many conflicting intentions.” Canby described himself as “dumbfounded” that Scorsese would waste his talents on a genre that was never all that interesting in the first place.11 Like other Scorsese films, it would get some positive later appraisals, especially after it was rereleased in 1981. But while any discerning viewer can see the intelligence and care that went into its execution, the whole simply never adds up to the sum of its parts. He quickly moved on to The Last Waltz (1978), a concert movie about the final concert of rock legend the Band, an all-star extravaganza. But by this point, Scorsese, who had moved on to yet another Hollywood royalty paramour—Isabella Rossellini, daughter of actor Ingrid Bergman and Italian neorealist director Roberto Rossellini, whom he would later marry as his third wife and divorce three years later—was on the verge of collapse. On Labor Day weekend 1978, Scorsese began coughing up blood, blacked out, and began bleeding from his mouth. He was rushed to New York Hospital, where a doctor told him he had virtually no platelets in his bloodstream and was bleeding internally. “Finally, Marty got a doctor who conveyed the message that either he changed his life or he was going to die,” Robbie Robertson of the Band, his partner in excess, recalled. “We knew we had to change trains. Our lives were way too rich.”12 In this moment of crisis, De Niro stood by Scorsese, visiting him regularly in the hospital. He saw his friend’s cure as work. As he often did in those years, De Niro had a movie he wanted to make with Scorsese. It was called Raging Bull.

Great Violence In some respects, Raging Bull, based on the 1970 memoir of boxer Jake LaMotta, was an unlikely project for Scorsese. The sickly asthmatic had little interest in sports as a child, much less in a middleweight boxer who, while acclaimed by fans for his celebrated ability to absorb and give punches with astounding ferocity, was hardly a household name. De Niro had shown the book to Scorsese as early as 1974, when he was working on Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, but Scorsese pushed it aside amid other distractions. They continued to talk about it over the course of the next

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few years, but it wasn’t until Scorsese’s breakdown that it finally came into focus. “I think we should do this,” De Niro said, throwing the book on Scorsese’s hospital bed. “I realized I had nothing else to do,” Scorsese later remembered. “I had exhausted all the possibilities. Even my friends were all going on their own. I was alone. And it was time to go back to work.”13 The book was also going to take a fair amount of work to become a workable movie. LaMotta’s memoir is vivid in its unsparing account of his life in the tenements of the Bronx no less than the ring, where fighting was a means of survival long before it became a profession. Scorsese turned once again to Mardik Martin for a first draft of the screenplay, which was revised by Paul Schrader, who foregrounded LaMotta’s difficult relationship with his brother Joey—played by Joe Pesci, who entered Scorsese’s constellation for what would be the first of a series of movies. LaMotta also remained on hand over the course of the production. Here again, though, it was Scorsese and De Niro who sculpted the slab of a script into its final form.14 One notable feature of the screenplay, which went to the heart of the movie’s challenge to its audience, is that it stripped out LaMotta’s brutal childhood: we are presented with a fully formed—more like deformed— human being. The story has a circular structure, beginning in 1964, when the retired, corpulent LaMotta (De Niro famously gained fifty pounds in an extraordinary act of dedication to his craft) sits in his dressing room before a show, reciting an indifferently executed patter of rhyming autobiography mixed in with Shakespeare and other works. The camera then cuts suddenly and savagely to LaMotta absorbing punishing punches in his famous 1941 fight against Jimmy Reeves. Over the course of the next two hours, we witness a selfish, obsessive, self-loathing human being abuse those around him as well as himself in a quest to purge his inner demons and claim a championship (not necessarily in that order). It’s not hard to see, then, how a project like this would be a tough sell for a studio, particularly in the wake of New York, New York. The crucial assets Scorsese had in this quest were Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler, who had produced that movie—and, more importantly, Rocky (1976), Sylvester Stallone’s hugely successful boxing film, for which there would be a series of sequels. It so happened that boxing was a hot topic at the time Raging Bull was made; in addition to Rocky II (1979), Matilda (1978) and The Main Event (1979) were also in production. Raging Bull was essentially the price that United Artists paid Winkler and Chartoff for the right to release Rocky II.15

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Plot elements notwithstanding, Raging Bull is a quintessentially visual experience, and as such remains a profound testimonial of Scorsese’s power to tell a story with images. That visual impact began with an unusual decision about how the movie was filmed: in black and white. To some degree, this was a matter of distinguishing it from other films in the aforementioned pack. It also connected it with older boxing classics like Body and Soul (1947) and Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962). But it was also a matter of rendering extremely graphic imagery—of sweat, blood, and bodily injury—in ways that might be too difficult to absorb (or even fully accept as real) if shown in color.16 Raging Bull is a film chock-full of memorable images. Sometimes, they’re close-ups rendered in slow motion, as when we see Jake taking or giving punches as the wrenching of heads and necks throws off fluid, or in the opening credits, where we see Jake in the ring sparring with himself in

RIGHT THERE: Robert De Niro delivers a punch as middleweight champion Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull (1980). Though considered by many to be Scorsese’s crowning achievement, the film was not a commercial success, and it put his achieved dream of Hollywood filmmaking at risk. (Photofest)

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a robe, mist rising into the air, the credits themselves rendered in vivid blood red. Scorsese and his sound designer, Frank Warner, also manipulated sound—dropping it out entirely, only to have it roar back when a punch goes flying—to intensify the effect.17 (Warner would win a lifetime achievement award for his body of work.) Other cinematic touches are more quotidian, as when LaMotta fiddles with a television—a sign of his affluence in the early fifties—and his inability to get a clear picture becomes indicative of his paranoia as he assails Joey with unsubstantiated accusations that he’s cuckolding him. Perhaps the most unforgettable image occurs after one of his six celebrated fights with Sugar Ray Leonard, where we watch LaMotta endure a brutal beating, the final punch rendered in slow motion, LaMotta’s blood spraying the crowd. And yet LaMotta addresses him triumphantly: “You never got me down, Ray.” Amid the tumult as the decision is announced, the camera leaves the principal figures, slowly panning to the right along a rope so textured it seems like human flesh. The camera pauses on a patch of LaMotta’s blood, which looks like a rupture in the line as it slowly drips onto the floor of the ring. In some palpable sense, the very tissue of his body is his soul. One of the most vivid human icons in Raging Bull is that of the woman who becomes his second wife, Vickie, played by newcomer Cathy Moriarty, whose performance in the role would win her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. We first see Vickie at a public swimming pool, a shimmering version of purity in the sharply polarized black-and-white cinematography. (Jake has a classic Madonna-whore complex, one exacerbated by the old boxing belief that sexual intercourse weakens a fighter before a bout. Another classic image: Jake pouring a pitcher of ice water down his boxers to cool his rising passion.) There are intriguing glimpses of Vickie’s inner life, among them her toughness and a growing sense of grim imprisonment that will ultimately lead her to leave Jake. But he seems incapable of viewing her as anything other than a prize always on the verge of slipping through his fingers. There is a brief sequence in the middle of the film of family home movies—in color—that suggest a stretch of happiness that includes children and a warm relationship with her brother-in-law’s family. But this is only a passing moment in Jake’s otherwise tortured, and torturing, life. And yet there’s a stubborn integrity in the ferocity with which LaMotta pursues his dream of a championship. When a local gangster expresses his frustration to Joey about his brother’s unwillingness to throw a fight, Joey

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tries to explain: “He likes to do things his own way. I mean, Jesus Christ, he’d come down from the cross sometimes. He don’t give a fuck, he’s going to do things his own way. He wants to do what he wants to do. He wants to make it his own way, you know? He thinks he can make it on his own.” When it becomes clear that he will never, ever get his chance unless he plays ball, LaMotta agrees to throw a fight, but he does such an embarrassingly poor job of it that he gets suspended by the boxing commission. Eventually, he will attain his goal, but it brings him no peace. It appears that part of what a championship means to Jake is the approval of the crowd, because after his inevitable retirement from boxing, he makes a transition to stand-up comedy, a craft his celebrity allows him to pursue even though he’s a terrible entertainer. He buys a nightclub in Miami, and we witness his painful patter in which he conflates loutishness with a sense of humor. When Jake flirts with an underage girl he allows into his club—it turns out she’s fourteen years old—he’s arrested, and his maladroit handling of the matter (which includes defacing his championship belt to sell the jewels on it when in fact it would have been much more valuable sold whole) leads him to be thrust violently into a jail cell, events that culminate in the most memorable, piteous line in the film: “I’m not an animal.” He repeats it like an incantation, beating his head and fists against the concrete walls of the cell, his body shrouded in darkness except for a single shaft of light into which his head rises and falls as he wails in rage. At some level, it’s hard to believe he isn’t a caged animal at that moment, the culmination of two punishing hours in which we witness the life of an appalling and yet riveting man. It is possible, one supposes, that what rivets us is a lurid fascination with a car wreck of a life. But part of the greatness of Raging Bull is that, in its understated way, it insists on Jake’s humanity: he is a mortal survivor, and as such we are invited to see, and measure, ourselves against him. After an uneasy reconciliation with Joey—Jake’s tenderness with his brother is heartbreaking—the film ends where it began, with Jake in his dressing room in 1964, preparing for his show in which he will recite lines from classic movies. In an extraordinary piece of intertextuality, we watch Robert De Niro staring into a mirror playing Jake LaMotta, who’s playing Marlon Brando playing Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, a movie about a boxer enmeshed in organized crime. (Scorsese shot nineteen takes before deciding on the right deadpan one.)18 The camera jumps to quotidian yet specific images—a bare lightbulb, a light switch (it’s on), a payphone, an

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empty hanger on a coatrack—as Jake recites his lines, puffing on a cigar. He is, almost despite himself, somebody. “You know, a man goes into a ring, fights, that’s his living,” Scorsese told Richard Schickel two decades later. “He comes out of the ring and he gets into a fight. I mean, that’s what he does for his living. How do you expect him to behave? There are certain instincts that are nurtured and move him. I’m not excusing it, this was the world he came from.” And in an important sense, the one Scorsese came from. For a while, it looked like he might really leave it behind, but he couldn’t entirely. “Raging Bull also represented something new to me: an acceptance of where I came from,” he told Schickel. “Having made New York, New York, a film that was not received well, I went through a rough period in my life. I came out on the other side, and I said to myself, ‘Wait a minute, I can’t deny who I am.’ ” Who he was, he realized, was a provincial boy who could not ever entirely leave the neighborhood behind. And he would stop trying.19 Raging Bull was another commercial failure, losing money for the studio. But it was nominated for eight Oscars. De Niro won for Best Actor, and Thelma Schoonmaker won as well, in her first official role as Scorsese’s editor, a job she would keep permanently. Raging Bull was also nominated for Best Picture but lost out to Ordinary People, an earnest but hardly pathbreaking film directed by Robert Redford. Critical opinion of Raging Bull was a little divided—some reviewers were appalled by the violence— but it also received rapturous reviews. In 1990, four different film organizations dubbed it the best film of the decade, and many observers consider it the apex of Scorsese’s professional achievements.20 Scorsese was gradually making his peace with his place in the system. He said that when he embarked on Raging Bull, “I just wasn’t comfortable with myself, what I was trying to be. A director in the style of Hollywood, or a filmmaker in the style of Europe? I mean, I didn’t fit either place. I still don’t.” But by the time he finished, he was gaining more clarity. “When I lost [Best Picture] for Raging Bull, that’s when I realized what my place in the system would be, if I did survive at all—on the outside looking in.”21 Scorsese left Hollywood in 1979, after a sojourn of nine years there; while some of Raging Bull was shot there, most of it was made back home in New York, where he has been based ever since. Scorsese wasn’t quite done with the cosmopolitan culture of entertainment, however. In his next movie—also a commercial failure—he would turn his lens, literally, on show business itself. It wasn’t a pretty picture.

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No Joke Like a lot of movies—like a lot of Scorsese movies—the 1983 feature The King of Comedy kicked around for a while before it was finally realized. Newsweek film reviewer Paul Zimmerman had first written a script in 1970 based on celebrity hounds surrounding television talk-show host David Susskind, as well as Johnny Carson fanatics who wrote detailed critiques of every Tonight Show broadcast. Zimmerman showed the screenplay to Scorsese circa 1974, but he couldn’t really relate to the material. It did appeal to De Niro, however, and this turned out to be another case where his prodding of an initially reluctant Scorsese, still recovering from his breakdown, eventually bore fruit. Once again, he and De Niro went at the script together, and the film went into production in July 1981, a little faster than Scorsese would have liked, in order to start before a Directors Guild of America strike would halt any project that was not already substantially under way.22 The key to The King of Comedy was its casting. De Niro took the lead role of Rupert Pupkin, a would-be comedian and talk-show host with limited social skills and unlimited chutzpah. Although superficially different from Travis Bickle, Jimmy Doyle, or Jake LaMotta, this was another maniacal character of the kind that had become a De Niro specialty. Pupkin has a confederate in the form of Masha, played by the ever-edgy Sandra Bernhard. Masha and Rupert cook up a plot to realize their respective fantasies with the fictive talk-show legend Jerry Langford: Rupert to get a stand-up slot on his show, Masha to get a tryst with him. It’s Jerry Lewis whose role is pivotal. Actual talk-show hosts Dick Cavett and Carson were discussed as possibilities for the role of Langford, as was Frank Sinatra.23 Lewis—a bona fide show business pioneer whose talents ranged across acting, singing, directing, and humanitarian work—was best known as the silly sidekick of his longtime partner, Dean Martin, and as a result the scope of his talents was sometimes underestimated. Scorsese’s conceit in giving him the part was that Lewis would underplay it— which is to say to play it close to his actual personality—while De Niro would play the over-the-top foil for him. The cast was rounded out with a collection of real-life celebrities, among them psychologist Joyce Brothers (a fixture of the talk-show circuit at the time), veteran stage and screen actor Tony Randall, and Carson’s Tonight Show producer Fred DeCordova. In something of an inside joke, Rupert keeps a life-size cardboard .

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DARK STAR: Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis) fights his way through celebrity hounds with the overweening help of Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro) in The King of Comedy (1983). Another commercial flop, the film now seems prescient in its caustic satire of what would come to be known as “reality” television and a warped American Dream of fame. (Photofest)

cutout of Liza Minnelli alongside another of Langford in his basement, and his fantasy patter is frequently punctuated by the voice of his unseen mother (Scorsese’s mother, Catherine) telling him to shut up. One of the more challenging things about The King of Comedy is that it doesn’t really have any likeable characters. Jerry Langford is no monster, but there’s an aridity about him reflected in the dark emptiness of his elegant Manhattan apartment and the sterile offices where his show is produced. He has a beautiful vacation home on the east end of Long Island, but the table there is set for one. Like the actual Johnny Carson, it appears Langford knows everybody and yet has few friends. He’s greeted warmly on the street, but when he declines a request to say hello to the nephew of a passerby at a payphone, the previously cheerful middle-aged woman to whom he gave an autograph screams, “You should get cancer! I hope you get cancer!” This is a world in which it’s the worst who are filled with passionate intensity. “You’re looking at the new king of comedy,” Pupkin tells his old

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high school classmate Rita, a local barmaid he takes out to dinner, who likes him without taking him too seriously. (She’s played by Diahnne Abbott, who also appeared in New York, New York and was De Niro’s wife at the time.) “Why not me?” he asks her. “A guy can get anything he wants as long as he pays the price. What’s so funny about that? I mean, crazier things have happened.” On the conceit of such sentiments, thousands of American Dreams have been launched, some with crazy results. But few as crazy as this one. The madcap trajectory of the plot is launched at the start of the movie, as a throng of autograph hounds, many of whom know each other, wait for Langford at his backstage door. Masha manages to get into Langford’s limousine and physically assaults him with professions of love until he manages to back out. (A freeze frame of Masha with her clawlike hands against the car window is the backdrop of the credits, accompanied by a 1959 Ray Charles rendition of the Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen standard “Come Rain or Shine,” with its aptly ironic lyric, “I’m gonna love you like nobody’s loved you.”) Pupkin deftly manages to insert himself into the situation and arrange a rescue for Langford, hopping into the limo as it pulls away. He launches into his pitch for an audition—“Once you get over the initial shyness you’re gonna be OK,” Langford observes dryly—and the talk-show host tells Pupkin to bring a tape of his material by his office. It’s pretty clear that this is a throwaway offer to get the overbearing fan off his back, but of course Pupkin considers it money in the bank. He uses it to impress Rita, as well as to bulldoze his way repeatedly into the lobby of Langford’s office, where he is coolly parried by his associate Cathy Long (Charlie’s Angels star Shelley Hack) before he’s finally tossed out by security. That hardly stops him. Pupkin takes Rita out to Langford’s summer place to press his case, where he confounds and upsets the staff—and provokes Jerry to anger. (Rita, for her part, is mortified when she realizes that they are there uninvited; though credulous, she seems like the one truly human figure in this story. That humanity extends to her foibles: she discreetly steals a decorative box off Langford’s coffee table on her way out the door.) Since his previous efforts have proved unavailing, Rupert teams up with Masha to kidnap Langford, and their well-conceived plot thwarts Langford’s staff as well as the NYPD, who see no way around allowing Rupert to perform a monologue on the show as ransom. The uneasy force the movie projects—it’s both uncomfortable and ­riveting—lies in the way it gives voice to the deepest longings so many

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Americans have to convert the most quotidian aspects of their lives and endow them with value (which is understood as glamour). This peculiar version of the American Dream, of success as a matter of merely and effortlessly being oneself, shimmers especially brightly on celebrity talk shows, where guests drop by faux living-room settings and talk about their new projects, speaking calmly of challenges embraced and challenges overcome, as in chapters of what seem like enviable lives. One might call it the Dream of the Coast—as in the (Pacific) noun as well as the verb of smooth sailing.24 It’s in this sense that the truest moments in The King of Comedy are the fantasy sequences where we see Rupert Pupkin imagining life as it should be. “How do you do it?” the imagined Jerry Langford implores his adored pal, trying to understand what makes Pupkin tick. “I think it’s that I look at my whole life and I look at the awful, terrible things in my life, and I turn it into something funny,” he explains. “It just happens.” Part of what makes such fantasies so compelling, and problematic, is that they’re threaded with longings for revenge. In another such fantasy, Pupkin’s high school principal takes the stage, live, to officiate the wedding of Rupert and Rita. “None of us—myself, his classmates—dreamt that he would amount to a hill of beans,” the principal explains. “But we were wrong. And you, Rupert, you were right. And that’s why we thought, before the entire nation, we’d like to apologize to you personally and to beg your forgiveness for all the things we did to you. And we’d like to thank you personally, all of us, for the meaning you’ve given our lives. Please accept our warmest wishes, Rita and Rupert, for a long and successful life together.” The kicker: “We’ll be back to marry them right after this word [commercial break].” Capitalism is woven into the very fabric of the dream. Masha’s dream, by contrast, involves the pursuit of a different kind of happiness, and a different kind of revenge. “I love you,” she tells Langford, who is duct-taped from head to toe. “I never told my parents that I loved them. Of course, they never told me they loved me, either, which is fine with me. But I love you. . . . ​I just wanna like put on the Shirelles. I just wanna be Black.” Lankford shows neither fear nor sympathy, only stoic endurance. He gets his chance to escape when Masha frees him for the purpose of sex, stealing the gun that has been the instrument of his captivity, only to find out it’s fake. He flees Masha’s (upscale) apartment with her chasing him into the street in her underwear. The hollow joke at the heart of The King of Comedy is that Rupert Pupkin is entirely in earnest when he gets his chance to tell his story while Langford

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is still Masha’s captive. “Now a lot of you are probably wondering why Jerry isn’t with us tonight,” he tells his audience. “Well, I’ll tell ya: the fact is, he’s tied up. And I’m the one who tied him. [Laughter.] I know you think I’m joking, but believe me: that’s the only way I could break into show business— by hijacking Jerry Langford. Right now Jerry is strapped to a chair somewhere in the middle of the city. [More laughter.] Go ahead and laugh, thank you, I appreciate it, but the fact is, I’m here. Now tomorrow, you’ll know I wasn’t kidding and you’ll think I was crazy. But I figure, look at it this way: better to be king for a night than schmuck for a lifetime.” The unseen audience reacts uproariously at this, the climax of Pupkin’s routine. His dream, however, is not yet fully realized. As is typical of talk shows, The Jerry Langford Show is actually taped hours before it airs, and as part of his deal with the police, Rupert wants to see the show broadcast over the airwaves before he surrenders to the authorities. Pupkin goes to the bar where Rita works and enjoys his moment of triumph. The escaped Langford, for his part, pauses in front of a store with a bank of televisions for sale and watches grimly as Pupkin performs. “Hey, that’s the same guy who was just on television,” a barfly observes in wonder. But not everyone is impressed. “As a matter of fact, I’m looking for the guy who wrote the material,” a detective tells Pupkin as he puts the felonious comedian into a squad car. “I’d like to pick him up and take him in with you.” When Pupkin reveals he wrote the jokes, the detective suggests he throw himself on the mercy of the court. As it turns out, however, Rupert Pupkin will be king for more than a night. We later learn that eighty-seven million people watched his broadcast, and we see a steady stream of magazine covers—Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Life—along with a headline from People: “The Very Private World of Rupert Pupkin.” Rights to his memoir, The King of Comedy, go for over $1 million (there’s also a movie deal). He ends up serving two years and nine months of a six-year sentence and returns in triumph. The simply scabrous message of The King of Comedy is that we live in a celebrity culture that rewards bad behavior. In the four decades since its release, the film has only grown more prescient, especially in light of the distinctly Pupkinesque figure, a former “reality” show star, who launched a successful bid for the White House largely on the merits of television antics like falsely claiming his predecessor was born in Africa. “The King of Comedy is my coming to terms with disappointment, disappointment with the fact that the reality is different than the dream,” Scorsese told Richard Schickel in 2011. As such a remark suggests, Scorsese

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himself had felt the pull of Hollywood enchantment not all that different from the one Rupert Pupkin did. “When I first went to L.A. in 1970, there was a little bit of that need in me—to buy into, participate in, the dream world of celebrity.” But by 1983, he had woken up. And sobered up.25 The King of Comedy was a box office disaster. Made for about $20 million, it brought in barely a tenth of that. Nor was its commercial performance partially offset by critical acclaim, which was largely lacking.26 (As with New York, New York, it would later garner positive reappraisals, with more justification.) Scorsese had directed three high-profile failures in a row. The high regard with which he was viewed in the industry was enough to keep his career on life support. But he was no longer in control of his destiny. This lack of control was apparent when it came to a long-term project dear to Scorsese’s heart that he had been hoping to realize for a decade: a screen adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1955 novel The Last Temptation of Christ. A Greek Orthodox writer best known for his 1946 novel Zorba the Greek (later made into a classic 1964 movie starring Anthony Quinn in the title role), Last Temptation imagines what might have happened had Jesus not been crucified. It was deeply controversial—the book was placed on the Roman Catholic papal Index of Forbidden Books, and a Greek Orthodox bishop refused to allow Kazantzakis’s body to lie in state after his death in 1957—though its combination of piety and apostasy was right up Scorsese’s alley. The book first came to his attention while he was working on Boxcar Bertha in 1972. Scorsese got the rights from Kazantzakis’s widow and his executor, a big hurdle. But it was going to be a tough sell under any circumstances. Scorsese did have one good card to play, however: when his old agent, Harry Ufland, decided to go into film production, Scorsese acquired a new one, Michael Ovitz of Creative Artists Agency, one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, an admirer of Scorsese’s, and someone who enjoyed a productive working relationship with two other powerful figures: Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who were at Paramount Pictures at the time. “What do you want most?” Scorsese remembers Ovitz asking him. “I said, ‘The Last Temptation of Christ.’ He said, ‘I’ll get it made for you.’ ” But not even Ovitz could overcome cost overruns, skeptical studio executives, reluctant actors (De Niro turned down the lead), and a letter-writing campaign started by a group of women known as the Evangelical Sisterhood, which sent five hundred letters a day in protest over the production. When the head of the United Artists theater chain, the

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second largest in the country, announced it would not exhibit the film, Paramount pulled the plug. It appeared the project was dead, and with it Scorsese’s dream of making important works of cinematic art on his own terms.27 But he wasn’t yet ready to give up. “I realized then,” he remembered, “you can’t let the system crush your spirit. I really did want to continue making pictures. I’m a director, I’ll make a low-budget picture, After Hours. I’m going to be a pro and start all over again.” And then, according to Peter Biskind, the author to whom Scorsese made these remarks in 1991, “he did, and he survived.”28

On the Clock After Hours was not a typical Martin Scorsese movie. In the aftermath of the Last Temptation fiasco, Eisner and Katzenberg tried to soothe Scorsese by offering him a buddy picture, Beverly Hills Cop (originally slated as a Sylvester Stallone vehicle, it became a huge hit in 1984 with Eddie Murphy in the lead role). He was also offered Witness, a 1985 Peter Weir film that would also be a big hit, starring Harrison Ford as a big-city detective in Amish country.29 The idea was to give Scorsese something commercial that would get him back on his feet. But he just couldn’t see himself doing that. Instead, he wanted to find success by going small, by making a fast, profitable, independent-scale project. So when his lawyer brought him a Columbia film program script by writer Joseph Minion, with rights owned by his former star Amy Robinson—Theresa of Mean Streets—and her partner, Griffin Dunne, who would star, Scorsese jumped on board. The project was financed by the Geffen Company, a new player on the film scene led by David Geffen, who was making the transition from a music to a film impresario; he would go on to form a power trio with Spielberg and Katzenberg to launch DreamWorks, the first new studio in decades. Perhaps the most notable aspect of After Hours from the standpoint of Scorsese’s film career is that it was his first project with Michael Ballhaus, the cinematographer who, like editor Thelma Schoonmaker, would go on to be a fixture of future Scorsese productions. Plot-wise, After Hours is a slender movie. It’s also one whose significance in terms of the American Dream is less in its content than in the role the project played in sustaining Scorsese’s aspirations at a time when they were

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in doubt. Dunne plays Paul Hackett, a restless computer technician in midtown Manhattan who’s looking for some excitement after work and finds it when he meets Marcy (Rosanna Arquette), and alluring but unstable young woman, at a local diner. He hops in a cab and goes downtown to Soho to meet her, only to have the twenty-dollar bill in his wallet, which he was going to use to pay for the ride, fly out the window (in depicting a world before widespread ATMs, the film is something of a historical document, as it is in its depiction of Soho as a ghostly, empty neighborhood largely inhabited by bohemian types). So begins a night from hell that he seemingly can’t escape, one that includes bizarre sculptures, weird residents, and a local posse that incorrectly believes he’s responsible for a string of robberies in the neighborhood. The film has a deeply ironic ending, with Paul falling out of a truck and ending up back where he started—his midtown office. For Scorsese, the point of the movie was to emphasize the anarchic quality of everyday life and the lack of control we have over our fates. “That’s the key thing to me—that idea of being a pawn, that the gods really don’t care and we’ve got to make a life in spite of that,” he told Schickel. “It comes down to accepting that reality. Rather than complain about it, we deal with it. We try to live a morally good life on that basis.”30 After Hours succeeded on the terms it was made. The final cost was $4.5 million, and it grossed twice that. “When I went to Hollywood to promote my next film, I found, to my surprise, some people resented we had made it for so little,” he later remembered.31 That next movie was another journeyman project, but of a different sort—and on a much larger scale. As Scorsese was finishing After Hours, he received a letter (addressed to “Michael Scorsese”) as well as a phone call from film legend Paul Newman.32 In 1961, Newman starred in The Hustler, in which he played Fast Eddie Felson, a brash young pool shark who challenged an established billiards champion, Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason), for bragging rights—and a lot of money. In the aftermath of a defeat brought on by his impulsivity, a professional gambler, Bert Gordon (George  C. Scott), who has witnessed the contest, offers to manage Eddie’s career by having him lose to inferior players before luring them to wager large bets that Eddie will win. As their plans take shape, Eddie begins a relationship with Sarah Packard (Piper Laurie), a fragile young alcoholic. But Bert’s callousness and sexual manipulation of Sarah result in her death, a tragedy for which Eddie holds himself responsible. He has a rematch with Minnesota Fats, defeats him this time, and decides to put down his pool cue for good.

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In a 2002 reassessment of The Hustler, Roger Ebert notes that the film is an unusual document in the Hollywood canon: “This is one of the few American movies in which the hero wins by surrendering, by accepting reality instead of his dreams.”33 The Hustler was directed by Robert Rossen, a veteran director who was blacklisted for his communist affiliations, but who was able to resume his career after deciding to name dozens of people he knew were former or current party members. The film, which was shot in black and white, was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including nods for Newman, Gleason, Laurie, and Scott. The Hustler was also nominated for Best Picture, losing out to Elmer Gantry. (It may also be worth noting that Jake LaMotta has a small role in the film as a bartender.) In 1984, Walter Tevis, the novelist who had written the novel on which the movie was based, published a sequel, The Color of Money. Newman was intrigued by the possibility of another movie about Eddie Felson and commissioned a screenplay that he showed to Scorsese. But Scorsese didn’t like it, and enlisted novelist Richard Price, a New York Jewish writer with urban sensibilities similar to his own. Eventually an entirely different story took shape, albeit one with the same title. In this version, set twenty-five years later, Felson is a liquor salesman enchanted by a brilliant young player in whom he sees hustling possibilities. Newman succeeded in recruiting an up-and-coming actor, Tom Cruise, fresh off triumphs in the 1983 films All the Right Moves and Risky Business (and right before he took off into the stratosphere in 1986 with Top Gun). He also procured a deal with Katzenberg and Eisner to bring the project to Touchstone. In this arrangement, Scorsese would be a hired hand. This reflected his need to rehabilitate his career, as well as the changed nature of the industry since his heyday of a decade earlier: “It was the eighties, and the director-as-superstar era was over,” biographer Vincent LoBrutto notes.34 Scorsese didn’t mind. “This was my first time working with a movie star. A movie star is a person I saw when I was ten or eleven on a movie screen,” he explained. He and Price found themselves having to bend their art to Newman’s will. “The reality is, you’ve got to write for Paul Newman, because he’s got to play it, and if he won’t play it, there’s no movie!” Price said. But Scorsese nevertheless found ways to punctuate the film with his own signature, as in a close-up of a cue ball where the chalk flies as if the cue is Jake LaMotta taking a punch, or a top shot of an empty Atlantic City pool hall that looks like a cathedral (underlined by organ music).35

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The Color of Money in many ways doubles its original source material. Eddie becomes the Bert Gordon character; Cruise’s Vincent Lauria is the Fast Eddie figure; and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio’s Carmen becomes a tough-minded Sarah who tries to sexually manipulate the fixer rather than be his victim. But rather than a fall from grace, the tale becomes one of redemption. Eddie corrupts Vincent, but also rediscovers his love of the game. The movie ends on an ambiguous note—we never learn whether the mentor defeats his protégé—but it’s the passion that matters. The spirit of the movie is captured in an epigraph voiceover uttered by Scorsese at the start of the film: “Luck plays a part in 9-ball. But for some players, luck itself is an art.” The Color of Money may well be Scorsese’s most enjoyable movie. (Taxi Driver and Raging Bull are often awe-inspiring, but it would be hard to call them fun.) It was also exceptionally profitable, making over five times its approximately $10 million budget.36 Price’s screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award, and Newman finally won the Oscar that had long eluded him. The film reestablished Scorsese’s credibility as a commercial

ON CUE: Paul Newman (reprising his role as Fast Eddie Felson in the 1961 film The Hustler) and Tom Cruise in The Color of Money (1986). The film was Scorsese’s first with a Hollywood legend, and its commercial success stabilized his career. (Photofest)

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force in Hollywood and inaugurated a long stretch in his career in which he would alternate between crowd pleasers (like Cape Fear) and vertiginous personal projects (like Silence).

It’s a Wonderful Death Meanwhile, in a surprising turn of events, The Last Temptation of Christ was resurrected while Scorsese was working on The Color of Money. Ovitz brought the project to the newly installed head of Universal Studios, Tom Pollock, who had read the Kazantzakis novel in college and loved it. Pollock secured the willingness of the Cineplex Odeon theater chain to exhibit the film, and came up with what he dubbed “chicken feed” to fund the biblical epic. Scorsese the artist was back in business.37 But on a much smaller scale. The inspiration for Last Temptation was the big technicolor epics of the fifties like The Robe (1953) and The Ten Commandments (1956), but its budget in 1987 dollars ($7 million) was a shoestring for a film shot on location in Morocco. The original script was written by Paul Schrader; as he was no longer available, Scorsese recruited Time magazine reviewer Jay Cocks, with whom he would collaborate frequently in the years to come. Aidan Quinn, who had taken the role of Jesus, was also unavailable; he was replaced by Willem Dafoe. Many of the rest of the roles went to Scorsese perennials: Harvey Keitel as Judas Iscariot; Verna Bloom (who had appeared in New York, New York) was cast Jesus’s mother, Mary; and Barbara Hershey of Boxcar Bertha, who had first brought the book to Scorsese’s attention, would be Mary Magdalene.38 The conceit of the novel, carried into the movie, is that Mary Magdalene has become a prostitute in frustration over Jesus’s refusal to marry her. Judas, for his part, is highly active in the Zealot movement to overthrow Roman rule. At first he intends to murder Jesus, but he becomes increasingly convinced that he may in fact be the Messiah, and ultimately becomes the most trusted apostle, so much so that Jesus ultimately implores Judas to betray him so that scripture can be fulfilled. In the age-old question about the divinity and mortality of Jesus, Last Temptation decidedly comes down on the side of him as a man. He is dogged by uncertainty and often startled by his own power, as in Scorsese’s depiction of the famous story of the resurrection of Lazarus, in which he conveys the experience—the keening sounds of the mourners, the attempts

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of the crowd to avoid the smell as the stone is rolled away, the sheer terror in Jesus’s eyes as Lazarus’s hand suddenly extends from the darkness—in a way a novel never can. The story moves toward its climax in due fashion as Jesus throws the moneychangers out of the Temple, holds the Last Supper, gets arrested, and is interrogated by Pontius Pilate (played in a key of silky indifference by pop icon David Bowie). Once Jesus is on the cross, though, something unexpected happens: an angel appears and tells him he’s free to leave and get on with his mortal life. He marries Mary Magdalene, who bears his child. When Mary is suddenly taken from him—earthly pain will be a part of his life just like earthly joy—Jesus follows the advice of the angel and takes up with Lazarus’s two sisters, Mary and Martha, both of whom have children with him. Christianity goes on without him; as per scripture, Saul (Harry Dean Stanton) starts out persecuting believers until he’s converted and becomes Paul, spreading the Good News in defiance of Jesus’s wishes. “You know, I’m glad I met you,” Paul tells him in their encounter, explaining that the myth of Jesus is so much more important than the truth. “Because now I can forget all about you.” Jesus lives to see the historical destruction of the Jewish Temple at the hands of the Romans in a.d. 70, when he receives a visit from the apostles, led by Judas, who are angry at him for betraying God’s plan. But this whole sequence has been nothing but a dream, and Jesus awakens to embrace his death on the cross, fulfilling his destiny and transforming the world. In a striking metatextual commentary, the final frames of the film are literally exposed as film—an accident that Scorsese decided to keep for the final print. The final seconds are a riot of color accompanied by Peter Gabriel’s triumphant soundtrack. He has risen. It seems safe to say that most devout Christians would find this rendition of the story odd. What the filmmakers and studio didn’t quite realize— despite the fact that there had been so much controversy five years earlier—is how much opposition it would provoke. A new wave of protest broke before the film was even released. One evangelical leader offered to reimburse the film’s cost if Universal would destroy it; picketers demonstrated outside the studio gates. A Roman Catholic cardinal in Britain advised his flock not to see it. Universal responded by pushing ahead the Last Temptation’s release date from September to August so as to get ahead of rising protest, but that didn’t entirely work: there were demonstrations in San Francisco, Washington, Seattle, and Toronto. The film did have admirers among the faithful, and because it was made so cheaply, it

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managed to earn a modest profit. Scorsese himself pronounced the project a disappointment. “With Last Temptation, I wasn’t totally satisfied,” he said a decade later. “We never quite finished the picture because we had to release it so fast—though that’s no excuse.” Artistically speaking, it remains a minor film in the Scorsese canon.39 The film is nevertheless important in revealing the ongoing throughline in the director’s vision in two ways. The first is that while it may seem foolish to try to connect a Greek novelist’s version of the New Testament to the American Dream, it nevertheless seems plausible to note that the conceit at the center of the story—a divinely inspired notion that one can find earthly fulfillment in this life—is its key premise in all its formulations going back to the Puritans who explicitly rejected the idea even as they sought to create a new society. Crucially, however, this notion of secular salvation is ultimately revealed as a monstrous lie, literally the work of the devil. Scorsese had always been a skeptic of the American Dream. But he always took it seriously. It had a kind of romantic glamour in New York, New York; it had a twisted kind of nobility in Raging Bull; it remained a living option in The Color of Money. Scorsese would never lose sight of its appeal; indeed, few directors have ever rendered it with more tactile allure. But he would also never again come as close as he had to embracing it. The King of Comedy signaled his move away from the American Dream; The Last Temptation of Christ reinforced it. The other reason why The Last Temptation of Christ is notable in Scorsese’s body of work is the distinctive way it deals with the provincial/cosmopolitan dialectic. In some sense, of course, there’s nothing more cosmopolitan than Roman Catholicism—the very word “catholic” means universal, and the Roman Empire has been a byword for globalism for thousands of years. But Scorsese’s version of the story is intentionally parochial—he renders an obscure band of religious fanatics on the fringe of an imperial realm—and takes it to the point of absurdity. Judas and Paul, among other characters, sound like they’re coming straight out of working-class Brooklyn, as if they’re a bunch of outer-borough hillbillies. Andre Gregory, who plays John the Baptist, has a southern accent, his preaching style distinctly evangelical. (The Romans, who impose their will from the distant metropolis center, have British accents.) “Every day you have a different plan!” Judas says to Jesus at one point. “God only talks to me a little at a time,” he responds. Playing the piece in a vernacular tongue is an interesting idea in theory. But it doesn’t quite work in practice.

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The merits of the case aside, Last Temptation shows that from this point on, Scorsese will consistently choose to focus his gaze on small, often insular communities, often under tremendous pressure from the outside. New York, New York was a valentine to Hollywood glamour; Raging Bull and The King of Comedy were studies of celebrity. Going forward, however, his allegiance, in terms of attention, and sympathy, will be with big fish in little ponds. Perhaps the best example of this is the film that many regard as his greatest triumph: Goodfellas.

WISEGUYS: Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro, Paul Sorvino, and Joe Pesci in an iconic publicity still from Goodfellas (1990). Perhaps Scorsese’s biggest crowd-pleaser, it cemented his reputation as the preeminent storyteller of the American Dream of gangsterism. (Photofest)

4 Dream Critiques

New York Stories • Goodfellas • Cape Fear • The Age of Innocence • Casino • Kundun • Bringing Out the Dead As the twentieth century—the American Century—came to a close, Martin Scorsese’s career arrived at an ironic equilibrium. He had spent much of the 1970s and 1980s pursuing his quest to become a successful film director, one that had resulted in a good deal of personal turbulence and uncertainty but one that also showed him often enchanted by the promises in different versions of the American Dream, however nagging the doubts that surfaced in the words or actions of his characters. By 1990, however, the currents running through his life effectively reversed: he had achieved sufficient professional stability—built through a series of acclaimed movies whose reputations outweighed multiple commercial failures—to have some confidence that he could sustain his career indefinitely. Scorsese continued to capture the enchantment of American materialism—at times giving it an almost febrile glow, whether for gangsters or Gilded Age aristocrats—but the weight of his filmic arguments now pressed in a more decisively skeptical direction regarding the dream that both sustained and perplexed him. There’s one other aspect of this that’s important. Up until this point, Scorsese’s major characters, from Charlie Cappa to Jake LaMotta, were strivers seeking to attain something. But as we move toward the latter half of his 81

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career, Scorsese’s characters have often achieved power or status and are now confronted with the possibility of losing—in some cases, forfeiting—it. They’re aware of what success means, and what it doesn’t, because they’ve experienced it firsthand. In one fundamental sense, the core meaning of the American Dream hasn’t changed: it’s about mobility. But now it’s as likely to be downward as it is upward—or to break out of its trajectory entirely. And longings for redemption—counterdreams that also dangle just out of reach— make claims of their own. However varied, the frictions surrounding such dreams continued to be at the heart of Scorsese’s body of work as a whole. A big part of his newfound stability was rooted in personal relationships. They included his fourth wife, producer Barbara De Fina, whom he married in 1985 and with whom he continued to collaborate after their divorce in 1991. (Their joint company, Cappa DeFina Productions, propelled dozens of projects, straight through Silence in 2016.) His professional family also included powerful figures like his agent, Michael Ovitz; major studios such as Universal; and longtime collaborators such as editor Thelma Schoonmaker, cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, and production designer Dante Ferretti. Scorsese himself also achieved some inner equilibrium. “In the ’80s, things were kinda down for me, it was really difficult,” he told Roger Ebert at a retrospective symposium on his work in 1997. “What I learned was to be aware of myself, to be wary of myself, and to be wary about being complacent about what I can do,” he explained. This self-knowledge resulted in a stronger sense of discipline in his moviemaking. “Marty’s been very good lately on budgets,” his longtime producer Irwin Winkler observed during the making of his masterpiece, Goodfellas. “We planned this one well. He knows what he wants, but he still has the freedom of improvising and trying new things.”1 This wouldn’t always be true—Scorsese went over budget for The Age of Innocence, for example, and there was significant bloat in the making of Hugo and The Irishman—though in the nineties this was more the exception than the rule. This sense of self-acceptance had another, perhaps less attractive, side to it, too, one evident in a smaller side project Scorsese completed in 1989. Three years earlier, Woody Allen had approached him and Steven Spielberg to each direct a segment of an omnibus film about Manhattan life. Spielberg stepped aside for Francis Ford Coppola, and the final product was titled New York Stories. Coppola’s segment, “Life with Zoe,” was a trifle cowritten with his daughter Sofia (soon to be a directorial powerhouse

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in her own right) about a rich girl’s effort to reunite her parents. Allen’s “Oedipus Wrecks” is a comic fable about a man who gets what he wishes for—his annoying mother disappears—only to have the repressed figure return in all the more oppressive a way. Scorsese’s installment, “Life Lessons,” which Scorsese commissioned novelist Richard Price to write, stars Nick Nolte as a painter and Rosanna Arquette (who starred in After Hours) as his muse. It’s the first and most substantial of the three segments, depicting an edgy power struggle between a man who wants a woman around as a source of comfort and a companion who has artistic ambitions of her own. He can’t quite bring himself to affirm her work (he points out, reasonably, that a real artist needs an inner compass, not outer approval), and she can’t quite bring herself to be his soul mate (she points out, also reasonably, that that’s simply not enough for her). She leaves him, and he—predictably, perhaps lamentably, but with straightforward honesty as a matter of storytelling—finds himself a new ingénue. Scorsese’s friend and collaborator Jay Cocks was candid about the high degree of self-revelation that animates the short film. “ ‘Life Lessons’ says a lot about Marty and Marty’s priorities, and about his ability to deal with, focus, and transcend his obsessions,” he noted of a buddy who would marry a total of five wives. “He has to forgive the obsessed artist; if he didn’t, he’d be hanging himself in effigy.”2 A psychologist could argue that Scorsese’s self-destructive impulses in the late seventies and early eighties reflected a measure of guilt about the price of such obsessions. A feminist could argue that “Life Lessons”—like the far more extended exploration of similar terrain in New York, New York—reflected a foundational sexism in Scorsese’s vision in which a masculine drive to create trumps values of decency and reciprocity. Scorsese would essentially plead guilty on both counts (something that would come naturally to a cradle Catholic) while still arguing for the integrity of rendering a hard truth: that dreams require choices, and that artists sometimes choose their own work before all else. However valid, there are limits to the value of such an exercise, though, which is why “Life Lessons” is finally a minor piece of work in the Scorsese canon.

Mob Mentality The same cannot be said of his next project, Goodfellas (1990). It first came on Scorsese’s radar in 1985, when Nicholas Pileggi, a journalist with a long

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career of covering organized crime (and husband of the much beloved writerdirector Nora Ephron) published the best-selling Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family. The book, an exceptionally well-structured piece of oral history threaded with good reporting, tells the story of Henry Hill, a second-tier mafioso—he was not Italian on both sides, so could never become a made man—who literally and figuratively knew where all the bodies were buried, among them those involved in the legendary Lufthansa heist of 1978, in which approximately $6 million was stolen from John F. Kennedy Airport in New York and never recovered. Hill later gained immunity in exchange for his testimony against his former associates, entered the Federal Witness Protection Program, and gave his story to Pileggi, who had never heard of him (which, given the depth of his knowledge of this beat, is really saying something). Scorsese learned about Wiseguy from a review in the New York Review of Books. When producer Irwin Winkler asked him whether he was interested in it, Scorsese said yes and Winkler bought the rights. Pileggi came on board to help write the screenplay, which was retitled Goodfellas (defined as those who didn’t snitch). The up-and-coming Ray Liotta, so brilliant in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1986), was cast as Hill; De Niro—returning to the fold for the first time since The King of Comedy— took the part of Hill’s mentor, Jimmy Conway, another Irishman and the mastermind of the heist. Joe Pesci was cast as Tommy DeVito, a truly frightening gangster. A crucial female voice—as a matter of voiceover as well as perspective—came from Lorraine Bracco, who played Hill’s wife, Karen.3 Scorsese has described Goodfellas as “the American Dream gone completely mad and twisted,”4 and that’s a pretty good distillation of the story’s trajectory (whose chronology is also a little twisted). The establishing shot is that of a car driving erratically on a dark highway, Hill with Jimmy and Tommy, when they suddenly hear banging noises they can’t place. They then realize it’s Billy Batts (Frank Vincent), the man they thought they had murdered that evening, who is thrashing in the trunk. The viewer is spared nothing as Tommy repeatedly stabs Batts to kill him, with Jimmy firing a few bullets into him for good measure. They will eventually pay a price for their act, but for the moment, this is just another night, one leavened by some excellent Italian food courtesy of Tommy’s mother (played by Catherine Scorsese with her usual verve). The scene culminates with one of the signature visual strategies of Scorsese’s storytelling: a freeze frame. This one captures Henry’s dimly lit, troubled face. And for the first time, we hear his voiceover: “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.”

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Notwithstanding the brutality that’s part of the film’s critique, Goodfellas is finally impossible to understand if you don’t appreciate how deeply— how gorgeously, really—Scorsese renders the allure of a life in crime. After this opening sequence, we flash back to the midfifties, when the young Henry Hill (Christopher Serrone) gazes longingly from the apartment of his troubled home at the machinations of the cabstand across the street run by Paul Cicero (Paul Sorvino), the capo who will secure Henry’s future. “To me, being a gangster was better than being the president of the United States,” the adult Hill remembers in his voiceover. “It meant being a somebody in a neighborhood that was full of nobodies.” Those nobodies include Henry’s father, who fruitlessly tries to stop him from entering the life, and a wheelchair-bound brother whom he nevertheless regards with affection. “I was part of something, I belonged,” he says of the new life he embraces. One of the reasons why Henry’s rise is rapid is that he intuitively understands the rules of the game. He endures a beating from his father—“The way I see it, everybody takes a beating sometime”—and when he’s arrested for the first time, he understands implicitly that he must keep his mouth shut. A lawyer mysteriously emerges from the courtroom to get him off, and he’s whisked out by Jimmy, who stuffs bills into his jacket and leads him to the courthouse lobby, where a collection of mobsters regard him with the joy of an adolescent who has just completed his confirmation—or, in the words of the adoring Cicero, “broke his cherry.” To achieve any American Dream, you have to be smart as well as tough, and Henry Hill is both. It’s important to emphasize that the shimmering appeal of the Life is not limited to men alone. Henry’s future wife, Karen, endures the proverbial terrible first date—and gets stood up on a second—but shows a feistiness in confronting him at the cabstand that leads him to snap to attention. Once Henry turns on the charm—and shows her a little of what his life is all about—she’s enthralled. The key moment when her enchantment crystallizes is revealed in the most celebrated sequence of the movie, the famed Steadicam shot that’s now a film school fixture (Paul Thomas Anderson paid homage to it in his own classic 1997 film Boogie Nights).5 Over the course of three minutes— significantly, it’s from Karen’s point of view—we watch Henry slip a twenty-dollar bill to a valet as the couple bypasses the main entrance to the famed New York nightspot the Copacabana, instead proceeding through a kitchen entrance where Henry is treated like a prince by all who cross his path (it helps, of course, that he spreads more love through the palm of his

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hand). A table magically appears and gift bottles arrive from friends. Karen is awed—as, in all likelihood, are most viewers. Karen is even more dazzled shortly after this when she tearfully tells Henry that she was harassed by a man across the street, prompting him to come over and deliver a brutal pistol-whipping. We watch as he returns to Karen’s house and hands the gun over to her with a bloody hand. “I know there are women like my best friends who would have gotten out of there the minute their boyfriend gave them a gun to hide,” she admits. “But I didn’t. I gotta tell the truth: it turned me on.” The next shot we see is Henry and Karen’s wedding, where a rabbi breaks a glass in an interfaith union in which Karen’s Judaism and Henry’s Catholicism matter less than their love of a good life defined in the most earthly of terms. It will call for compromises—we watch a camera pan slowly with anthropological clarity as Karen describes a community that remains resolutely working class in its cultural mores, if not economic ones—but it’s a deal whose terms she accepts, whatever her misgivings, even after Henry sets up with the requisite girlfriend on the side (Gina Mastrogiacomo). It’s a bad deal, however. That’s really the point of the movie. Its impatience with liberal pieties aside, Goodfellas is a cautionary tale about the fallen nature of human beings whose faith in worldly gratifications is doomed to fail. One might plausibly watch Goodfellas looking for that pivotal turning point, that seemingly incidental but crucial mistake, that inadvertently brings the world of these characters crashing down. But there isn’t one, really. Tommy’s murder of Billy Batts, a made man and thus off-limits, was a major mistake, but we see him lose his temper in dangerous ways multiple times; if killing Batts didn’t do him in, something else would. Henry’s vice is cocaine, something he’s specifically and repeatedly warned not to snort or sell. The day of his downfall, rendered in frenetic form with a clock marking the hours in which dealing guns, transporting coke, and managing pasta sauce are given seemingly equal weight, is one of the great set pieces of the film—and one in marked contrast to the loving charm of that scene at the Copa. The shortcomings of these characters aren’t tragic flaws; they’re typical and inevitable ones of people who don’t understand that one of the reasons why conventional morality exists is to protect us from ourselves. Henry doesn’t go down in a blaze of glory; instead, he ceases to be a goodfella by deciding to save himself and his family by playing the role of snitch, in which he will drag down his mentors Jimmy and Paulie. “Now I get to live the rest of my life as a schnook,” Hill laments in a voiceover as we see him standing in

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an ordinary suburban doorway. There’s one more image of glamorous gangsterism—we see Tommy fire a gun in a winking allusion to Edwin S. Porter’s pioneering 1903 film The Great Train Robbery—before Hill disappears into his house. The door shuts; the gangster has been domesticated. In addition to widespread critical acclaim, Goodfellas was a solid box office success, earning roughly double its $25 million budget. As such, the film solidified Scorsese’s standing in Hollywood, reaffirming his ability to achieve critical acclaim alongside commercial success (if still not on anything like a Spielberg or Lucas scale, though he enjoyed more cultural cachet than either). The movie also strengthened his claim as the premier chronicler of gangsterism, his credibility rooted in the way he depicted its operation at the level of everyday life. Goodfellas would be notably influential in later depictions of this culture, notably The Sopranos (1999–2007), which features a number of actors from the movie, among them Sorvino, Bracco, and Michael Imperioli, who parlayed a small role in Goodfellas into a major one as Tony Soprano’s nephew Christopher.6 Its fingerprints could also be discerned in Boardwalk Empire, a crime saga set in Prohibition-era New Jersey; Scorsese directed its pilot.

Dreams of Fear In the aftermath of his triumph, Scorsese plowed his newly acquired professional capital into another commercial endeavor: a remake of the classic 1962 thriller Cape Fear. He did so as part of a deal with Universal, which had bankrolled The Last Temptation of Christ with an understanding that he would subsequently make a crowd-pleaser. Like so many Scorsese projects, this one has a complicated backstory, beginning with the fact that it was originally to be a Steven Spielberg film. Scorsese had acquired the rights to another property, Schindler’s List, about a Nazi entrepreneur who ends up saving thousands of Jews during World War II. Spielberg and Scorsese essentially swapped projects, a move that would finally bring Spielberg his much coveted but elusive Oscar for Best Picture. Scorsese, for his part, gained the financial backing of Spielberg’s production company, Amblin Entertainment, as well as the leading man that Spielberg had lined up for the movie: none other than Robert De Niro. Cape Fear is generally considered minor Scorsese; certainly, it’s not near the top of movies his devotees will typically name when reeling off

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favorites from his filmography. But it showcases his sheer professionalism in making (or in this case, remaking) a nail-biting thriller. More importantly, it’s deeply illuminating in the way his tweaks to the original story reveal his view of the American Dream, and the way his critique of it extends beyond organized crime into the marrow of everyday bourgeois life. The 1962 version of Cape Fear, based on a novel by pulp fiction writer John D. MacDonald and directed by journeyman J. Lee Thompson, was a meditation on the way anarchic forces lurked beneath the seemingly placid surface of the midcentury American Dream. Gregory Peck plays Sam Bowden, a principled southern lawyer (not unlike the one he would portray in To Kill a Mockingbird, released eight months later) with a wife and daughter in small-town North Carolina near the river of the title. Eight years earlier, Bowden had intervened in a sexual assault, resulting in the arrest and conviction of Max Cady—played with marvelous understated menace by Robert Mitchum. Now released, Cady is hell-bent on revenge, an enterprise he undertakes with considerable cleverness and cruelty, ratcheting up the terror until a final confrontation on the Cape Fear River. The film was shot in stark black and white, which allowed it to stand out as well as to intensify its dark mood. The underlying question the movie engages is whether American life and institutions—especially the rule of law—are strong enough to withstand the forces of irrational hatred represented by Max Cady. Bowden’s domestic life with his wife, Peggy (Polly Bergen), and daughter, Nancy (Lori Martin), is almost a parody of the happy family, and Bowden himself is the straightest of arrows. So when confronted by the sheer evil that Cady represents, his instincts are to play by the rules, a principle he repeatedly affirms over the course of the story. “A man like that doesn’t deserve civil rights,” Peggy remonstrates with her husband in an effort to convince him to take more extreme measures. “You can’t put a man in jail for what he might do,” he replies. “And thank heaven for that.” Eventually Sam reluctantly hires a detective (Telly Savalas), who also recommends extralegal measures. “You’re a lawyer,” he says. “And you believe in due process. But it’s your family, not mine. A type like that is an animal. So you’ve got to fight him like an animal.” Eventually, Bowden in fact does fight Cady in a brutal struggle at the riverside in which he finally gets the upper hand on his enemy. “Go ahead,” Cady says, with Bowden poised to shoot him. “I just don’t give a damn.” But in a final affirmation of his principles, Bowden’s

MAD MAX: Ex-con Max Cady (Robert De Niro) manhandles lawyer Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte) in Scorsese’s 1991 remake of Cape Fear. In significantly reconfiguring the 1962 original, Scorsese deconstructs the American Dream of the happy home. (Photofest)

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revenge is both lawful and satisfying. “No,” he tells Cady. “That would be letting you off too easy, too fast.” The injured Cady is apprehended and turned over to the police. “You’re gonna live a long life,” Sam tells him. The American Dream is a dream of justice. In its broadest outlines, Scorsese’s Cape Fear honors its source material. And it does so in myriad ways. One good example is his use of Bernard Herrmann’s wonderfully ominous score—with its theme of four long descending and repeating notes—which Scorsese had Herrmann adapt, arrange, and conduct for the remake. The music is only one example of the way both films are redolent of the work of Alfred Hitchcock in their creation of an air of menace even when depicting ordinary moments. (Another Hitchcockian touch is the opening credits of Scorsese’s version, which evoke those of Hitchcock’s 1960 masterpiece Psycho.) Beyond that, Scorsese re-creates a series of scenes from the original, among them a highly symbolic one where Cady takes Bowden’s car keys away from him just as he’s about to start his car: there’s no escape. Scorsese also pays homage to the original by having a number of its actors appear in the remake, albeit in different roles. So it is that Mitchum takes the part of the ineffectual police chief who advocates extralegal measures to Bowden, and Peck plays the clever attorney who represents Cady. (Martin Balsam, who played the police chief in the original, here plays the judge who rules against Bowden.) Such intertextual gestures indicate just how closely Scorsese knows, and cheekily honors, the Thompson version. Ultimately, however, it’s the differences that make all the difference. One could say that the Scorsese version of Cape Fear is the Thompson version on steroids—or in the apt words of a reviewer for Variety, the changes “mak[e] the characters squirm physically, morally and sexually.”7 One obvious example is the level of violence, like Cady’s flinch-inducing rape of a flirtatious colleague of Bowden (Illeana Douglas), who makes the mistake of falling for his false charm, an assault on an entirely different scale from the original. To cite another example: both versions of the film culminate on a houseboat on the Cape Fear River. But the 1991 version goes one step further by having the mayhem unfold against the backdrop of a cataclysmic summer storm. Central to the contrast are the two versions of the story’s antagonist. There’s an almost sleepy-eyed sense of danger to Mitchum’s Max Cady, and it’s this seeming paradox that makes him all the more alarming. De Niro’s Cady, by contrast, radiates malice. The establishing shot of the film,

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accompanied by that eerie four-note theme, shows him doing pushups in his jail cell just before he’s released from prison, his jacked-up body a virtual weapon. Taped to the wall of that cell are illustrations of notorious historical figures—Josef Stalin, Robert E. Lee, Alexander the Great entering Babylon. The other inmates silently watch (awed?) as he makes his way out of the facility. There are storm clouds on the horizon as its doors close behind him. One of the ways Scorsese’s version complicates the story is that De Niro’s Cady is not simply an amoral man hell-bent on revenge, the way Mitchum’s is. De Niro’s Cady instead sees himself as a mighty, even holy, vessel of retribution. The bare back we see while he’s doing pushups is dominated by a tattooed crucifix, a scale hanging on each side of the horizontal beam. One is marked “truth”; the other “justice.” Beneath the pictures on his wall are a set of law books, and as he leaves prison, a guard asks him whether he wants to take them with him. “Already read ’em,” he replies, dismissively. This Cady has embodied the law (in a distinctly Old Testament way). And now he will bend it to his will. In more ways than one, this embodiment of retribution speaks with a southern accent. De Niro delivers his lines with an evident drawl, and Confederate flags and other such imagery pepper the film, suggesting Scorsese’s effort to capture a specifically southern pathology rooted in an extreme form of white libertarian agency—and outrage when it’s violated. Actually, this somewhat idiosyncratic form of Old Testament moralism does have an indigenous model in his Catholic soul mate, Flannery O’Connor, who also specialized in evoking Dixie monsters, like the Misfit of her classic 1953 story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” When Cady is brought into court on a dubious vagrancy charge, we again see his heavily inscribed body, which includes biblical verses like “Vengeance is mine” and “My time is at hand.” Here’s the thing: unlike in the 1962 version of Cape Fear, in which Cady’s hatred of Bowden is entirely unjust, here he has a point. While Peck’s character got involved as a Good Samaritan who intervenes to stop a crime in action, there’s a crucial difference in Wesley Strick’s 1991 screenplay. His Sam Bowden, played by Nick Nolte, was actually Cady’s defense attorney. This Bowden makes a crucial decision to suppress a key piece of evidence—a report that the victim of Cady’s rape was sexually active, opening her up to accusations of promiscuity that could have potentially helped Cady’s case (in the mores of that community, anyway). One could well understand why any normal citizen would try to get Cady off the street, where he is truly a menace to society. But Nolte’s Bowden violates

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the canons of his profession in a way that amounts to a corruption of the legal system. In short, Cady has a case against Bowden. And he means to prosecute it to the fullest extent of the law as he understands it—which means an eye for an eye (with interest). That’s not the limit of Nolte’s compromised character. We learn he bends the rules for himself as well. Instead of the happy family of the 1962 version of Cape Fear, we get a deeply unhappy one. Bowden’s wife, here named Leigh (Jessica Lange), still nurses a grudge from the extramarital affair Sam conducted years ago—and she’s rightly suspicious about that colleague at work (the one Cady will murderously assault as a way of intimidating Bowden, much in the way he poisons the family dog). In the original, the Bowdens’ daughter, Nancy, was almost a caricature of innocence; here Dani (played by Juliette Lewis; note the gender bend in her name and that of her mother) is an estranged adolescent with an alarming soft spot for bad boys, one Cady is delighted to exploit in a creepy scene where he masquerades as the drama teacher for whom she’s all too willing to perform. But the real difference, the one that places Scorsese’s version of Cape Fear on a different artistic plane, is the way he subverts the mythology of the American Dream in ways that go far beyond the original. This was a very conscious choice. “Spielberg was originally going to direct the film, and the script I first read was written for him,” Scorsese explained. “It was more black and white than I could accept. For instance, the family was happy, sitting around the piano singing—the kind of thing Steve could do genuinely quite well because he believes in it.”8 The 1962 version does question this mythic construct of patriarchal domesticity—the challenge that Max Cady poses is meant to be disconcertingly credible and forceful—but the idyllic life that Sam Bowden is living with his loving wife and innocent daughter in a beautiful house with a three-car garage and Ionian columns (another southern touch) is finally up to the challenge. Scorsese, by contrast, asserts that beneath a thin veneer of glossy appeal—embodied by Nolte himself, downright trim and good-looking compared with the shaggy Lionel Dobie of “Life Lessons” two years before9—the Dream is in fact an illusion that rests on a foundation of moral rot. We never question the integrity of Gregory Peck’s Sam Bowden. Almost from the start, we do question Nick Nolte’s Sam Bowden. As Leigh cuttingly points out as the couple weighs the threat of Cady, “You know how to fight dirty. You do that for a living.” But as Scorsese notes, their problem is deeper than Bowden’s bad judgment. “Because of their malaise, their disappointment

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with their lives, they are more susceptible to what [Cady] has been saying,” he explained. “And to some extent, Max has actually been created by Sam, because Sam made a moral mistake.” Still, Scorsese expressed some sympathy for the characters. “What interests me is that anyone with a feeling of compassion would have been tempted to do the same thing, to let Max serve fourteen years in jail.” In the world of Martin Scorsese, there are always compromises, in the best and worst senses of that term. And no one is completely innocent—in multiple senses of that term.10 In both versions of the story, there is a frantic climactic battle, and in both versions, the Bowdens survive. But there’s little sense of triumph in the 1991 Cape Fear. Rather than vanquish the threat, Cady seems to have instead revealed the fault lines of the Bowden family. For the moment, they are reunited and glad to be alive. But the ending leaves you wondering how long they will remain together. Cape Fear was one of the biggest commercial successes of Scorsese’s career. Thanks to the Spielberg connection, the project had a relatively large $35 million budget, which paid off handsomely with $182 million in global box office receipts. Its comparisons with the much beloved original were widely positive (Vincent Canby of the New York Times praised it as “new and improved and, from time to time, so fiendishly funny that it qualifies as a horror film”). De Niro was nominated for Best Actor at the 1991 Oscars, and young Juliette Lewis received a Best Supporting Actress nod. Though often considered secondary Scorsese even at the time, it has nevertheless attracted a steady array of subsequent admirers. “I’ve probably seen Cape Fear, like, 700 times,” the famed musician and producer Questlove, who watched the film nightly while making his first record with the Roots, confessed in 2020.11

Elite Aspirations It was from this position of strength that Scorsese embarked on a more personal, less commercial project: a film version of Edith Wharton’s famed Pulitzer Prize–winning 1920 novel, The Age of Innocence. It took a while to line up the money to finance it and 20th Century Fox dropped out at the last minute, though Columbia Pictures stepped in. However, Scorsese did have the advantage of working again with a cast of big stars. One particular coup was young Winona Ryder, only twenty years old at the time filming began, who had already compiled an impressive filmography that included

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the generational touchstone Heathers (1989) and movies with big-name directors Tim Burton (Beetlejuice in 1988; Edward Scissorhands in 1990) and Francis Ford Coppola (Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 1992). For The Age of Innocence, Ryder was cast as ingénue bride May Welland. Michelle Pfeiffer, who played her cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, was a veteran whose hits ranged from the naïve Madame de Tourvel in Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons (1988) to the juicy part of Catwoman in Burton’s Batman Returns (1992). Scorsese and casting director Ellen Lewis’s biggest coup, however, was landing the Anglo-Irish prodigy Daniel Day-Lewis, who had just won the first of what would be an unprecedented three Best Actor Oscars for his role as Irish poet Christy Brown in My Left Foot (1989). Here he would be Newland Archer, engaged to May but drawn, seemingly inexorably, to the countess. The film was shot in the spring of 1992, but a series of delays pushed back its release to the fall of 1993. As many observers noted at the time, The Age of Innocence seemed about as far away cinematically as anything Scorsese had ever done—a costume drama of the New York elite, and one set about a century before any story he’d previously told (with the exception of The Last Temptation of Christ, which, as we’ve seen, came with a contemporary linguistic twist). And yet at the same time there was also something strangely familiar about The Age of Innocence. As with Goodfellas before it, and Casino after it, there was an almost anthropological quality to the story as a dissection of a small world and the rules that govern it, rules largely invisible to outsiders. (In all three cases, we have voiceover narrators who explain to us what we’re seeing.) Unlike in other projects, the characters in this film are evident and avowed cosmopolitans. But as the story proceeds, the provincialism of their worldview becomes steadily more evident—in many ways lamentably so. But in the final choices of its protagonist to live by a code many would regard as idiosyncratic at best, the film makes a statement that unrealized dreams are the ones we cherish most. The Age of Innocence came to Scorsese’s attention by way of his old friend Jay Cocks, a moviegoing companion who had gone on to work as a film critic for Time, and who had nevertheless remained close with him in the decades since. Their relationship prevented Cocks ethically from reviewing any Scorsese films for the magazine, but the two eventually became collaborators, first when Cocks did some rewrites on Last Temptation, and then more fully with Cocks writing a series of screenplays for Scorsese films, of which The Age of Innocence would be the first.

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Cocks had given the Wharton novel to Scorsese to read in 1980, but it wasn’t until seven years later that “things in [Scorsese’s] life had calmed down and [he] was able to be a little more reflective.” This was the golden age for filmed literary classics made by the trio of producer Ismail Merchant, writer Ruth Jhabvala, and director James Ivory, among them Henry James’s The Bostonians (1984) and E.  M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1985), in which Day-Lewis had appeared as the priggish Cecil Vyse. Scorsese admired these films, and was intrigued by the unspoken Victorian codes that paralleled those of mafia gangsters. “I became fascinated by the way that they tried to communicate with each other, and I thought this would be a challenge to try and do.”12 Scorsese being Scorsese, he addressed much of that challenge visually. The Age of Innocence is a film in which material objects function as a kind of coded hieroglyphics, in which the message is not necessarily what it seems. This is apparent from the opening credits, in which we see a series of roses come into bloom—except that they’re not: they’re made of paper (as we realize in discerning their delicate embroidery). When we move from the credits to the establishing shot, in which we’re informed we’re in the New York City of the 1870s, we do see yellow daisies, and a hand reaching to pluck one, but we soon realize that they’re props in an opera—tellingly, it’s Faust (1859)—that’s being performed at a concert hall. However, that’s not the real entertainment for much of the audience, whose members are far more interested in watching each other. The central act of this drama is the arrival of Countess Ellen Olenska (née Welland), a native New Yorker who has returned home after a disastrous marriage to a Polish count and who has the temerity to appear in public before her old social set. Newland gallantly tries to show his support for the Welland family by greeting Ellen warmly when he visits his fiancée, May Welland, in their box at the theater. In the subsequent ball hosted at the home of gauche Julius Beaufort and his wife, Regina (yet another Welland, played by Mary Beth Hurt), Archer is dismayed to learn that social pressure has led Ellen to skip the dance because, in the words of May, “her dress wasn’t smart enough.” In the days that follow, Archer becomes a staunch defender of Ellen— partly out of family loyalty, partly out of protest for the way she is being ostracized despite the fact that it’s her louche husband back in Europe who’s really the problem—even as he presses May’s grandmother Mrs. Mingott (Miriam Margolyes) for her blessing to allow the couple to wed. His strategy is complicated by the fact that he’s an attorney, and his boss,

GUILTY PLEASURE: Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) savors a rare moment alone with his beloved, Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), in Scorsese’s 1993 film version of Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel The Age of Innocence. In sympathetically depicting a choice to live by a code many would regard as idiosyncratic at best, the film makes a statement that unrealized dreams are the ones we cherish most. (Photofest)

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Mr.  Letterblair (Norman Lloyd, in a cast chock-full of fine character actors), wants him to convince Ellen to reconcile with her husband. Her recalcitrance on this point leads the gossipy Sillerton Jackson (Alec McCowen), in an after-dinner conversation with Archer, to suggest she will be cut off from the Wellands and be allowed, in a devastatingly ­matter-of-fact statement accompanied by falling cigar ash, to “find her level.” It’s surely one such moment that Scorsese had in mind when he explained how The Age of Innocence was like one of his gangster movies: “If somebody has to be taken out, they’re taken out.”13 The even greater complication in all of this, of course, is that Archer and the countess have fallen in love. This is something that for a long time he doesn’t quite seem to consciously realize, though his growing insistence on speeding up the wedding with May, in which he ultimately prevails, suggests he knows it at some level. Their marriage should be the end of the matter, but it isn’t. Ellen and Newland have a couple of subsequent encounters but never fully consummate their affair (unless you count an admittedly ravishing moment when Newland removes a glove from Ellen’s hand in a highly charged erotic exchange when the two are alone in a carriage). He writhes in agony over their dilemma: “Nothing’s done that can’t be undone,” he tells Ellen. “I’m still free. You can be, too.” But she’s the realist. “I think we should look at reality, not dreams,” she says as their precious moment alone expires. “I just want us to be together.” “I can’t be your wife, Newland. Is it your idea that I should live with you as your mistress?” [The very idea is patently absurd.] “I want—somehow I want to get away with you. Find a world where words like that won’t exist.” “Oh, my dear, where is that country? Have you ever been there?”

Newland Archer—his very name redolent of the American Dream—stumbles to express hopes that know no race, class, or gender. “We have the same problems of wanting things that we can’t have, and having things that we don’t want, and that’s what this story is about,” Cocks explained. De Fina situated this longing in the broader context of Scorsese’s career: “In all his movies there’s that yearning, that wanting something desperately that you know you can never have and can never be. And yet you still don’t give up the yearning.”14

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In the end, that yearning is all Newland has: he is successfully maneuvered into capitulation. His defeat is revealed in a remarkable scene. The Archers have just hosted a dinner party for the countess, who has decided to return to Europe. Over footage of a sumptuous meal, Joanne Woodward reads Wharton’s words—“The gracefulness of the prose has a scathing, ironic violence to it,” Scorsese noted15—that make plain Archer’s loss of innocence about others’ innocence: “From the seamless performance of this ritual, Archer knew that New York believed him to be Madame Olenska’s lover. And he understood, for the first time, that his wife shared the belief.” More than that: May—so easy to underestimate as a fool—is a step ahead of him. Now, sitting alone with her in his study, he starts to explain that he’s to leave, perhaps for India or Japan. “I’m afraid you can’t do that, dear,” she says, rising in her chair to tower over her husband before kneeling to curl with her head in his lap. (Here, as elsewhere in his body of work, Scorsese manipulates the film speed, slowing key images down to maximize their impact.)16 She’s having a baby, she announces, and they both understand that means he isn’t going anywhere. But there’s an important postscript to this story that adds a deeper dimension to Scorsese’s career-long analysis of the American Dream. After this climactic scene, the story jumps to the same room decades later, the panning camera capturing mementos of Newland’s life with his wife (who has died) and children. His adult son Ted, an architect, browbeats Newland into going to Paris, and once there suggests, with studied off-handedness, that they visit Dad’s former flame, who lives there. Archer is shocked that his son knows about the countess. Ted explains that on her deathbed, May told him that he was in good hands because “once, when she asked you to, you gave up the thing you wanted most.” Archer replies (twice) that “she never asked me.” But the point is that the request could be both unspoken and honored. “It seemed to take an iron band from his heart to know that, after all, someone had guessed and pitied. And that it should have been his wife moved him inexpressibly,” the narrator informs us. This is probably why Archer refuses to join Ted, who is actually friendly with the countess, when they stand on the threshold of her apartment. “What will I tell her?” Ted asks incredulously. “Just tell her I’m old-fashioned,” Newland replies in what is the final scene of the movie. We see motorcars on the street; a new century, with new ways of life, has arrived.17 Sometimes—actually, very often in American life—the value of dreams derives from the way we choose to sacrifice them in the name of a greater

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good. “Essentially, [Archer] is what they call a stand-up guy,” Scorsese later reflected, noting that he himself is not among those who actually chose that path. “It’s about making a decision and sticking to it, making do with what you have. . . . ​I don’t say it’s a happy ending, but it’s a realistic and beautiful one.”18 Commercially speaking, The Age of Innocence was a bust, earning $32 million on a $34 million budget.19 The film was nominated for five Academy Awards, with nods for Ryder, Cocks, Dante Ferretti’s art direction, and Elmer Bernstein’s score. It won the Oscar for costume design. (DayLewis was ineligible for a Best Actor nomination because he was already nominated for his performance in the Northern Ireland drama In the Name of the Father.) The Age of Innocence is not typically a film that instinctively comes to mind when thinking of Scorsese’s body of work, but it remains one of the strongest pieces in his canon, one that rewards repeated viewings.

Bad Bets For Scorsese, it was time to tack back in more of a crowd-pleasing direction. There was talk of him doing an astronaut love story with Warren Beatty, and a movie version of Richard Price’s lauded 1992 novel Clockers (which Spike Lee would ultimately direct and release to acclaim in 1995). But Scorsese ultimately decided to chart a course back toward more familiar turf, re-teaming with Nicholas Pileggi for another mob epic, Casino. The origins of Casino begin with a news story that captured Pileggi’s eye: a very public marital spat that took place in Las Vegas between Geri McGee, a former hustler on the Strip, and her husband, casino executive Lefty Rosenthal. (Originally envisioned as the movie’s opening scene, it became its climax instead.) Pileggi pursued the thread of the story to a massive mob operation that was run through Rosenthal—a man who began his career as a handicapper and ended up administering an empire, albeit one where his true role could never be revealed as such (he had titles like “director of food and beverage”). Rosenthal was backed, in somewhat clumsy but highly violent fashion, by a gangster named Tony “the Ant” Spilotro. Pileggi had planned to write the book first and then collaborate with Scorsese on the screenplay, but Scorsese persuaded him to make the movie first instead. The story was streamlined and tweaked for legal

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reasons, and the three main characters were renamed Ace Rothstein (De Niro), Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone), and Nicky Santoro (Pesci).20 Many observers consider (some with an air of lament) Casino a variation on Goodfellas. There’s the same voiceover, documentary-style storytelling at the start, a focus on underworld characters, and simmering as well as exploding violence. Pesci’s character in particular may be hard to distinguish in the two movies. (Anyone with questions about his versatility should look back on Raging Bull on the one hand and ahead to The Irishman on the other.) To some degree, leveling such a criticism is a little like expressing unhappiness with Taylor Swift writing love songs or Toni Morrison writing novels about slavery. But there’s little question that Goodfellas and Casino are similar— and that most viewers prefer the former to the latter.21 There are, however, some important differences worth noting. One is that we’re dealing with a different stratum of organized crime here. Mean Streets was essentially about wannabe gangsters. Goodfellas was about becoming a foot soldier in the mob. Casino focuses on what might be termed the managerial level. There is some attention to the big mob bosses “back home” (Chicago in real life; Kansas City in the movie), which is to say the ruling class of Godfather lore. But on the whole, they are peripheral—and a lot less mythically powerful—than the characters of Coppola fame. Setting is also notable. Scorsese described Casino as “an urban western,” an apt phrase suggestive of the degree to which he was deeply attentive to both halves of that term. We get repeated shots of the vastness of the Nevada desert—and we also get scenes of the incongruously dressed Ace and Nicky meeting there for secret discussions. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore notwithstanding, Scorsese has never made a classic western, though it’s apparent that western directors such as John Ford and Howard Hawks have had a profound impact on his cinematic consciousness. Of course, Casino’s setting is deeply urban, though it’s clear that Las Vegas is very much a western city—and, in a very powerful, distinctive way, a city of dreams.22 Which brings us to the key point for the purposes of this discussion. In the context of the American Dream, Casino is an unusual movie because it begins with the dream achieved and then chronicles its destruction. Cape Fear is similar. But while that film shows us a man whose fallible behavior unwittingly threatens the realized aspirations he has achieved (and narrowly preserves), Casino shows us how the inexorable forces of greed— Scorsese’s Catholic sense of sin is never more evident than here—lead

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DICEY: Sharon Stone as Ginger McKenna (Rothstein) in the 1995 film Casino. The film begins with an American Dream achieved and then chronicles its destruction by showing how inexorable forces of greed lead people to throw away that which they cherish most. The promised land becomes paradise lost. (Photofest)

people to throw away that which they cherish most. The Promised Land becomes Paradise Lost. This is something that we’re explicitly informed of at the outset. “It should have been so sweet,” Ace says (uttering the closing words of another character in the book version of Casino). “We were given paradise on earth, but we fucked it all up.” Nicky, whose character spends so much of the movie at loggerheads with Ace, says something similar: “In the end, we fucked it all up. It should have been so sweet, too. But it turned out to be the last time guys like us were given anything that fuckin’ valuable again.”23 But having posited this point, the movie moves insouciantly, as did Goodfellas, into a breathless chronicle of what made heaven so heavenly. There’s a full twenty-two minutes before we first encounter Ginger, who is the narrative engine of the story. Before that, we’re treated to a brilliant account of how the casinos in Vegas worked in the 1970s, in ways that ranged from psychological manipulation to the mechanics of skimming cash to be packed into suitcases and sent back home. Ace describes Vegas as a mob version of a “morality car wash” (yet another line that found its way

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into the book)24 and describes running a casino as “selling dreams for cash.” Later in the film, as we see him honored for his contributions to the community, Ace notes, “Back home, they would have put me in jail. Here they’re giving me awards.” Nicky, for his part, comes out to Vegas as muscle for Ace, only to realize that there’s all kinds of racketeering on the side that’s there for the taking. “For Nicky,” Ace laments an hour into this three-hour epic, “Vegas was the fucking Wild West.” Over the course of the movie, each of these characters overreaches. The most obvious example is Nicky, whose self-control was never much to begin with and who increasingly finds himself enmeshed in surveillance by both law authorities and the bosses back home. Ace’s vice is Ginger, with whom he’s smitten. He knows she doesn’t reciprocate, but he offers her a life of financial security and indulges her particular vice of fine jewelry. What he can’t abide, though, is her unshakeable attachment to her former pimp Lester Diamond (James Woods), which consumes Ace with jealousy that takes the form of pettiness and (especially) controlling behavior. Ginger, for her part, anesthetizes herself with alcohol and drugs, clinging ever more tightly to the safe deposit box that Ace gave her after marrying her (but only after she got herself pregnant with his child). She foolishly turns to Nicky for help, which poisons his relationship with Ace. Ginger reaches the point of no return after her addictions result in the neglect of her daughter, which culminates in that aforementioned marital fight in the front yard of the Rothstein house. The results of all this aren’t pretty. We actually see—or think we see— the outcome for Ace in the opening scene of the movie, in which he turns the ignition of his car and it blows up. (It’s not clear who culprit is; very possibly it was Nicky.)25 We later learn he survives, and is allowed to resume his life as a handicapper. Ginger meets a miserable end by overdosing in a cheap hotel. Nicky’s demise is both pathetic and brutal, as he and his brother are beaten to death with baseball bats in a cornfield in one of the most sickening sequences in any Scorsese movie (and that’s saying something). This was very much by design. “Nicky is horrible,” Scorsese noted. “He’s a terrible man. But there’s something that happens for me in watching them get beaten with the bats and put into the hole. Ultimately it’s a tragedy. It’s the frailty of being human. I want to push audiences’ emotional empathy with certain types of characters who are normally considered villains.” It’s not only nice people who pursue, attain, and forfeit their dreams, which vary in their appeal and, indeed, lawfulness. We’re a lot like them in some ways, even if we entirely reject them in others.

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Casino performed respectably at the box office, pulling in over $110 million on its approximately $40 million budget.26 Sharon Stone’s widely hailed performance as Ginger landed her an Academy Award for Best Actress. Having once again reestablished his credentials as a solid earner, Scorsese turned to the most idiosyncratic, and arguably least commercial, feature film of his entire adult career: a biopic of the Dalai Lama whose title refers to the name by which he is addressed: Kundun (presence).

Soul Searching As with The Age of Innocence, this project may seem more out of left field than it actually was. Over the course of his career, Scorsese has periodically paused to make movies with religious themes (The Last Temptation of Christ before Kundun; Silence after it), which are foils for the often extreme secularity of his gangster films: the grubby material world alternating with the otherworldly spiritual one. But this is also something of a simplification, because moral and religious issues often thread through his secular stories, and worldly issues collide with otherworldly ones in his religious films. This is especially true of Kundun, which takes place against the backdrop of Chinese history in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Kundun came to Scorsese when his agency sent him the screenplay by Melissa Mathison, the veteran screenwriter of E.T. who was Harrison Ford’s wife at the time. This was a relatively unusual way for him to develop the project, as his typically germinate from within a small circle of associates. “I read the script and liked its simplicity, the childlike nature of it, that it wasn’t a treatise on Buddhism or a historical epic in the usual sense,” he explained.27 Kundun begins with the discovery of the fourteenth reincarnation of the Dalai Lama in a remote region of Tibet (played by four different actors at different stages of his life, culminating in the adult portrayed by Tenzin Thuthob Tsarong). He comes of age against the backdrop of World War II and the triumph of the Communist Revolution led by Mao Tse Tung (Robert Lin), whose government treats Tibet paternalistically and then increasingly coercively, driving the Dalai Lama into exile. The drama of the film—which proceeds in a stately, intensely visual manner reminiscent of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1987 classic The Last Emperor, full of vast landscapes, arresting architecture, and majestic music—focuses on the way a boy comes to understand his responsibilities to his people and

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his decision about what that means: nonviolent resistance and voluntary withdrawal. An intensely willful little boy becomes a man who understands that a dream of a Tibetan future requires him to give up the only home he has known. In this regard, the story of the Dalai Lama isn’t all that far from that of Jesus Christ. As Scorsese biographer Vincent LoBrutto notes, they are “both men of conviction, courage, and purpose.”28 For all the unfamiliarity of the story and the settings, the underlying dynamic of Kundun is a familiar one in the wider Scorsese world in another way as well: a provincial boy comes of age in a tribal community amid a larger society that is indifferent when it isn’t actively hostile, ultimately pulverizing that community. “I’m always interested in people who lose their world,” he told Richard Schickel in 2011. “Like in Mean Streets, or in Goodfellas, or The Age of Innocence. Here the Dalai Lama is losing the Tibetan Buddhism of the past 1600 years, wiped away in a very cruel way.”29 Kundun was barely a blip on the cinematic radar screen, taking in less than a quarter of its $28 million budget. By this point in his career, however, it was a setback Scorsese could afford. His next picture, Bringing Out the Dead, was supposed to be a more commercial venture, based as it was on Joe Connelly’s best-selling debut novel of the same name and featuring a screenplay by the old Scorsese hand Paul Schrader. But it too proved to be a bust, only bringing in half of its $32 million cost.30 Thematically speaking, Bringing Out the Dead, starring Nicholas Cage (Francis Ford Coppola’s nephew) as Frank Pierce, a literally and figuratively driven paramedic, is a hybrid of sorts, reflecting Scorsese and Schrader’s desire to be in the world while not quite of it. Pierce, whose name evokes Christ on the cross, has a dream: redemption. He’s feverishly haunted by the fact that he hasn’t saved as many people as he had hoped to, and is visited by the ghost of Rose (Cynthia Roman), one soul he’s lost. The film depicts his three-night odyssey through the sometimes hellish streets of drug-fueled Manhattan in the nineties, alongside a series of increasingly zany partners played by John Goodman, Ving Rhames, and Tom Sizemore. Pierce’s nightly shifts take place against the backdrop of the story of a heart attack victim, John Burke (Tom Riis Farrell), and his daughter, the perhaps inevitably named Mary (Patricia Arquette), who battles addiction and tries to come to the aid of, and to peace with, her estranged father, struggling to live—or is it die?—in the overcrowded fictive emergency room of Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy (nicknamed Perpetual Misery). Like the ghost of Rose, John also speaks to Pierce from his coma, begging him

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to cut off his ventilator, a “request” the paramedic finally honors, and one that serves to emphasize the ambiguity of his moral code even as he strives, sometimes at great psychic pain, to honor it. As the movie makes clear, however, there is an element of hubris in his desire to slake this moral thirst. “Forgive me, Rose,” Pierce says in a climactic encounter with the soul who has hovered around his life. Her reply: “Nobody told you to suffer. It was your idea.” (“When Schrader wrote that, I said ‘Oh, of course,’ ” Scorsese later told Roger Ebert.)31 This cathartic release is what allows Pierce to finally take refuge in the arms of Mary and find some peace. Bringing Out the Dead largely came and went without notice (LoBrutto dismissed it as “just another bead on the Rosary”).32 It was championed at the time, perhaps not surprisingly, by Ebert and was the subject of an appreciative reassessment on the website Slash Film two decades later.33 Alongside Kundun, it remains one of Scorsese’s least known and viewed films, effectively ending his 1990s—and his twentieth century—on a quiet note. Scorsese had now passed through an initial stage as a maverick filmmaker and was well along in his status as a seasoned veteran in late middle age. But he showed no sign of slowing down as he headed into a new millennium, where some of his most ambitious, and successful, projects still lay ahead.

FIGHT CLUB: The brawl, led by William Cutting, a.k.a. Bill the Butcher (center), in the opening scene of Gangs of New York (2002). The Civil War is often represented as the triumph of the forces of light (abolition) over the forces of darkness (slavery). But in Gangs of New York, it is not only the dream of the plantation elite that’s destroyed by the power of the national state. So are provincial cultures like those represented by Bill the Butcher— often vicious, as most cultures are in one form or another. But there is something admirable in his savagery, which even at its worst is marked by a code of honor. (Photofest)

5 Recurring Dreams

Gangs of New York • The Aviator • The Departed • Hugo • Shutter Island • The Wolf of Wall Street • Silence As Martin Scorsese’s career reached its climax, three American dreams named at the outset of this study remained at the center of his cinematic vision. One was a dream of upward mobility. Another was a dream of power and pleasure. The third was a dream of wisdom and transcendence. The settings were somewhat different from those when he was a young man: the quest for mobility would be played out against the urbanity of Paris and Hollywood rather than the sidewalks of New York; power and pleasure were the province of nineteenth-century street gangs or twentieth-century trading desks (along with more baroque varieties of criminality); transcendence was pursued in remote seventeenth-century Japanese villages rather than familiar Catholic parishes. The same tensions between the cosmopolitan and the provincial continued to complicate the pursuit of these dreams (those trading desks were on suburban Long Island, not in Manhattan). In one sense, then, Scorsese’s preoccupations had not changed much in the half century since he began his career. But as he crossed into the new millennium, there was a new sense of fullness—in the more expansive scope of his storytelling; in the caliber of actors with whom he was working; in the production values underwritten by sharply larger budgets—that he achieved in his work. And there’s a sheer beauty in some 107

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of these movies that suggests a man who has learned how to more fully savor art, life, and the connection between them. There was another sense in which Scorsese was in a familiar situation at the start of the twenty-first century: he was again in trouble commercially with the powers that be controlling his purse strings. After the solid box office performance of Goodfellas and Cape Fear in the early nineties, he produced a string of commercial disappointments or downright flops for the remainder of the decade. The Age of Innocence was essentially a wash; Casino made money, but less than its backers hoped; Kundun and Bringing Out the Dead were flat-out financial disasters. Scorsese had long since adopted a one-for-them, one-for-me approach of alternating crowd-pleasers with personal obsessions (whose commercial success could be surprisingly unpredictable). But now he was striking out with both. His situation was not quite as dire as it was in the mid-1980s, when he faced the prospect of losing his career as a director of feature films. Partly that’s because the film industry’s economic structure was changing. The advent of home video, followed by streaming, created new markets where films that failed to earn out their initial costs might yet have an afterlife. The increasing profitability of foreign markets meant that a movie could make more abroad than it did at home (and indeed producers now counted on this). Scorsese himself did not necessarily have the cachet to fully exploit such sources of revenue, though he certainly had an international following that ranged from avant-garde cineastes to gangster-film fanatics. But many of his acting collaborators—notably Leonardo DiCaprio, who replaced Robert De Niro as Scorsese’s alter ego—did, and they would make a difference in his fortunes in the twenty-first century. Scorsese also had other kinds of friends in high places. These included financiers in a Hollywood where major studios were no longer the only game in town amid the arrival of independent mavericks such as Miramax, led by the notorious Harvey Weinstein and his brother Bob. Perhaps most importantly, Scorsese still had the backing of Michael Ovitz, who had been his agent in the mideighties and had helped Scorsese get back on his feet when his fortunes were at low ebb. Ovitz had since gone on to serve as president of Disney before his ouster in 1997, after which he founded a new agency, Artists Management Group, bringing Scorsese back into his fold. Ovitz delegated two of his surrogates to fly to New York and ask him, “If you could do anything, what would it be?” Scorsese’s answer: Gangs of New York—a deeply personal film that would have to be made as a big-budget

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extravaganza. And so it was that the machinery of the dream factory, however improbably, set about realizing one of Scorsese’s oldest obsessions.1

Uncivil Wars The Gangs of New York is the title of a 1928 book by Herbert Asbury, an American journalist (his mentor was the acerbic H.  L. Mencken) whose rebellion against his Southern Methodist background led him to a career of writing about crime.2 Asbury’s study is a sprawling compendium of anecdotes tracing the rise and fall of the city’s street gangs over the century preceding the book’s publication. “This book is not a sociological treatise, and makes no pretense of offering solutions for the social, economic and criminological problems presented by the gangs,” he begins, implicitly rejecting the instincts of progressive reformers (a message generally consonant with Scorsese’s entire body of work). He goes on to describe a prototype that fits many of Scorsese’s previous characters: “The basic creed of the gangster, and for that matter any type of criminal, is that whatever a man has is his only so long as he can keep it, and that the one who takes it has not done anything wrong, but has merely demonstrated his smartness.”3 Here as in Scorsese’s work, such characters tend to get their comeuppance. But the appeal of their lives is clear, even if it isn’t necessarily affirmed. Scorsese first encountered The Gangs of New York back on New Year’s Day in 1970 when visiting a friend. He realized that the book’s locus was the neighborhood where he had grown up. “The cobblestones talked to me,” he said of his childhood haunts. At that point, he had only made one featurelength movie, and it was clear that a project on this scale was clearly out of his league. But it remained in his mind. Once he was on the map with Taxi Driver, Scorsese took out a two-page ad in Variety touting Gangs as his next project and asked Jay Cocks, still at Time, to work on a screenplay. But the project never developed momentum, in part because in the aftermath of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate fiasco—and Scorsese’s own New York, New York—the heyday for big-budget, director-centered projects had passed.4 There were other problems. The script that Cocks produced was extremely long—179 pages; “It was almost like a novel,” Scorsese said5—and was itself a sprawling affair that included an elaborate paternal revenge plot that begins in 1846 and culminates in the Civil War draft riots in 1863. (The departure from the book was so great that when Cocks, along with

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screenwriter Steven Zaillian and playwright Kenneth Lonergan, was eventually nominated for an Oscar, it would be for Best Original Screenplay, not an adaptation.) And then there was the matter of the film’s protagonist. The lead character, known as Amsterdam Vallon, had to be young, but almost by definition, any actor who could fit the part would lack the clout increasingly necessary to greenlight a Hollywood picture. Enter Leonardo DiCaprio. Star of the record-shattering 1997 hit Titanic, DiCaprio was a mega movie star who was also serious about his acting. Robert De Niro, who had worked with DiCaprio when he was a child in the 1993 film This Boy’s Life, had told Scorsese that he was the real deal. So when AMG, which represented DiCaprio as well as Scorsese, put the two together as a package, it finally seemed like the movie could proceed. The project was originally set up with Disney, but after its bad experience with Kundun, the studio passed. However, a new company, Initial Entertainment Group, led by investor Graham King, put up $65 million in exchange for foreign rights, and Harvey Weinstein of Miramax, eager for prestige, decided to take it on. (Scorsese and DiCaprio also put financial skin in the game as a hedge against cost overruns.) The project got an additional fillip of star power from Cameron Diaz, who would play Amsterdam’s love interest, Jenny Everdeane, and Daniel Day-Lewis, who agreed to work with Scorsese again and swap his uptown pedigree in The Age of Innocence for the decidedly downtown swagger of Bill Cutting, a.k.a. Bill the Butcher, the profane, charismatic, and brutal boss of the city’s Five Points neighborhood (Day-Lewis described him as a “hooligan dandy”).6 The actor, who had long treated every film as his last, needed entreaties for this one as well, especially given his feelings about Weinstein, who, long before his fall as a #MeToo sexual assailant, was regarded as monstrous even as he racked up a string of impressive artistic and commercial successes. “What he doesn’t understand is that I did Gangs in spite of Harvey, not because of him,” Day-Lewis said on the eve of the film’s release.7 Production of Gangs began in early 2000 at the famed Cinecittà studios in Rome, where production designer Dante Ferretti, who had worked on many previous Scorsese films, put together a set that many observers at the time and since have considered breathtaking. Costume designer Sandy Powell, another longtime team member, also outdid herself, as did cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, who used filters to capture the period reality of particulates in the air.8 (Janusz Zygmunt Kamiński did something similar in Steven Spielberg’s 2012 biopic Lincoln.) Even people who have had

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problems with Gangs—which includes many of its most ardent admirers— agree that it is visually spectacular. The sheer majesty of the film may be why Scorsese told Roger Ebert that the movie should be seen as “an opera, not a documentary.”9 In theory, at least, Gangs centers on a dream of revenge. The opening sequence of the film shows the child Amsterdam with his father, Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson), who is about to lead his tribe of Irish immigrants, the Dead Rabbits, out of catacombs that look positively medieval into the Five Points to battle the Protestant natives led by Bill the Butcher. In the vicious fight that follows—we see the snow gradually turn red—Bill vanquishes Vallon, but treats him with tenderness once it’s clear he’s been dealt a mortal stabbing, caressing his head as he dies. “Soon be over, Priest,” he says with Amsterdam grieving at his father’s side. Bill places his enemy’s knife back in his own hands: “You may need it across the river,” he tells him. Amsterdam is sent to a reformatory and returns, via flash-forward, as he’s released into adulthood. There’s an indelible image of him tossing the bible he’s been given over a bridge, with the water rippling outward as it sinks: religion makes its mark, but the God of the Five Points is a decidedly Old Testament figure, not the merciful one invoked by the reformers who periodically show up in the film and who conflate bourgeois values with Christian ones. For the rest of the film, Amsterdam’s mission is to avenge his father’s death by killing Bill. But that goal gets complicated, and compromised, as he unexpectedly finds himself adopted by the Butcher, who does not know his true identity, as a protégé. For the next two hours of the film, Amsterdam is a Hamlet figure, convinced of what he needs to do but somehow unable to execute his plans. However, in terms of its logic—and in terms of the sheer intensity of Day-Lewis’s towering performance—Gangs of New York is really Bill the Butcher’s story. And in terms of its place in the Scorsese canon, this is another story in which we watch an attained American Dream get turned to ashes. As he is quick to explain, especially to anyone who might think otherwise, Cutting is the master of his domain. He’s equally clear on the source of his power. “Do you know how I stayed alive so long?” he asks after Amsterdam instinctively and improbably saves Bill from an assassination attempt. “Fear. The spectacle of fear. All these years. Fear. The spectacle of fearsome acts.” By this point, Bill feels little but contempt for those who surround him. “I killed the last honorable man fifteen years ago,” he tells Amsterdam, still not knowing that Priest Vallon was his father.

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The real threat to Cutting’s world is not anyone from within the Five Points, or even his own greed, the way it is for characters in films like Goodfellas or Casino. Rather, it’s the impersonal and implacable forces of government power that threaten to steamroller over his provincial kingdom—a kingdom that rests on a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant supremacy in which Catholics are as much a hated race as African Americans, who largely figure here on the margins. (There’s a character named Jimmy Spoils, played by Lawrence Gilliard  Jr., who, like some Irish characters, gets admitted into the Native club, a status that will be of little use to him once the draft riots break out.) For much of the film, the rising forces of change are embodied by the real-life, and legendarily corrupt, Boss Tweed (Jim Broadbent) of Tammany Hall, who begins as Bill’s ally but increasingly sees the Irish as a source of votes and thus of power in a city and nation that is becoming increasingly democratic. The pivotal scene in this plot development takes place at the docks, where Irish immigrants are disembarking. “There’s the building of our country right there,” Tweed tells him. “Americans aborning.” “I don’t see no Americans,” Cutting replies. “I see trespassers. Paddies who will do for a nickel what a nigger does for a dime and a white man used to get a quarter for—then moan when you treat them like niggers.” (His economic logic resembles that of opponents of immigration to this day.) Tweed is not impressed by Cutting’s arguments. “You’re a great one for the fighting, Bill, I know. But you can’t fight forever.” “I can go down doing it,” he responds, walking away. “And you will.” Cutting turns back. “What did you say?” “I said you’re turning your back on the future.” Cutting wags his finger and clicks his teeth. “Not our future.” Ironically, Cutting puts his hand on young Vallon’s shoulder as they depart. A splendid piece of camera work follows as the lens tracks away from the immigrants disembarking from one ship to Union soldiers embarking on another, while coffins are lifted from that vessel to join the immigrants on the dock in a circle of arrivals and departures. There’s an allegorical truth here about the way working-class people were raw material to be consumed as part of a new birth of freedom in a reconstituted nation—one that would leave Cutting and his kind behind.10 When, not long after this, Cutting finally learns of Amsterdam’s true identity, he turns on him with ferocity. This last leg of the film takes place

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against the backdrop of the draft riots, a real-life event in 1863 in which thousands of working-class people erupted against forced conscription while the wealthy could buy immunity for the princely sum of $300. The city erupts in chaos as Bill, Vallon, and their respective gangs conduct negotiations that will culminate in a showdown intended to bookend the one that had occurred all those years before. But neither their contest nor Jenny’s planned escape from this masculine madness is allowed to unfold as planned, because Union troops fresh from Gettysburg arrive in force to put down the riots. Vallon and Cutting come to blows, but the two literally are blown apart by navy vessels firing into the city, and Bill ends up with shrapnel in his side. “Thank God,” Cutting tells his adoptive adversary. “I die a true American”—a line reportedly delivered by the actual Bill the Butcher, who in fact died in a bar fight in 1855.11 In a reversal of the opening scene, Vallon does Cutting the favor of delivering the coup de grace. Bill dies comforted by knowing it is at the hands of one of his own, so to speak, not what he regards as a faceless mass turning his home into an unknown country. The Civil War is often represented as the triumph of the forces of light (abolition) over the forces of darkness (slavery). And to a great degree, it was. But in Gangs of New York, it is not only the slaveholding elite that’s destroyed by the power of the national state. So are provincial cultures like those represented by Bill the Butcher—often vicious, as most cultures are in one form or another. Although he is the antithesis of the values many of us hold dear, there is something admirable in his savagery, which even at its worst is marked by a code of honor. The underlying cultural logic is clear: like the actual Native Americans living on the frontier, Bill the Butcher must die so that a modern, multiracial, non-WASP-dominated society might live. Bill achieved a dream; he lost it so that we might have ours, riven as it inevitably is in its imperfections and our own investments in its inequalities. There’s a critical consensus that Gangs of New York is not quite a great film. Some observers found it too long, its patricide/Civil War threads too loosely tethered. Others felt DiCaprio lacked the heft to really carry his part. Still others noted the absence of a strong female point of view, Diaz’s Everdeane and Cara Seymour’s turn as the real-life Dead Rabbit Hell-Cat Maggie, a legendary brawler who collected the ears of her enemies, notwithstanding. Scorsese’s most stalwart champion, Roger Ebert, did not regard it as “in the first rank of his masterpieces.” In his review in the New

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York Times, A. O. Scott described it as “near-great.” Scorsese biographer Vincent LoBrutto complains that the storyline “gets lost in the beauty and the mayhem.” Nevertheless, all these figures recognized that Gangs remains a remarkable film—and one notable in that it ever got made, a statement in its own right about Scorsese’s doggedness in the face of decades of setbacks. “The fact remains that Martin Scorsese realized a thirty-year dream,” LoBrutto concludes. “His tenacity and driven nature are the stuff of legends in today’s Hollywood.”12 This sense of a near miss is also reflected in the film’s commercial performance. Its budget, which grew over the course of production, punctured the $100 million mark. It did not make that back domestically, though it did end up near $200 million globally when the dust finally settled.13 The film was nominated for an impressive ten Academy Awards—but didn’t win any. Scorsese himself shared the general perception of a mixed outcome. He was haunted by money problems throughout the production and was constantly wrangling with Weinstein, who was pushing him to streamline and finish the production. “It was just an obsession for me,” he later explained, describing it as one of his worst experiences as a filmmaker, even as it was “a wonderful place to be at that moment, whatever you may think of the film.”14

Flying High Under such circumstances, Scorsese’s next move is a little surprising: he agreed to work with Weinstein again. Miramax and Initial Entertainment reunited to put together over $100 million to finance the director’s next project, very much a one-for-them movie, The Aviator, a biopic of the famed, reclusive, and mentally ill mogul Howard Hughes, whose innovations in the film and aviation businesses made him a giant of both in the first half of the twentieth century.15 As had been the case with De Niro before him, DiCaprio was now functioning as something of an artistic funnel for Scorsese; it was he who was passionate about the project (as was Warren Beatty before him, who never realized his own planned Hughes film) and convinced Scorsese to take it on. As with The Color of Money and Cape Fear, the result was a highly professional product in which Scorsese’s fierce commitment to craft resulted in a film that was both crowd-pleasing and refined.16 That said, Scorsese still found a way to connect with the material, the core of which was a screenplay by the accomplished John Logan, which

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focused on the period between 1927 and 1947, when Hughes was in his prime and had not fully surrendered to the obsessive-compulsive disorder that would ultimately cripple him. “I think what John was trying for was something that had the spirit of adventure—a hope of what this country could be,” Scorsese told Richard Schickel a decade later. “It’s about the spirit of the explorer—the spirit of someone who kept testing the limits and pushing and pushing, because this was the place to do it in. . . . ​It’s about a dream of the country.”17 While Hughes, who was born into a fabulously wealthy family, could never be a poster child for a dream of upward mobility, his character nevertheless embodied a sense of ambition that knows no boundaries. Thus it is that we hear him say in a (prescient) childhood flashback, “When I grow up I’m going to fly the fastest planes ever built, make the biggest movies ever, and be the richest man in the world.” The Aviator became a vehicle for Scorsese to focus on his own American Dream by depicting a passionate filmmaker at work. The opening of the movie shows Hughes—dashingly embodied by DiCaprio—on the set of what would become his 1930 classic Hell’s Angels, a project that required elaborate stunt work and fanatical attention to detail. We see Hughes’s perfectionism mocked by movie mogul Louis B. Mayer in one scene, and we see, there and subsequently, how Hughes would bulldoze over obstacles, financial and otherwise, to achieve what had been seemingly impossible, whether the issue at hand was a better movie, a better aircraft, or getting the better of a corrupt senator, Ralph Owen Brewster of Maine, a role that Alan Alda, who usually plays good guys, clearly relishes here. Hughes was a notorious womanizer, a fact that the film tacitly acknowledges, instead focusing more on his celebrated romance with Katharine Hepburn, a role for which Cate Blanchett—who has made a career playing historical figures ranging from Elizabeth I to Bob Dylan—won an Academy Award. The Hughes-Hepburn relationship is portrayed here as that of a pair of stubborn iconoclasts determined to make their mark in the face of indifference, hostility, or lurid curiosity, a dynamic that gives them a deep sense of mutual respect even as they’re driven in different directions. The shadow of Hughes’s mental illness and Hepburn’s burgeoning relationship with Spencer Tracy end an affair that would probably never have worked anyway (Hughes goes to great lengths to quash a tawdry exposé of Hepburn-Tracy, an act of generosity she only learns about much later). One might say the same about a subsequent relationship with Ava Gardner, played here by Kate Beckinsale. The inclusion of these elements in the

PLANE VIEW: Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes in The Aviator (2004). While Hughes, who was born into a fabulously wealthy family, could never be a poster child for a dream of upward mobility, his character nevertheless embodied a sense of ambition that knew no boundaries. (Photofest)

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story helps balance Hughes’s character and recalibrates the film in ways that had been missing from the lopsidedly masculine Gangs of New York. One trait that The Aviator shares with Gangs, albeit in a very different way, is its tremendous sense of visual verve. The first half of the movie has an almost confectionary glow, one achieved using two-color film stock, with objects appearing only in shades of red and cyan blue (no yellow). For the stretch of film set after 1935, the cinematography reverts to full technicolor, tellingly making the changeover in one of the most memorable scenes of the film, when Hughes washes his hands in the men’s room but then can’t bring himself to touch what he regards as a hideously infected doorknob, trapping him there. Such claustrophobic moments—and there are many, notably those that show Hughes barricaded in his screening room, rendered in shades of scabrous red—are balanced by ones where he literally soars, thanks to the use of skillfully deployed computer-generated imagery made possible by the largest budget Scorsese had to date.18 The Aviator was a commercial success for Scorsese, one of the biggest of his career, earning back its costs and more domestically while grossing another $100 million abroad.19 It garnered eleven Academy Award nominations, winning five (editing, costumes, production design, art direction, and the nod for Blanchett as supporting actress), but none of the main categories. Film scholar Tom Shone describes this as “about right: ravishing surfaces and stellar supporting cast, but the center does not hold.” LoBrutto, by contrast, is more forgiving, calling The Aviator “a film more personal than the average work for hire project.”20

In the Name of the Father One might say the same for Scorsese’s next film, The Departed. This was another picture that came to him by way of DiCaprio, based on the 2002 film Infernal Affairs, a thriller that was part of an Asian gangster trilogy (and entered by Hong Kong as its entry for the Best Foreign Film Oscar that year). At first, Scorsese didn’t want to do it. On the one hand, it was familiar territory he felt he had already trod; on the other, he didn’t particularly relate to what he considered a schematic story of a police force and a mobster each placing a mole in the other’s camp. These reservations were outbalanced by a series of other incentives beyond working with DiCaprio again. One was William Monahan’s script, which he skillfully transposed

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to his native Boston (there are a series of parallel scenes in Infernal Affairs and The Departed, but the latter is far more securely planted in a specific habitat in the neighborhood of South Boston, or “Southie”). Another was the backing of Warner Brothers, a major studio with a long pedigree of crime films much beloved by Scorsese, among them those by William Wellman of Public Enemy (1931) fame. A third was the heavyweight presence of Jack Nicholson, recruited to play the role of Frank Costello, modeled on the famed Boston mobster Whitey Bulger. Additional box office appeal was added by another Boston native, Matt Damon, who would play Costello/Nicholson’s stalking horse in the Boston State Police. DiCaprio, for his part, would play an undercover cop supervised by the paternal Queenan (Martin Sheen) and the often hilariously profane Dignam (Mark Wahlberg). All in all, it made for a compelling package.21 In The Departed, there is once again the trope of the wickedly appealing Dream in danger. Mostly set in the present, the film opens with a flashback sequence in which Nicholson’s character delivers a soliloquy explaining his credo: “I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me,” he says against a backdrop of early 1970s antibusing protests and street-fighting men (Scorsese uses the classic 1969 Rolling Stones song “Gimme Shelter” to great effect here). “That’s what the niggers don’t realize. If I got one thing against the black chappies, it’s this: no one gives it to ya. You have to take it.” His musings culminate in a dark catechism to his new recruit, Colin Sullivan, just before we see the latter, ironically, serve as an altar boy: “When you decide to be somethin’, you can be it. That’s what they don’t tell you in church.” But the locus of interest in The Departed is actually a different, more complicated dream: a desire to escape one legacy and affirm another. This is the dream of DiCaprio’s Billy Costigan. His backstory looms large here: his uncle Jackie had been tight with Costello, but his father remained aloof as an airport baggage handler, and his pointed refusal to join the Life seemed to gain him grudging respect. He died when Billy was young, and his mother married a rich man—a source of durable resentment, which becomes clear in a hospital scene where Billy tells his stepfather that their relationship will be terminated once his mother dies. Billy enters the state police at the same time Colin does, but while Colin sees it as a ticket to the good life (Costello underwrites a beautiful apartment with a view of the Massachusetts State House—though there’s a pointed image of a rat along the windowsill), Billy seems to view police work as a way of washing his

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LEONINE: Jack Nicholson as gangster Frank Costello in The Departed (2006). (There’s a severed hand in the plastic bag to his left.) While few regard it as his greatest work, the film was the only one for which Scorsese won an Academy Award for Best Director. (Photofest)

prep school background clean and affirming the moral vision of his father by punishing those who choose a life of sin. But Billy’s rage for justice is also a problem. When Colin comes in for an introductory meeting as part of his orientation with the Staties, Dignam mocks him but Colin knows not to take the bait. Billy’s interview immediately follows—unlike in Infernal Affairs, the two characters never directly cross paths until the end of this version of the story—but finds it considerably harder to keep his temper, particularly after Dignam recites and demeans his class-fractured background. “I got a question: how fucked up are you?” he asks. Billy’s silent response vividly demonstrates the very meaning of the phrase “if looks could kill.” But Dignam doesn’t let up: “What’s a lace-curtain motherfucker like you doin’ in the Staties?” Queenan poses the question more delicately, but no less insistently: “Do you want to be a cop, or do you want to appear to be a cop?” Ironically, once they’re satisfied the answer is yes, he does want to be a cop, Billy needs to appear to be a criminal, going so far as to do a stint in jail to bolster his credibility with Costello’s crew, which he’s assigned to infiltrate. The price of this deception in the name of a greater truth is high, particularly on Billy’s psyche. He begins seeing—in more ways than one—the

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psychiatrist (Vera Farmiga) whom Colin also happens to be dating, one of a number of examples of doubling in the movie. Like Amsterdam Vallon, Billy increasingly finds himself under the wing of his nemesis. (So does Colin, but the results are more seriocomic, thanks to Alec Baldwin’s performance in that role.) Billy achieves his professional objectives but does not live to achieve his redemptive aim—he becomes one of the many figures the title refers to as the departed, in a film that depicts ten executions that include shootings, garroting, and a long fall from a tall building.22 Ironically, Billy’s avenger turns out to be his tormentor, Dignam. The only rat left at the end of the movie is the one scampering across the window view of the Massachusetts State House. In a 2007 review of The Departed, Roger Ebert explains both how this movie is different from Scorsese’s previous work and how consonant it is: “Most of Martin Scorsese’s films have been about men trying to realize their inner image of themselves. That’s as true of Travis Bickle as of Jake LaMotta, Rupert Pupkin, Howard Hughes, the Dalai Lama, Bob Dylan, or, for that matter, Jesus Christ. The Departed is about two men trying to live public lives that are radical opposites of their inner realities. Their attempts threaten to destroy them, either by implosion or fatal betrayal. The telling of their stories involves a moral labyrinth, in which good and evil wear each other’s masks.”23 The final line here is crucial: from beginning to end, whether comedy or tragedy, moral ambiguity is the hallmark of Scorsese’s moral vision. (In The Departed we’re given priests who are apparently pedophiles and mobsters who do good deeds.) This ambiguity complicates his characters’ attempts to realize an imagined version of themselves, which is to say to close the gap between dream and life. It’s a quest that’s complicated still further by a nagging question whether the very aspiration of self-invention is itself the problem—pretending to be something you’re not—which is a form of pride that can be the greatest sin of all. Few serious Scorsese fans consider The Departed his best work, but one can make a fair case for it as his biggest hit. Certainly the movie was financially successful, earning more than three times its $90 million budget.24 It was a staple of Top Ten film lists for 2006. In a list of great pop culture entertainment in 2009, Entertainment Weekly logged The Departed at number 90 with the following explanation: “If they’re lucky, directors make one classic film in their career. Martin Scorsese has one per decade (Taxi Driver in the ’70s, Raging Bull in the ’80s, Goodfellas in the ’90s). His 2006 Irish Mafia masterpiece kept the streak alive.”25 Scorsese’s own ambitions for the film had been more modest. “I was just hoping for some sort

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of financial success with The Departed,” he told Richard Schickel years later. “I figured that it would pretty much be it for me, that I wouldn’t do any more studio pictures.” So it was all the more surprising that Scorsese finally triumphed at the Oscars, with The Departed taking Best Picture and he himself finally—finally!—winning Best Director. “Could you double-check the envelope?” he quipped upon accepting the award. The film also took Best Adapted Screenplay, and Thelma Schoonmaker won her third editing prize after Raging Bull and The Aviator.26 For the moment, Scorsese decided to stay a crowd-pleasing course. While he had for many years been nursing a hope to make Silence, a film version of the 1966 novel by Japanese writer Shūsaku Endō, he yet again followed the lead of DiCaprio in developing a pet project of his, The Wolf of Wall Street (in 2007, DiCaprio won a bidding war for the rights against Brad Pitt, with whom he would costar in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood a dozen years later).27 The plan was again to work with Warner’s, but when that got bogged down, Scorsese and DiCaprio shifted course with another project, Shutter Island. The film is based on a 2003 novel by Dennis Lehane, a highly successful crime fiction writer, two of whose previous novels, Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone, had been made into acclaimed films directed by Clint Eastwood (2003) and Ben Affleck (2007), respectively. Shutter Island is a departure from Lehane’s usual style in its gothic surrealism. In this regard, it’s a departure for Scorsese as well, and in once again channeling his talents into the spirit of the material, he produced one of the most lurid films of his career, one that shades into the genre of horror. DiCaprio stars as Teddy Daniels, a U.S. marshal who, as the movie opens, is taking a shuttle ride across Massachusetts Bay with his partner, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), to the eponymous island of the title in 1954 to investigate the disappearance of a patient from its psychiatric facility. There he meets a somewhat creepy Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley, the powerhouse British actor making the first of two appearances in Scorsese films) and the even more creepy Dr. Naehring (Max von Sydow, channeling the dark side of his acting palette). Daniels manages to track down the missing patient, played by Emily Mortimer (who would join Kingsley again in Hugo), but from that point on the film takes an increasingly surreal turn, culminating in a climactic scene that shows that everything you’ve been watching for the previous two hours has been illusory. In the final scene of the film, Daniels poses a haunting question: “What would be worse? To live as a monster or die as a good man?” The movie ends with his making that choice.

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Shutter Island is arguably the most polarizing movie of Scorsese’s career. As a number of observers have noted, the film is loaded with so many MacGuffins—allusions to the Holocaust, the Cold War, grotesque medical experiments—that its narrative energy diffuses. The master of the MacGuffin, of course, was Hitchcock; the film is very much an act of homage (there’s a sequence involving a staircase, for example, that comes straight out of Vertigo). As is often true of Scorsese, and may be true to a fault here, his obsession with visual style is really what the film is about. “Mr. Scorsese’s camera sense effectively fills every scene with creepiness, but sustained, gripping suspense seems beyond his grasp,” complained A. O. Scott in the New York Times. On the other hand, Shutter Island continued Scorsese’s streak of box office success, pulling in close to $300 million on an $80 million budget. Anecdotally, the film, like Cape Fear, seems to have a following as a minor classic. “Shutter Island is that rare thing: a thriller that plays much better in retrospect than it does as you are watching it—appropriately enough, perhaps, for a film so haunted by memory,” writes film historian Tom Shone in his coffee-table analysis of Scorsese’s body of work. “Some movies are never meant to be new. They are merely old movies in waiting.”28

Animated Movie In his next film, Hugo, Scorsese tried to keep his commercial streak going while branching into new directions. One of these was to ride a new wave in 3-D moviemaking, which experienced a renaissance at the turn of the new century after its early emergence in the fifties. As was true the first time around, this proved to be something of a gimmick. But Scorsese was intrigued by the technical challenge it posed. “I’ve always been interested in 3-D,” he explained. “But I was never able to use it. First of all, it had fallen out of fashion, and it took too much money.”29 Another novel aspect of the project that was unusual for him was its source material, The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007), by Brian Selznick, for which he was awarded the Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished American picture book for children. Scorsese’s body of work had always been decidedly adult. Nevertheless, the book appealed to Scorsese on a series of personal levels. He had married his fifth wife, Helen Morris, in 1999, and she promptly bore him a daughter, Francesca, who was around the age of the film’s protagonist when he undertook the project. Selznick’s lavishly illustrated and bound

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book essentially consists of storyboards, which surely appealed to Scorsese’s sensibility. It also was a valentine to one of Scorsese’s favorite filmmakers, Georges Méliès (1861–1938), a founding father of cinema (Scorsese had first seen the 1902 Méliès classic A Trip to the Moon when he was a child, and it made an indelible impression). So it was not a hard sell when Graham King, who brought The Invention of Hugo Cabret to his attention, told him, “Marty this is so you, you have to do it.” The script was written by John Logan, who had penned the screenplay for The Aviator. The film was shot at London’s famed Shepperton Studios, its elaborate set a composite of three Paris train stations; Dante Ferretti was once again in charge of the production design.30 Hugo tells the story of a preadolescent boy (Asa Butterfield) in the 1930s. His mother dies before the story opens; his father (Jude Law) works in a museum as a horologist, a trade he teaches Hugo while giving him a love of all things mechanical, notably the abandoned automaton he brings home. After his father dies in a fire, Hugo falls into the custody of his alcoholic uncle (another turn by Ray Winstone of The Departed), whose frequent absences from his job maintaining clocks at the train station allow Hugo to do the work while foraging for what he needs via theft under the suspicious but hapless eye of the station manager (Sacha Baron Cohen in a light dramatic role). As the film opens, Hugo has taken to stealing parts from the shop of a toy store in the station, whose owner (Ben Kingsley) catches him in the act. Hugo eventually befriends the man and his adoptive goddaughter (Chloë Grace Moretz). The two discover that the toy store owner is none other than Méliès, who in real life had in fact fallen into obscurity and opened a toy store, a set of circumstances he explains when his identity is revealed. Hugo offered Scorsese another opportunity to tell a story about a filmmaker—and this time, to tell a story about a dream resurrected. The latter part of the movie includes loving re-creations of Méliès films, including A Trip to the Moon and Kingdom of the Fairies (1903); as he so often does in his movies, Scorsese makes a cameo appearance here, this time as a photographer, just as he did in The Age of Innocence (his daughter Francesca also appears as an extra). Méliès, who began his career as a magician, was especially attentive to the power of fantasy and special effects, which are his signal contributions to the history of cinema; not coincidentally, the automaton Hugo is rebuilding was actually his. In the novel version of Hugo, the filmmaker says, “If you’ve ever wondered where your dreams come from . . . ​just look around. This is where they are made”—a line that makes it into the film.31

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However enchanting it may have been to audiences at the time and ever since, Hugo proved to be a commercial disappointment. The technical difficulties of 3-D led to serious cost overruns, an outcome that soured Scorsese’s relationship with King, who lost a good deal of money on a major project that struggled to make back its gigantic $180 million budget.32 The film was nominated for eleven Oscars, including nods for Best Picture and Best Director, winning five, all for the more technical side of the ledger (cinematography, art direction, sound mixing, sound editing, and visual effects). Today Hugo lives on, as so many movies do, as streaming fodder, but in this particular case that’s a far cry from the visual spectacle it was imagined to be but only briefly was. Other than in occasional superhero movies, 3-D filmmaking has again faded to the margins, its artistic possibilities, such as they may be, largely unrealized.

Banksters The financial failure of Hugo set back Scorsese’s hopes of finally making Silence, and so he turned his attention to another project that had been on hold but that finally got some momentum: The Wolf of Wall Street. After originally kicking around the idea with Warner’s, DiCaprio and Scorsese did Shutter Island and then had gone their separate ways—DiCaprio maintained his supernova status with projects like Inception (2010), Django Unchained (2012), and The Great Gatsby (2013), while Scorsese got bogged down in Hugo. Now, however, DiCaprio circled back to what he called “a modern-day Caligula.” He considered working with other directors but concluded that “there wasn’t anybody else who could bring the rawness and toughness, the music, and particularly the humor required to convey the excitement of these young punks—these robber barons—taking on the Wall Street system.”33 Title notwithstanding, The Wolf of Wall Street isn’t exactly a Wall Street story. It is, once again, a tale of people on the periphery of the great metropolis playing by their own set of (amoral) rules but gradually being ensnared by a larger system, legal and financial, whose gravitational pull is finally too big and powerful to escape. The film is based on the 2007 memoir by Jordan Belfort, whose fledgling career in downtown Manhattan was snuffed out by the financial panic of 1987, leading him to form a Long Island brokerage firm—dubbed, with faux WASP gravitas, Stratton Oakmont—specializing

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in penny stocks. The first hundred pages or so is a gripping account of a single day, many incidents from which would end up in the movie, before the book descends into an increasingly tiresome string of anecdotes that would spill into a series of sequels. After serving a stint in jail for fraud, Belfort transitioned into a career as a financial guru—something else depicted in the film, in which Belfort has a cameo, introducing himself as played by DiCaprio. He plays a double game in another sense as well. “I sincerely hope my life serves as a cautionary tale to the rich and poor alike,” he writes at the start of his memoir. The problem is that the next five hundred pages read more like a paean to the joy of decadence than they do contrite confession, as suggested by the bright red subtitle that stands out on the paperback edition: “I partied like a rock star, lived like a king.”34 In the book, Belfort is at some pains to explain exactly how he manipulated the financial system. The heart of his scheme involved agreeing to take on eager clients in exchange for a block of shares at below-market prices, which he would then sell at a profit when he peddled them to clients looking for bargains in penny stocks—some of them credulous neophytes who fell for shady marketing tactics, others blue-chip traders who liked to shop for treasure in junkyards. This core strategy was executed with any manner of illicit business practices that crossed the line into downright fraud, but for a long time Belfort was too far below the radar to attract the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Federal Bureau of Investigation.35 Scorsese and his collaborators had little interest in such minutiae (though screenwriter Terence Winter of The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire fame did work for a stint at Merrill Lynch).36 In fact, the movie foregrounds this indifference: at one point Belfort starts to explain his business practices and then breaks the fourth wall: “I know you’re not following what I’m saying anyway, right? That doesn’t matter. The real question is this: was all this legal? Absolutely fucking not. But we were making more money than we knew what to do with.” In the larger context of Scorsese’s work, The Wolf of Wall Street is best understood not as a business fable but rather as the highest rung on an ascending ladder of criminality that began with Mean Streets and went up to Goodfellas and Casino before reaching the top of the respectability food chain here. But even these guys (and most of them are guys, though there is a smattering of women; ironically it’s Jordan’s first wife, Teresa, played by Cristin Milioti, soon thrown over, who unwittingly gives him the essence of his business strategy) never quite cross over into the realm

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CALCULATED SPREAD: Leonardo DiCaprio preaches a gospel of fraud to his converts as the felonious Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). Once again, we witness a tale of people on the periphery of the great metropolis playing by their own set of (amoral) rules to achieve a decadent American Dream, only to be ensnared by a larger system, legal and financial, whose gravitational pull is finally too powerful to escape. (Photofest)

of ruling-class respectability. The movie doesn’t mention that Belfort is Jewish, but that can be inferred, in part by the manner of his father (Rob Reiner), who is bemused by his son’s business practices. In any event, the traders of Stratton Oakmont are thoroughly familiar figures. “Money doesn’t just buy you a life, better food, better cars, better pussy,” Belfort says in the opening voiceover. “It also makes you a better person. You can give generously to the church or the political party of your choice. You can save the fucking spotted owl with money.” With minor modifications, such words could just as easily be spoken by Charlie Cappa’s uncle Giovanni, or Henry Hill, or Ace Rothstein, who were no less intelligent, ruthless, or cynical. The question remains—and indeed to many critics has become more insistent in the twenty-first century, when critical sensibilities have taken on a decidedly more moralistic tone—where Scorsese himself stands in all of this. Is he at least tacitly endorsing this corrupt version of the American Dream? It would appear that, at least to some degree, the answer is yes. One of the most emotionally stirring scenes in The Wolf of Wall Street occurs

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during one of Belfort’s periodic stemwinder speeches to his traders. “This is Ellis Island, dear people. I don’t care who you are or where you’re from, whether your relatives came over on the fucking Mayflower or an inner tube from Haiti. This right here is the land of opportunity. Stratton Oakmont is America.” He then goes on to tell the story of Kimmie Belzer (Stephanie Kurtzuba), a single mom who was nearly broke when she came to the company. She asked Belfort for a $5,000 loan; he gave her $25,000. One need not take such anecdotes at face value—his celebration of the fact that she now drives a Mercedes seems tacky, to say the least—and yet recognize their mythic force. There’s little doubt, in any case, that the look of gratitude on her face is anything less than genuine. Actually, there’s a whiff of dirty money in the very financing of The Wolf of Wall Street. The company that backed the film, Red Granite, was a new player in Hollywood that had trouble securing studio backing because of the film’s sexual content (DiCaprio reported that the independent financing made it easier to push the envelope in this regard, though they still had to make changes to avoid a deadly NC-17 rating). There are allegations that one of the principal’s stepfathers illegally secured funds through the Malaysian government. The producers later paid a $60 million settlement after charges of embezzlement.37 It’s unlikely Scorsese played any direct role, or indeed was even aware of any of the details involved in the deal. But it would come as no surprise to him that sin inhered in this piece of handiwork, as it does in all human labors. But perhaps the most problematic indicator of the film’s compromised moral vision—as in so many Scorsese movies—is the sheer amount of time we spend with its sybaritic protagonist and his sidekick Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill). In any work of art, presence tends to make the heart grow fonder. And while Jordan Belfort is a bad man, he’s also charming, funny, and fascinating to watch. So it’s not surprising or inappropriate that some would take offense at the way the film refuses to explicitly condemn his behavior. “Did you think about the cultural message you’d be sending when you decided to make this film?” asked Christina McDowell, whose father was a business associate of Belfort’s. “You have successfully aligned yourself with an accomplished criminal, a guy who still hasn’t made full restitution to his victims.” She continued: “And don’t even get me started on the incomprehensible way in which your film degrades women, the misogynistic, ass-backwards message you endorse to younger generations of men.” (There’s lots of fully exposed female flesh in the movie, including that of Margot Robbie, who

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plays Belfort’s second wife; DiCaprio doesn’t return the favor.) Scorsese was heckled at a screening during Oscar season in 2014.38 “Was Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street a critique of capitalist masculine privilege, or a three-hour-long feast on the goodies such privilege can buy?” asked Dana Stevens in Slate.39 She, like other reviewers, recognized that this is a question. It’s important to note, then, that one can answer that it does not endorse what it depicts. The simplest reason to think so, as is the case in so many Scorsese movies—and so many others, dating at least as far back as Public Enemy—is that the sinners are finally laid low. Belfort is caught; he goes to jail; he’s forced to confront the fact that he’s a drug addict; his wife leaves him and he doesn’t get custody of his daughter. There are limits to his humbling; indeed, he is in many ways unrepentant, and we leave him essentially where we found him: making a living by making dubious promises to credulous dreamers. But while many of us laugh with, rather than at, Belfort in his various escapades—and this is surely the funniest movie Scorsese ever made, in part thanks to DiCaprio’s physical acting and the improvisatory contributions of Hill, who took the Screen Actors Guild–mandated $60,000 minimum as an acting fee just for the privilege of appearing in a Scorsese film40—­very few of us would make the same choices he does. That may be simply because we lack Belfort’s talents, or we’re afraid we’d get caught. But it’s also because we understand that this particular dream costs more than it’s worth, whether or not this message is didactically propounded by moralists unlikely to dissuade those of us who insist on chasing it anyway. Pandering or not, The Wolf of Wall Street was a resounding commercial success, the largest of Scorsese’s career, almost quadrupling its $100 million budget.41 It received five Oscar nominations (for DiCaprio, Hill, Winter, and Scorsese, along with a Best Picture nod), though it didn’t win any. In the six movies he had directed in the first thirteen years of the twentyfirst century, Scorsese had sold over $1.5 billion in tickets, and while the actual profit was smaller than this figure, it doesn’t count home video sales.42 By this point, of course, some individual movies, among them DiCaprio’s Titanic, made more than $1 billion, so Scorsese was still no financial titan in Hollywood. But he had demonstrated that it was possible to pursue deeply personal projects (with some compromises along the way) while remaining commercially viable in the industry. Now, finally, he could cash in those chips with the most resolutely uncommercial, but most religiously profound, picture of his career: Silence.

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Omertà Shūsaku Endō was born in Tokyo in 1923. After a brief period of living in Manchuria, his parents divorced, and his mother took him back to Japan. There, he was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church, where he remained for the rest of his life. Endō studied French literature at Keio University, graduating in 1949, after which he moved to France and continued his studies at the University of Lyon. His first two novels, Shiroi hito and Kiiroi hito (White Man and Yellow Man, both 1955), began a lifelong quest to compare Western and Eastern perspectives. What many observers consider his greatest novel, Chimmoku (Silence), was published in 1966. Much honored at home and abroad, Endō died in 1996. Scorsese first read Silence in the 1990s and was immediately captivated by it, rereading the book many times. Noting that there have been a number of important twentieth-century Catholic novelists, among them Graham Greene (with whom Endō is often compared), Scorsese writes that Endō was important to him because of the way he navigated the globallocal dialectic. Silence, he notes, “is precisely about the particular and the general. And it is finally about the first overwhelming the second.” The novel also intersects with another long-standing Scorsese obsession: “the conflict of faith, the necessity of belief fighting the voice of experience.”43 The plot of Silence, based in fact and closely followed by the movie, tells the story of a pair of seventeenth-century Portuguese Jesuit missionaries, Sebastião Rodrigues (played by Andrew Garfield) and Francisco Garrpe (Adam Driver), who are distressed to learn that their mentor, Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson), who has been evangelizing in Japan for a number of years, has suddenly gone silent and has allegedly reputed his faith. They convince their superior, Father Valigniano (Ciarán Hinds), to allow them to go and try to retrieve him. Upon their arrival in Japan, the two priests find fervent but beleaguered Catholic communities, along with government authorities determined to stamp out the church’s subversive influence. These pressures drive the two Jesuits to separate for the sake of safety, and we then follow Rodrigues as he grapples with two deeply trying figures. The first is Kichijiro (Yôsuke Kubozuka), who originally ferried the two priests from Portuguese Macao to Japan and who, despite earlier denials, is actually a Christian. The problem is that Kichijiro has a penchant for repeatedly betraying Rodrigues and other believers, and then repeatedly asking for absolution, which Rodrigues is understandably increasingly reluctant to give, but always does.

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The other, more formidable, figure is Inoue (Issei Ogata), who was actually baptized a Catholic but is now determined to extinguish Christianity generally from Japanese soil. The threshold for denunciation is low—all a believer has to do is place his or her foot on a sacred etching placed on the ground. What makes Inoue devilishly effective, however, is his recognition that some Christians are all too eager to martyr themselves for the cause. This he will allow—we witness horrible crucifixions in rising tides of boiling water before dissidents are cremated—but he has an additional strategy of torturing other people if the obdurate believers will not commit apostasy. This is the awful dilemma the two priests face separately; Garrpe manages to drown himself in trying to save members of his flock, but Rodrigues will not be so “lucky” in that he will have to witness others subjected to anguish for his recalcitrance. Rodrigues’s ordeal is heightened still further when Ferreira comes forward to explain that he too was faced with this choice and ultimately capitulated, urging Rodrigues to do the same. Rodrigues is determined to resist, in part because he believes that his flock wants him to hold the line as an affirmation of their belief as well as their sacrifice. The problem—and it’s a serious one—is that he receives no external support from a God who steadfastly maintains the silence of the title. (The word recurs repeatedly in both book and movie—and Scorsese’s use of silence, along with his customary penchant for top shots, also known as “God’s-eye view,” has never been deployed more effectively than here.) Rodrigues’s cross becomes increasingly hard to bear. “You will say that their death was not meaningless,” he writes to Valigniano of the martyrs, which is heard in voiceover. “Surely God heard their prayers as they died. But did he hear their screams? How can I explain his silence to those who have endured so much? I need all my strength to understand it myself.” Rodrigues also addresses God directly: “The weight of your silence is terrible.” He asks himself, “Am I praying to nothing?” Inoue, of course, implacably turns such screws. “You cling to your illusions and call them faith,” he says calmly. His interpreter adds, “Think of all the suffering you have inflicted on these people just because of your selfish dream of a Christian Japan.” Ferreira notes that the Japanese simply cannot believe on Catholic terms—when they hear the word “son,” he explains, they think it refers to the sun in the sky. “They cannot conceive of our idea of a Christian God.” What makes this collision of cultures all the more compelling is that twenty-first-century viewers cannot help but sympathize to at least some

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degree with the Japanese government’s desire to check the growth of a religion it has good reason to believe is an imperial wedge for European domination. Inoue compares Spain, Portugal, England, and Holland as four concubines squabbling for the attention of a Japanese husband who finally sends them all away. In response to Rodrigues’s assertion that Christianity is a universal truth that all can receive, Inoue asserts that it is a foreign plant that can never take root on Japanese soil. Rodrigues ultimately succumbs to such pressures—though, as we see in an ending that’s different from the book’s, not entirely. Once he does, he realizes that there is less difference than he believed between him and Kichijiro, who remains by his side for the remainder of Rodrigues’s life. Ironically, the incorrigible sinner is the truest believer of all. This, for Scorsese, is the key to Endō’s greatness. “Endō looks at the problem of Judas more directly than any artist I know,” the director of The Last Temptation of Christ, another story in which Judas is central, explains. “He understood that for Christianity to live, to adapt itself to other cultures and historical moments, it needs not just the figure of Christ but Judas as well.”44 Here, perhaps for the only time in his career, Scorsese affirms the power of the global over the local. It’s fitting, however, that this affirmation is literally otherworldly. In the context of its release in 2016, Silence is an almost comically politically incorrect movie. It’s a version of Heart of Darkness in which a group of Westerners go in to try to save one of their own who has gone native (perhaps partially forgivable given that its source material is Asian), and a valorization of Roman Catholicism at a time when the enlightened elite (among others) feels comfortable with a wholesale rejection of organized religion. But Scorsese’s fierce honesty in representing sin in all its allure in his other movies makes him all the more credible in portraying fierce religious commitment, reminding us that there really were truly admirable people who were willing to live and die for what they believed, however fallibly. Like the greatest artists—one thinks here of Dostoyevsky—he is willing to explore doubt with remorseless honesty, making its logic clear and compelling even as he ultimately affirms the value of faith. Clearly, Scorsese is a sinner. He’s also a deeply religious man, one whose faith informs and chastens an American Dream that is local, universal, and, finally, insufficient. As his capstone work would also show.

RINGLEADERS: Joe Pesci as mob boss Russell Bufalino and Robert De Niro as foot soldier Frank Sheeran in The Irishman (2019). The film is an elegy for the price of the American Dream. (Photofest)

Conclusion

Dream of Life

The establishing shot of Martin Scorsese’s 2019 film The Irishman gives us the hallway of a nursing home. There’s no particular person or image on which the camera focuses as it begins to move forward as if we’re walking that hallway—we see nurses crossing it on the way to somewhere else; a priest talking with a pair of people seated in a lobby area; elderly residents using walkers, sitting in wheelchairs, or breathing through oxygen tanks. Statues of saints indicate that it’s a Catholic facility. As we get toward the end of the hall, we make a left, then a right into what seems like a livingroom space inhabited by residents who are chatting, reading, doing a jigsaw puzzle. There’s no audible dialogue, but the soundtrack offers us the majestic 1955 doo-wop Five Satins hit “In the Still of the Night.” It’s a nostalgic nod, of course, well within the cultural frame of reference for the elderly inhabitants of the facility. But there’s another meaning as well: the still of the night is also the time when we are most likely to fret, long, and regret. The camera moves left and we’re in what looks like a dining room. There’s a man there in a wheelchair at an empty table. Alone. That’s Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro). 133

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Frank has no one now. His wife and friends are all dead. He’s estranged from his four daughters, one of whom hasn’t spoken to him in decades. But Frank won’t talk to the people who are most interested in what he has to say: the Feds. He politely refers them to his lawyer, not realizing that he, too, is dead. “It’s over. They’re all gone,” the lead agent explains, reeling off the list of names of Sheeran’s contemporaries. “It’s time. It’s time you say what happened.” But Sheeran will not. He will tell us, though, in a story that sprawls over half a century and takes about three and a half hours to tell, making it Martin Scorsese’s longest movie. Frank Sheeran was a real person. The veracity of his tale, told to journalist Charles Brandt in the 2004 book I Heard You Paint Houses, in a manner comparable to that of Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy, is another question. If it’s true, then Sheeran figured in some of the most notorious scandals of the twentieth century, among them the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, the Kennedy assassination in 1963, and most directly, the murder of Jimmy Hoffa, the controversial leader of the Teamsters union who mysteriously disappeared in 1975 in a case that has never been solved. For Scorsese and his collaborators, however, the factual truth was beside the point. It was the emotional truths—truths of love, loyalty, and the price we pay for the dreams that we chase—that mattered. “This is a version thereof,” is his response to such queries.1 In the version of the story offered by the book and movie, Sheeran (1920–2003) was a greater-Philadelphia drifter before he went overseas and ended up in Italy during World War II. These chapters are among the most dramatic in I Heard You Paint Houses—whose title refers to the splashing of blood on floors and walls that occurs when hitmen do their jobs—and there’s a clear indication that a tacit acceptance, even encouragement, of wartime atrocities schooled Sheeran to become the effective gangster he went on to become (there’s a brief scene in the film where he orders a pair of German prisoners of war to dig their own graves before he shoots them).2 After the war he got a job as a truck driver, where a chance encounter with Russell Bufalino (a notably self-contained Joe Pesci) changed the course of his life. Bufalino, who ran a large criminal enterprise based in southeastern Pennsylvania, became Sheeran’s mentor, a fact of even greater significance when Hoffa (Al Pacino), who was also close with Bufalino, needed some muscle to take care of Teamster business. Hoffa then also became Sheeran’s mentor, which was fine until the union boss’s high-handedness led the mob to conclude that Hoffa had to go. As a matter of mercy as well as

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efficiency, Sheeran is assigned the job, one he executes with a heavy heart as well as his usual proficiency. His daughter Peggy—played as a child by Lucy Gallina and as an adult by Anna Paquin, in performances of marvelous understatement—considers Hoffa, as a champion of working people, as an exception among her father’s brutish associates, which is at best partially true. But Peggy (correctly) considers her father responsible for Hoffa’s death, which she regards as unforgivable. In a number of ways, The Irishman feels like a Scorsese family reunion. For one thing, it brings together some of the most important actors with whom he has worked over the past half century—not only De Niro and Pesci but also Harvey Keitel, who makes an appearance as Philly crime boss Angelo Bruno. Even some of the new faces in the film, notably Al Pacino and Bobby Cannavale (as Bruno henchman Felix “Skinny Razor” DiTullio), somehow seem like inevitable additions. There’s also a bevy of familiar faces behind the camera, among them producer Irwin Winkler, screenwriter Steven Zaillian, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, and costume designer Sandy Powell. Then there’s the topic of organized crime, one Scorsese has mined repeatedly, though in this case we finally seem to reach Coppola territory in Godfather-stature characters who are doing things like consorting with presidents and developing multimillion-dollar enterprises. However, his focus remains on the foot soldier, whose Irish ancestry in a sea of Italians harks back not only to Goodfellas but also to Scorsese’s longstanding interest in the Irish that extends from his childhood through Gangs of New York and The Departed. In terms of its production, however, The Irishman marks Scorsese’s move into a new era of moviemaking, also on a number of levels. The story covers a stretch of decades using stars who were septuagenarians at the time of filming; the decision not to use younger actors for those earlier scenes required sophisticated CGI technology to create an impression that the leads were younger than they actually were (a process that Scorsese compared to the use of makeup, but one that was not entirely successful, as the gait of the leads sometimes seemed older than it should). This, in turn, sent the budget for the film into the stratosphere, reflecting the growing cost of Scorsese films generally, and their recent tendency to run over budget. Paramount Pictures, which originally backed the film, withdrew, which put the project into turnaround until Netflix stepped in. After protracted negotiations, there was a short theatrical window for the movie—too short for most theater chains, which refused to exhibit it—but it was understood

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that the real life of the film would be on a streaming platform. For Scorsese, whose entire life had been premised on seeing films in theaters, this was a hard pill to swallow. But he understood the world was changing—“the biggest revolution since sound in 1927,” he said. One thing this would mean is that box office success would no longer be a relevant metric for measuring success. Netflix reported that twenty-six million people watched at least 70 percent of The Irishman during the first five weeks of its release, a figure that doesn’t translate easily into dollars. But it does seem to have achieved the objective for the streaming service in terms of enhancing its prestige, as the film was nominated for ten Academy Awards, though, in what is now a familiar story, it didn’t win any.3 For all its high-profile attention, splashy special effects, and epic sprawl, however, The Irishman is a surprisingly intimate experience—“It’s like a chamber piece, in a way,” Scorsese said.4 At its core, the film is a meditation on aging and what matters most when we reflect back on our lives. Frank Sheeran is a bad man. But we can nevertheless relate to him, and it is clear that he has experienced love and shown loyalty. Before we see his face in that nursing home at the start of the movie, the camera pauses on the ring that we will later learn was a cherished gift from Bufalino. (Sheeran describes the night he received it, as part of a cheesy award ceremony honoring his work, as “the highlight of my life.”) His affection for Hoffa is similarly deep and sincere, and it appears Sheeran really believes that killing him was an act of kindness under the circumstances. It’s not an illogical notion. But it’s wrong and he knows it. “What kind of man makes a phone call like that?” he asks an uncomprehending priest (Jonathan Morris) as he remembers the phone call he made to Hoffa’s wife after the murder, pretending not to know his whereabouts. “I know I wasn’t a good dad,” he tells his daughter Delores (Marin Ireland), even though he doesn’t seem to understand just how bad he was, something she has to explain to him. Scorsese underlines Sheeran’s lack of self-awareness when he complains that he finally did go to jail for “bullshit things” with a subtitle that lists the crimes for which he was never charged: murder, attempted murder, intimidation, embezzlement, and arson. This is part of a larger technique in which we meet gangsters and there’s a freeze frame before we are told how, some years later, they would meet a violent end. But Sheeran’s inability to come to a reckoning is finally less appalling than pathetic. He gropes toward some kind of reconciliation with his Catholic heritage—something Bufalino does more successfully at the end

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of his life—to little avail. The priest who ministers to Sheeran asks, “Do you feel anything for what you have done?” His answer: “I don’t. Maybe ’cause I’m here now talking to you, that in itself is an attempt.” It’s when the priest says, “I think we can be sorry even when we don’t feel sorry,” that Sheeran makes his confession of a sort about his phone call to Jo Hoffa. In the final scene of the film, the priest explains he won’t be seeing Sheeran again until after the holidays. “It’s Christmas?” he asks. “Almost,” the father answers. “Well, I ain’t goin’ anywhere,” Sheeran answers. The final shot of the film is him alone in his room, visible in a slightly open doorway. The screen goes black and “In the Still of the Night” returns. Frank Sheeran, it’s clear, is paying a price for his sins. What’s far from clear, however, is whether a better man would not be similarly lonely at the end of his life. At best there are no guarantees. Still, the choices he made in the pursuit of a life of power and plenty—an American Dream he largely achieved—did not afford him the return he sought. In that regard, Frank Sheeran is perhaps a cautionary tale. Family and faith may matter more than earthly aspiration, even in the promised land. For half a century, Martin Scorsese has grappled with this question. Few people have dramatized it with the clarity he has, a clarity that’s likely to remain vivid long after he, and we, leave the scene. But the answers are ones we fallible souls will determine for ourselves.

Acknowledgments

Much of this book was written amid the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. It was a refuge from the anxiety and restlessness of that time, and so I begin with my thanks to this project itself, as it were. For a while, anyway, it kept me out of trouble. As has Martin Scorsese, whose truly wonderful body of work has been a lifelong companion in good times and bad. As I have with four previous books, I’ve benefited from a thoroughly informed and insightful reading from William Norman, who saved me from countless errors and provided me with valuable insights. I’d also like to thank my agent, Roger Williams of the Roger Williams Agency, for helping me pitch the book and steer it through contractual waters once I crossed into the publishing domain. I’m grateful for the opportunity to work again with the talented staff of Rutgers University Press. This includes my editor Nicole Solano; sales and marketing director Jeremy Grainger; and publicity director Courtney Brach. Thanks also to copyeditor Ashley Moore for her tact and care, as well as designer Trudi Gershenov for her work on my behalf. I would also like to express my appreciation to the anonymous readers of the manuscript, especially the one whose final suggestions improved the outcome. This book, like a number of previous ones, was substantially written at the Starbucks coffee shop in Dobbs Ferry, New York. I was gladdened by the proficiency and goodwill of the staff there and the camaraderie of a community that buoyed me for much of the last decade.

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140  •  Acknowledgments

I finish this project in a moment of professional transition. In 2020, I left my institutional home of nineteen years, the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, to take up new duties at Greenwich Country Day School in neighboring Connecticut. I am grateful to both schools for the opportunities they have afforded me and the fine colleagues whose company I have savored. My family continues to be my mainstay source of sustenance, even as the lives of my four children—Jay, Gray, Ry, and Nancy—take on their own distinctive contours. My wife, Lyde, remains by my side. My final words of thanks are, again, to her. J. C.

Notes

Preface 1 The most important of these is Jim Cullen, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 2 Kael’s work has been anthologized in multiple volumes, most notably in the highly prestigious Library of America series. See Pauline Kael, The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael, ed. Sanford Schwartz (2011; New York: Library of America, 2016). The same can be said of Roger Ebert, who won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1975. The most relevant such volume is Roger Ebert, Scorsese by Ebert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Richard Schickel is the author of Conversations with Scorsese (2011; New York: Knopf, 2013), which will be cited frequently in the pages that follow. 3 Book-length studies of Scorsese that have informed this book include Andy Dougan, Martin Scorsese: Close Up (1997; New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1998); Ellis Cashmore, Martin Scorsese’s America (Boston: Polity, 2009); and Tom Shone, Scorsese: A Retrospective (New York: Abrams, 2014). 4 Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 140. 5 Important collections of Scorsese interviews include David Thompson and Ian Christie, eds., Scorsese on Scorsese (1989; London: Faber and Faber, 1996); Peter Brunette, ed., Martin Scorsese: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999); and especially Mary Pat Kelly’s ethnographic study Martin Scorsese: A Journey (1991; New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1996), which includes testimonials from many of Scorsese’s collaborators. Scorsese is the coauthor, with Michael Henry Wilson, of A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies (New York: Miramax/Hyperion, 1997). The book is the script used in the documentary. 6 For an overview of auteur theory and its history in Hollywood, see Barrett Hodsdon, The Elusive Auteur: The Question of Authorship throughout the Age of Cinema (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017). Andrew Sarris develops his perspective on auteur theory in his masterwork anthology The American Cinema: Directors 141

142  •  Notes to Pages xii–6

and Directions, 1929–1968 (1968; New York: Da Capo, 1996), which includes his seminal essays “Toward a Theory of Film History” and “The Auteur Theory Revisited.” 7 See Jim Cullen, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 8 Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 333. 9 Schickel, 327.

Introduction 1 The key figure in this conception of myth is Clifford Geertz. See Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). Geertz’s ideas have been popularized by Ira Chernus on his website Mythic America, among other places. See in particular his essay “The Meaning of ‘Myth’ in the American Context,” Mythic America, accessed September 16, 2018, https://mythicamerica.wordpress​ .com/the-meaning-of-myth-in-the-american-context/. 2 Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854; Project Gutenberg, 1995), conclusion, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm. 3 James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963; New York: Vintage, 1993), 89. 4 Jim Cullen, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3–5. Robert Samuels traces the ubiquity of the term in the print media of the thirties in The American Dream: A Cultural History (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012), chap. 1. 5 On the rise of Hollywood as the nation’s dream factory, see Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (New York: Pantheon, 1988). 6 David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (1981; Spring Valley, NY: Crossroad, 1998). Tracy’s key point as it pertains to Scorsese is explained by Fr. Andrew Greeley: “The Catholic imagination is ‘analogical’ and the Protestant imagination is ‘dialectical.’ The Catholic ‘classics’ assume a God who is present in the world, disclosing Himself in and through creation,” while classic Protestant works “assume a God who is radically absent from the world and who discloses himself only on rare occasions.” Andrew Greeley, The Catholic Myth: The Behavior and Belief of American Catholics (repr., New York: Collier, 1991), 45. 7 Vincent LoBrutto, Martin Scorsese: A Biography (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), 76. 8 David Thompson and Ian Christie, eds., Scorsese on Scorsese (1989; London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 47. 9 Matt Goldberg, “Scorsese, DiCaprio and Hill Talk Wolf of Wall Street; Says It’s Done with ‘a Great Sense of Sadistic Humor,’ ” Collider, October 11, 2013, http:// collider.com/wolf-of-wall-street-scorsese-dicaprio-hill-dark-comedy/. 10 See, for example, “Scorsese Faces Mounting Criticism over The Wolf of Wall Street,” Telegraph, January 4, 2014, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture​ /film/10547777/Martin-Scorsese-faces-mounting-criticism-over-The-Wolf-of-Wall​ -Street.html. 11 Richard Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese (2011; New York: Knopf, 2013), 155.

Notes to Pages 10–17 • 143

Chapter 1  The Elizabethan Era 1 Mary Pat Kelly, Martin Scorsese: A Journey (1991; New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1996), 19–24. The book is an ethnographic history consisting of interviews with a panoply of figures from Scorsese’s life. 2 Vincent LoBrutto, Martin Scorsese: A Biography (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), 3; Richard Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese (2011; New York: Knopf, 2013), 9. 3 Andy Dougan, Martin Scorsese: Close Up (1997; New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1998), 11. 4 For most of the past twenty years, the standard explanation for the Scorsese family’s retreat from Corona has been cast in financial terms (the “business problems” phrase comes from LoBrutto, Martin Scorsese, 19). But the more highly charged version is something that emerged, albeit elliptically, in Richard Schickel’s compendium of interviews, Conversations with Scorsese, 4–5. Scorsese has mentioned trying to develop a project about this autobiographical incident for years now. It’s not clear it will ever happen, though it should be noted that many of his projects, among them The Last Temptation of Christ, Gangs of New York, and Silence, germinated for years, even decades, before they were realized. 5 Kelly, Martin Scorsese, 26–27. 6 Guy Flatley, “He Has Often Walked ‘Mean Streets,’ ” New York Times, December 16, 1973, https://www.nytimes.com/1973/12/16/archives/he-has-often-walked​ -mean-streets-movies-martin-scorsese.html. 7 Kelly, Martin Scorsese, 31; Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 24–25; LoBrutto, Martin Scorsese, 45. 8 LoBrutto, Martin Scorsese, 44; Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 58–59; David Thompson and Ian Christie, eds., Scorsese on Scorsese (1989; London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 9. 9 Thompson and Christie, Scorsese on Scorsese, 9. 10 Kelly, Martin Scorsese, 34. 11 Kelly, 29, 32. 12 LoBrutto, Martin Scorsese, 36; Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 34. 13 Dougan, Martin Scorsese, 14; Kelly, Martin Scorsese, 31. 14 Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 24. 15 Martin Scorsese and Michael Henry Wilson, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies (New York: Miramax/Hyperion, 1997), 166. 16 Scorsese makes his “bones” comment on Singin’ in the Rain in Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 29; his identification with East of Eden is on 12. His fascination with Ford and the other movies cited here is a topic that is frequently mentioned in Scorsese’s voluminous body of commentary. 17 Scorsese and Wilson, Personal Journey, 17. 18 A photograph of one image from this storyboard appears in Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 17. 19 Schickel, 14. 20 Schickel, 55; LoBrutto, Martin Scorsese, 49. “When I went to NYU, in 1960, I walked six blocks down Houston Street, it was like going to Mars.” Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 103. 21 Haig Manoogian, The Film-Maker’s Art (New York: Basic Books, 1966).

144  •  Notes to Pages 17–38

22 Kelly, Martin Scorsese, 37; Dougan, Martin Scorsese, 21; Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 60. 23 Kelly, Martin Scorsese, 40. 24 LoBrutto, Martin Scorsese, 78–79; Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 96. “I had a wife and kid,” Scorsese reflected almost a half century later. “People said to me, ‘Don’t you realize your responsibility?’ I guess I didn’t.” Schickel, 96. 25 Dougan, Martin Scorsese, 29. 26 Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 95. 27 LoBrutto, Martin Scorsese, 110; Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 80. 28 Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 309. 29 Thompson and Christie, Scorsese on Scorsese, 32, 39. 3 0 Kelly, Martin Scorsese, 68.

Chapter 2  Redeeming Dreams 1 Steven Spielberg, foreword to Martin Scorsese: A Journey, by Mary Pat Kelly (1991; New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1996), xi–xii. 2 Scorsese’s father’s name was Charlie; his mother’s maiden name was Cappa. The character is not autobiographical in any direct sense, but there’s little doubt about the degree to which Scorsese identifies with his protagonist. 3 Vincent LoBrutto, Martin Scorsese: A Biography (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), 135. 4 See Ebert’s reassessment of Mean Streets: Roger Ebert, “Mean Streets,” RogerEbert. com, December 31, 2003, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/ great-movie-mean-streets-1973. 5 Kelly, Martin Scorsese, 72. 6 Kelly, 73. 7 Kelly, 79. 8 Pauline Kael, “Everyday Inferno,” New Yorker, October 8, 1973, https://www​ .newyorker.com/magazine/1973/10/08/everyday-inferno. 9 Tom Shone, Scorsese: A Retrospective (New York: Abrams, 2014), 49; Raymond Chandler’s essay was first published in the Atlantic in 1944, and was later included in The Simple Art of Murder (1950; New York: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 1988). A copy of the essay can be found online at http://jacksharman.com/wp-content/ uploads/2014/08/Raymond-Chandler-Simple-Art-of-Murder.pdf. 10 Richard Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese (2011; New York: Knopf, 2013), 103. 11 I am indebted to an anonymous evaluator of this manuscript for this apt observation. It is also made by Leo Braudy in Native Informant: Essays on Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 248. 12 Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 104–105. 13 I am indebted to William Norman of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School for this insight. 14 Kelly, Martin Scorsese, 83. 15 On the arc of Foster’s career as an actor and director, see Jim Cullen, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), chap. 6. 16 Kelly, Martin Scorsese, 83; LoBrutto, Martin Scorsese, 183–184. 17 Kelly, Martin Scorsese, 85. Not everyone—even Scorsese’s most devoted fans— believed he was suited to make a road movie of wide-open spaces. “Scorsese has

Notes to Pages 38–53 • 145

little feel for the automobile on the open road,” writes biographer Vincent LoBrutto. “Scorsese’s relationship to the car is in crowded city streets, cruising out of boredom. . . . ​He is a director of closed, not open, spaces.” Martin Scorsese, 188. 18 Scorsese has acknowledged the allusions to The Wizard of Oz, East of Eden, and Gone with the Wind, among other movies, and in particular the influence of Menzies. See his 1975 interview with the American Film Institute in Peter Brunette, ed., Martin Scorsese: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 17–18. 19 Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 109. 20 Kelly, Martin Scorsese, 85. 21 “God put it there,” Scorsese said in 1975. Brunette, Martin Scorsese, 43. Scorsese had a similar serendipitous experience with the ending of The Last Temptation of Christ. See the commentary in the Criterion edition of the DVD of the film, and Jim Cullen, Restless in the Promised Land: Catholics and the American Dream (Franklin, WI: Sheed and Ward, 2001), 126. 22 Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 111. 23 See, for example, David Thompson and Ian Christie, eds., Scorsese on Scorsese (1989; London: Faber and Faber, 2004), 51: “We never intended it to be a feminist tract.” 24 Molly Haskell, “Will Odysseus Stay Home and Do Needlepoint while Penelope Wanders Off in Search of Herself and Maybe Gets a Job Singing?,” Village Voice, February 17, 1975, https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=8eBLAAAAIBAJ&s jid=qosDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6151,3401181. (Haskell, by the way, was long married to Andrew Sarris, who popularized the influential auteur theory discussed in the preface of this book.) For another contemporary feminist critique of Alice, see Karyn Key and Gerald Peary, “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Waitressing for Warner’s,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Cinema, no. 7 (1975): 5–7, https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC07folder/AliceKayPeary. html. 25 Shone, Scorsese, 72. Schrader says something similar in Kelly, Martin Scorsese, 89. 26 Thompson and Christie, Scorsese on Scorsese, 60. 27 Poster included in Shone, Scorsese, 72. 28 Shone, 72–73; Kelly, Martin Scorsese, 96. 29 Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 116–117. 3 0 Kelly, Martin Scorsese, 92. 31 Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 121. 32 Thompson and Christie, Scorsese on Scorsese, 62. 3 3 Brunette, Martin Scorsese, 61. 3 4 Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 118. 3 5 Pauline Kael, “Underground Man,” New Yorker, February 9, 1976, https://www​ .newyorker.com/magazine/1976/02/09/underground-man. 36 Kael. 37 Richard Schickel, “Potholes,” Time, February 16, 1976, 62; Roger Ebert, “Taxi Driver,” RogerEbert.com, January 1, 1976, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews​ /taxi-driver-1976. Statistics on Taxi Driver’s financial performance come from the website the Numbers, accessed April 7, 2020, https://www.the-numbers.com ​/movie/Taxi-Driver#tab=summary.

146  •  Notes to Pages 55–61

Chapter 3  Impressive Failures 1 This data is widely available; the number here come from the website the Numbers, accessed February 23, 2020, https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/ Taxi-Driver#tab=summary. 2 The best book on this subject remains Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). The book was reissued by the University of Minnesota Press in 2010. 3 The best account of this story is Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998). Scorsese features prominently in this book. For a chronicle of the transition from the old order to the new, see Mark Harris, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood (New York: Penguin, 2009). 4 In a retrospective account of Taxi Driver, the Hollywood Reporter cited a $28.8 million gross, which it described as “an immediate critical and commercial hit.” See Gregg Kilday, “Taxi Driver Oral History: De Niro, Scorsese, Foster, Schrader Spill All on 40th Anniversary,” Hollywood Reporter, April 7, 2016, https://www​ .hollywoodreporter.com/features/taxi-driver-oral-history-de-881032. IMDbPro’s Box Office Mojo website reports it as $27.3 million. It cites The Godfather as coming it at about $135 million, Jaws at $260 million, and Star Wars at about $500 million. All figures are from the time of the original release. By these standards, Taxi Driver was a “mere” hit, but one that was far more uncompromising than any of these films, which were conceived and executed as crowd-pleasers. “Taxi Driver (1976),” Box Office Mojo, accessed November 19, 2020, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0075314/?ref_=bo_se_r_1; “The Godfather (1972),” Box Office Mojo, accessed November 19, 2020, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title /tt0068646/?ref_=bo_se_r_1; “Jaws (1975),” Box Office Mojo, accessed November 19, 2020, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0073195/?ref_=bo_se_r_1; “Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope (1977),” Box Office Mojo, accessed November 19, 2020, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0076759/?ref_=bo_se_r_1. 5 Mary Pat Kelly, Martin Scorsese: A Journey (1991; New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1996), 101. 6 Vincent LoBrutto, Martin Scorsese: A Biography (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), 202. 7 LoBrutto, 206–208; David Thompson and Ian Christie, eds., Scorsese on Scorsese (1989; London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 72. 8 LoBrutto, Martin Scorsese, 200. 9 LoBrutto, 203, 205. 10 “New York, New York,” Box Office Mojo, accessed February 9, 2020, https://www​ .boxofficemojo.com/release/rl1030194689. 11 Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (1985; New York: Holt, 1991), 520; Vincent Canby, “Film: ‘New York’ in a Tuneful Era,” New York Times, June 23, 1977, https://www.nytimes.com/1977/06/23/archives/film-new-york-in-a-tuneful-era​ .html. 12 Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, 386–387. 13 Roger Ebert, Scorsese by Ebert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 277–278; Richard Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese (2011; New York: Knopf, 2013), 138. 14 LoBrutto, Martin Scorsese, 225–226.

Notes to Pages 61–84 • 147

15 LoBrutto, 222–223; Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, 389–390. 16 LoBrutto, Martin Scorsese, 223–224. 17 Thompson and Christie, Scorsese on Scorsese, 83. 18 Thompson and Christie, 77. 19 Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 149, 144. 20 Ebert, Scorsese by Ebert, 149. 21 Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 139; Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, 405. 22 LoBrutto, Martin Scorsese, 254–256. 23 LoBrutto, 257. 24 For more on the concept of the Dream of the Coast, and its relevance for celebrity culture, see Jim Cullen, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), chap. 6. 25 Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 155–156. 26 LoBrutto, Martin Scorsese, 260. 27 LoBrutto, 263–271; Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 162–163; Jim Cullen, Restless in the Promised Land: Catholics and the American Dream (Franklin, WI: Sheed and Ward, 2001), 122. 28 Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, 407. 29 LoBrutto, Martin Scorsese, 273. 3 0 Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 160. 31 Thompson and Christie, Scorsese on Scorsese, 101. 32 The circumstances surrounding the origins of the project come from Kelly, Martin Scorsese, 189–192; Thompson and Christie, Scorsese on Scorsese, 106; and Peter Biskind and Susan Linfield, “Chalk Talk,” in Martin Scorsese: Interviews, ed. Peter Brunette (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 106–107. 3 3 Roger Ebert, “The Hustler,” RogerEbert.com, June 23, 2002, https://www​.rogerebert .com/reviews/great-movie-the-hustler-1961. 3 4 LoBrutto, Martin Scorsese, 278. 3 5 Kelly, Martin Scorsese, 193–194. 36 Among other sources, the numbers can be found at the website the Numbers, accessed February 19, 2020, https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Color -of-Money-The#tab=summary. 37 Kelly, Martin Scorsese, 201–202. 3 8 This background information and much of what follows draws on Cullen, Restless in the Promised Land, 123–125. 39 Cullen, 129–130.

Chapter 4  Dream Critiques 1 See Scorsese’s comments to Roger Ebert in the Wexner Center for the Arts interview at Ohio State University, in Roger Ebert, Scorsese by Ebert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 205. Winkler’s comment appears as part of Mary Pat Kelly’s oral history, Martin Scorsese: A Journey (1991; New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1996), 273. 2 Kelly, Martin Scorsese, 247. 3 Nicholas Pileggi, Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 9–12; Richard Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese (2011; New York: Knopf, 2013), 186.

148  •  Notes to Pages 84–99

4 David Thompson and Ian Christie, eds., Scorsese on Scorsese (1989; London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 155. 5 For an analysis of the many films that have borrowed from the artistry of Goodfellas, see Stephanie Merry, “Goodfellas Is 25. Here’s an Incomplete List of Movies That Have Ripped It Off,” Washington Post, April 29, 2015, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2015/04/29 /goodfellas-is-25-heres-an-incomplete-list-of-all-the-movies-that-have-ripped​ -it-off. 6 For a full list of actors who appeared in both, see Eric Schaal, “The Sopranos Stars Who Played Major Roles in Scorsese’s Goodfellas,” Showbiz Cheat Sheet, September 27, 2019, https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/the-sopranosstars-who-played-major-roles-in-scorseses-goodfellas.html. 7 Variety Staff, “Film Review: Cape Fear,” Variety, December 31, 1990, https:// variety.com/1990/film/reviews/cape-fear-3-1200428979. 8 Thompson and Christie, Scorsese on Scorsese, 166. 9 “I didn’t think of Nick Nolte at first, because I had just worked with him on ‘Life Lessons,’ in which he was fat, had a beard, and was drinking brandy as his character,” Scorsese, who had been considering Robert Redford for the part of Lionel Dobie, explained. “So I didn’t see him as a possible lawyer. Then when Goodfellas was shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Nick showed up in a blazer and tie, thinner and wearing glasses, with his hair parted. I nudged Bob [De Niro] and said, ‘There’s our lawyer.’ ” Thompson and Christie, 165–166. 10 Thompson and Christie, 166. 11 Box office data from the Numbers, accessed March 15, 2020, https://www.the​ -numbers.com/movie/Cape-Fear#tab=summary; Vincent Canby, “De Niro as Revenge Seeker in Scorsese’s Cape Fear,” New York Times, November 13, 1991, https://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/13/movies/review-film-de-niro-as-revenge​ -seeker-in-scorsese-s-cape-fear.html; Lindsay Zolandz, “For Questlove, Soul Train Is His Happy Place,” New York Times, March 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes​ .com/2020/03/03/arts/music/questlove-favorite-things.html. 12 Thompson and Christie, Scorsese on Scorsese, 177. 13 Scorsese made this comment in a promotional twenty-five-minute documentary, The Making of the Age of Innocence, released at the time the film was: Kevin Jagernauth, “Watch: 25-Minute Documentary on the Making of ‘The Age of Innocence’ with Martin Scorsese, Daniel Day-Lewis & More,” IndieWire, August 7, 2014, https://www.indiewire.com/2014/08/watch-25-minute​ -documentary-on-the-making-of-the-age-of-innocence-with​-martin-scorsese​ -daniel-day-lewis-more-273729. 14 Cocks and De Fina make these comments in The Making of the Age of Innocence documentary. 15 Thompson and Christie, Scorsese on Scorsese, 185. 16 For a more detailed explanation of the way this scene was shot, see Gavin Smith’s 1993 interview with Scorsese in Peter Brunette, ed., Martin Scorsese: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 200. 17 Much of the preceding paragraph draws from an analysis of Daniel Day-Lewis’s work in Jim Cullen, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 81. 18 Thompson and Christie, Scorsese on Scorsese, 194–195.

Notes to Pages 99–109 • 149

19 “The Age of Innocence (1993),” Numbers, accessed March 16, 2020, https://www​ .the-numbers.com/movie/Age-of-Innocence-The#tab=summary. 20 Nicholas Pileggi, Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas (1995; New York: Pocket Books, 2011). Scorsese has talked of the origins of the movie frequently. For two accounts, see Ian Christie’s interviews with him in Thompson and Christie, Scorsese on Scorsese, 198–199; and Brunette, Martin Scorsese, 222–223. 21 But not all. For one perceptive argument in favor of Casino over Goodfellas, see Natasha Vargas-Cooper, “Canon Fodder: Martin Scorsese’s Casino,” GQ, November 10, 2011, https://www.gq.com/story/ canon-fodder-martin-scorsese-casino-goodfellas-review. 2 2 For Scorsese’s discussion of Casino as an urban western, and the role of Las Vegas/Nevada as a setting, see his 1995 interview on Charlie Rose: “Martin Scorsese,” Charlie Rose, 33:59, aired November 17, 1995, https://charlierose.com​ /videos/21252. 23 Pileggi, Casino, 402. Spilotro’s very similar words to those of his character Santoro appear on 10. 24 Pileggi, 4. 25 For speculation on this, see Pileggi, 379. 26 “Casino (1995),” Numbers, accessed March 17, 2020, https://www.the-numbers​ .com/movie/Casino#tab=summary. 27 On the origins of Kundun, see Gavin Smith’s 1998 interview with Scorsese in Brunette, Martin Scorsese, 238. 28 Vincent LoBrutto, Martin Scorsese: A Biography (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), 351. 29 Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 213. 3 0 “Kundun (1997),” Numbers, accessed March 18, 2020, https://www.the-numbers. com/movie/Kundun#tab=summary; “Bringing Out the Dead (1999),” Numbers, accessed March 18, 2020, https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Bringing-Out​ -The-Dead#tab=summary. 31 Roger Ebert, “Bringing Out Scorsese,” in Scorsese by Ebert, 233. 32 LoBrutto, Martin Scorsese, 367. 3 3 Ebert, Ebert by Scorsese, 228–230; Chris Evangelista, “Keep the Body Going: 20 Years Later, Bringing Out the Dead Is the Rare Underrated Martin Scorsese Movie,” Slash Film, October 23, 2019, https://www.slashfilm.com/bringing-out​ -the-dead-scorsese.

Chapter 5  Recurring Dreams 1 Peter Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film (repr.; New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 2005), 399. 2 Carl Schoettler, “When Gangs of New York Author Got Mencken Banned in Boston,” Chicago Tribune, December 27, 2002, https://www.chicagotribune.com​ /news/ct-xpm-2002-12-27-0212270078-story.html. 3 Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld (1928; New York: Vintage, 2008), xi, xiii. 4 On the origins of the film, see Scorsese’s commentary in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York: Making the Movie (New York: Miramax Books, 2002), 19–20; Richard Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese (2011; New York: Knopf, 2013), 226; Vincent

150  •  Notes to Pages 109–122

LoBrutto, Martin Scorsese: A Biography (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), 369; Roger Ebert, “Gangs All Here for Scorsese,” in Scorsese by Ebert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 239. 5 Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 227. 6 See the Day-Lewis interview in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, 61. 7 Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures, 399–401. 8 See the Ballhaus interview in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, 127. 9 Ebert, “Gangs All Here,” 241. 10 Much of the analysis in this and subsequent paragraphs derives from a chapter on Daniel Day-Lewis in Jim Cullen, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 75–77. 11 Asbury, Gangs of New York, 90. 12 Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures, 465; Roger Ebert, review of Gangs of New York, 2002, in Scorsese by Ebert, 235–238; A. O. Scott, “To Feel a City Seethe,” New York Times, December 20, 2002, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/20/movies​ /film-review-to-feel-a-city-seethe.html; LoBrutto, Martin Scorsese, 371. On Hell-Cat Maggie, see Asbury, Gangs of New York, 27–28. 13 Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures, 464; “Gangs of New York (2002),” Numbers, accessed April 2, 2020, https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/ Gangs-of-New-York#tab=summary. 14 Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 225–226. 15 Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures, 466. 16 LoBrutto, Martin Scorsese, 373. 17 Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 240, 250. 18 Tom Shone, Scorsese: A Retrospective (New York: Abrams, 2014), 212–213. See also Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 244–245. For more on the nuances of color in The Aviator, see the interview with the film’s cinematographer: Robert Richardson, “High Life,” interview by John Pavlus, American Cinematographer, January 2005, https://theasc.com/magazine/jan05/aviator/page3.html. 19 “The Aviator (2004),” Numbers, accessed April 2, 2020, https://www.the-numbers​ .com/movie/Aviator-The#tab=summary. 20 Shone, Scorsese, 219; LoBrutto, Martin Scorsese, 381. 21 LoBrutto, 383; Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 260–261. 22 Shone, Scorsese, 224. 23 Roger Ebert, review of The Departed, 2007, in Scorsese by Ebert, 256–259. This passage opens the piece. 24 “The Departed (2006),” Numbers, accessed April 3, 2020, https://www.the-numbers​ .com/movie/Departed-The#tab=summary. 25 “100 Greatest Movies, TV Shows, and More,” Entertainment Weekly, December 4, 2009, https://ew.com/ article/2009/12/04/100-greatest-movies-tv-shows-and-more/. 26 Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese, 272; David M. Halbfinger and Sharon Waxman, “The Departed Wins Best Picture, Scorsese Best Director,” New York Times, February 26, 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/26/movies /awardsseason/26osca.html. 27 Shone, Scorsese, 254. 28 A. O. Scott, “All at Sea, Surrounded by Red Herrings,” New York Times, February 18, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/movies/19shutter.html;

Notes to Pages 122–134 • 151

“Shutter Island (2010),” Numbers, accessed April 3, 2020, https://www.the-numbers​ .com/movie/Shutter-Island#tab=summary; Shone, Scorsese, 239. 29 Shone, Scorsese, 250. 30 Shone, 244. 31 Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret (New York: Scholastic, 2007), 387. In both book and film, Méliès makes this comment to a boy who grows up to become a film scholar (played as an adult in the movie by Michael Stuhlbarg with his usual verve). 32 Shone, Scorsese, 250; “Hugo (2011),” Numbers, accessed April 4, 2020, https:// www.the-numbers.com/movie/Hugo#tab=summary. 3 3 Shone, Scorsese, 254. 3 4 Jordan Belfort, The Wolf of Wall Street (repr.; New York: Bantam, 2008), 11. 3 5 Belfort, 71–73. 36 Shone, Scorsese, 254. 37 This information is included in the general trivia in the Amazon Prime streaming version of The Wolf of Wall Street. 3 8 Ben Child, “The Wolf of Wall Street Is Criticised for ‘Glorifying Psychopathic Behavior,’ ” Guardian, December 30, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/film​ /2013/dec/30/wolf-of-wall-street-christina-mcdowell-letter-martin-scorsese; Ben Child, “Martin Scorsese Is Heckled at Academy Screening of The Wolf of Wall Street,” Guardian, December 23, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/film /2013​/dec/23/martin-scorsese-heckled-wolf-of-wall-street-screening-sex-drugs. 39 This question is the headline (repeated in the text) as part of “The Movie Club,” a running chat discussion in Slate that Stevens had with critics Wesley Morris, Stephanie Zacharek, and Mark Harris: Dana Stevens, “Was Wolf of Wall Street a Critique of Capitalist Privilege or a Feast on the Goodies Such Privilege Can Buy?,” Slate, January 12, 2014, https://slate.com/culture/2014/01/was-wolf-ofwall-street-a-critique-of-capitalist-privilege-or-a-feast-on-the-goodies-such-privilege​ -can-buy.html. 4 0 Hill’s fee is noted in the Amazon Prime trivia; on his improvisations, see Shone, Scorsese, 255. 41 “The Wolf of Wall Street (2013),” Numbers, accessed April 5, 2020, https://www​ .the-numbers.com/movie/Wolf-of-Wall-Street-The#tab=summary. 42 These figures were derived by adding up grosses on the six films as listed at https:// www.the-numbers.com. 4 3 Martin Scorsese, foreword to Silence: A Novel, by Shūsaku Endō, trans. William Johnston (New York: Picador, 2016), v. Scorsese makes these remarks in an edition of the novel timed to coincide with the release of the film. 4 4 Scorsese, foreword, vii.

Conclusion 1 Charles Brandt, I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank “the Irishman” Sheeran and the Closing of the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (2016; Hanover, NH: Steerforth, 2016). For a good piece of reporting on the claims the book makes and the reasons one might have to doubt them, see Manuel Roig-Franzia, “The Irishman Tells Us Who Killed Jimmy Hoffa. A Lawyer with a Secret Trove of Documents Says the Movie Got It Wrong,” Washington Post, January 14, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com

152  •  Notes to Pages 134–136

/lifestyle/style/the-irishman-tells-us-who-killed-jimmy-hoffa-a-lawyer-with-a​ -secret-trove-of-documents-says-the-movie-got-it-wrong/2020/01/14/8b211b88​ -0bcc-11ea-97ac-a7ccc8dd1ebc_story.html. A more detailed account, published shortly before the movie’s release, is former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith’s memoir of his stepfather, Hoffa associate Chuckie O’Brien: In Hoffa’s Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for Truth (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019). Scorsese explains his stance toward the factual veracity of Sheeran’s story in The Irishman: A Conversation, a promotional video to accompany the release of the film on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com /title/81212801. 2 Brandt, I Heard, 37–52. 3 The travails of The Irishman were widely reported in the trade and popular press in the second half of the 2010s. For a good overview of why the film finally ended up how it did, see Bret Lang, “Robert De Niro and Al Pacino on Reuniting for Netflix’s Costly Oscar Hopeful The Irishman,” Variety, October 1, 2019, https:// variety.com/2019/film/features/the-irishman-robert-de-niro-al-pacino-netflix​ -martin-scorsese-1203353771. The filmmaker’s expensive ways continued into his most recent project, Killers of the Flower Moon (in production as of this writing, though delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic). Its budget was reportedly over $200 million, and Scorsese again was looking for funding from streaming platforms. See R. T. Watson and Joe Flint, “Martin Scorsese Courts Apple and Netflix to Rescue Costly DiCaprio Film,” Wall Street Journal, April 9, 2020, https://www​ .wsj.com/articles/martin-scorsese-courts-apple-and-netflix-to-rescue-costly-dicaprio​ -film-11586484037. Scorsese’s remarks on makeup and “the biggest revolution in sound since 1927” are included in The Irishman: A Conversation. On the film’s viewership, see Frank Pallotta, “Here’s How Many Subscribers Watched Netflix’s The Irishman in Its First Week,” CNN, December 11, 2019, https://www.cnn​ .com/2019/12/10/media/the-irishman-netflix-viewership/index.html. 4 The Irishman: A Conversation.

Index

Note: Page references in italic type refer to illustrative ­matter. Abbott, Diahnne, 68 ­After Hours (film), 72–73, 83 Age of Innocence, The (book), 93, 95 Age of Innocence, The (film), 5, 23, 82, 93–99, 108, 123 Alda, Alan, 115 Alice (tele­vi­sion series), 37 Alice ­Doesn’t Live ­Here Anymore (film), 6, 36–43, 46–47, 55, 59–61, 100 Allen, Woody, 82–83 All the Right Moves (film), 74 Amazing Stories (tele­vi­sion series), xiii Amblin Entertainment, 87 American Dream, overview, ix–­xiii, 1–9, 78, 107, 137. See also upward mobility theme; specific film titles American Graffiti (film), 56 Anderson, Paul Thomas, 85 Arquette, Patricia, 104 Arquette, Rosanna, 73, 83 Artists Management Group (AMG), 108, 110 Asbury, Herbert, 109 assassination attempts, 44, 48, 50, 111 auteur theory, xi Aviator, The (film), 3, 114–117, 123

Baldwin, Alec, 120 Baldwin, James, 1 Ballhaus, Michael, 72, 82, 110 Balsam, Martin, 90 Band, the, rock documentary, xii, 60 Bang the Drum Slowly (film), 30 Baron Cohen, Sacha, 123 Batman Returns (film), 94 Beatty, Warren, 99, 114 Beckinsale, Kate, 115 Beetlejuice (film), 94 Belfort, Jordan, 124–125. See also Wolf of Wall Street, The (film) Bergen, Polly, 88 Bern­stein, Elmer, 99 Bern­stein, Leonard, 58 Bethune, Zina, 8, 22, 34 Beverly Hills Cop (film), 72 Big Heat, The (film), 35 Big Shave, The (film), 21 billiards, 73, 75 Biskind, Peter, 72 Blanchett, Cate, 115, 117 Bloody Mama (film), 25, 30 Bloom, Verna, 76

153

154  •  Index

Boardwalk Empire (tele­vi­sion series), xiii, 87, 125 Body and Soul (film), 62 Boogie Nights (film), 85 Bostonians, The (book and film), 95 Boxcar Bertha (film), 7, 24, 25, 30, 36, 76 boxing, 61–63. See also Raging Bull (film) Boyle, Peter, 46 Bracco, Lorraine, 84, 87 Bradbury, Lane, 40 Bram Stoker’s Dracula (film), 94 Brando, Marlon, 64 Brandt, Charles, 134 Bremer, Arthur, 44 Brennan, Laraine Marie, 20–21 Bringing Out the Dead (book), 104 Bringing Out the Dead (film), 4, 104–105, 108 Bring on the Dancing Girls (film), 21 Broadbent, Jim, 112 Brooks, Albert, 47 ­Brothers, Joyce, 66 Buñuel, Luis, 2 Burstyn, Ellen, 6, 36–37, 37, 41, 42 Burton, Tim, 94 Butterfield, Asa, 123 Cage, Nicholas, 104 Calley, John, 41 Calvinism, 43 Canby, Vincent, 60, 93 Cannavale, Bobby, 135 Cape Fear (book), 88 Cape Fear (film, 1962), 88, 90, 91–92 Cape Fear (film, 1991), 7, 76, 87–93, 100, 108, 114, 122, 148n9 Cappa DeFina Productions, 82 Car­ne­g ie, Andrew, 2 Carradine, David, 25 Casey, Bernie, 24 Casino (film), 99–103; financials of, 103, 108; imagery in, 3, 94; plot of, 5, 6, 100, 112 Cassavetes, John, 25, 28 Catholicism, 3–4, 9, 12–14, 107, 129–131 CBS, 21 Chandler, Raymond, 32 Chartoff, Robert, 61 Chimmoku. See Silence: A Novel (book)

Cimino, Michael, 56 Civil War, 7, 109, 113 Clockers (film), 99 Close Encounters of the Third Kind (film), 56 Cocks, Jay, 23, 76, 83, 94–95, 97, 99, 109–110 Color of Money, The (book), 74 Color of Money, The (film), 7, 74–76, 78, 114 Columbia Pictures, 44, 93 Connelly, Joe, 104 Conversation, The (film), 52 Coppola, Francis Ford: Cage and, 104; films by, 29, 44, 56, 82, 94; as peer of Scorsese, 24, 36, 56 Coppola, Sofia, 82–83 Corman, Robert, 7, 24–25, 30, 36 cosmopolitan-­provincial strug­g le, 5, 77 Creative Artists Agency, 71 Cruise, Tom, 74, 75 Cukor, George, 57 Curtin, Valerie, 41 Cutting, William, 106 Dafoe, Willem, 76 Dalai Lama. See Kundun (film) Damon, Matt, 118 Dangerous Liaisons (film), 94 Day-­Lewis, Daniel: in The Age of Innocence, 94, 95, 96; in Gangs of New York, 110, 111 Dean, James, 16 DeCordova, Fred, 66 Deer Hunter, The (film), 56 De Fina, Barbara, 82, 97 De Niro, Robert: in Bloody Mama, 25; in Cape Fear, 87, 89, 90–91, 93; in Casino, 100; in The Godfather, Part II, 44; in Goodfellas, 80, 84; in The Irishman, 30, 132, 133–137; in The King of Comedy, 66–70, 67; in Mean Streets, 30, 31; in New York, New York, 54; in Raging Bull, 3, 60–65, 62; relationship with Scorsese, 60; in Taxi Driver, 44–53, 45 De Palma, Brian, 24, 30, 44 Departed, The (film), xii, 5, 117–121, 123, 135 Diaz, Cameron, 110, 113 DiCaprio, Leonardo: in The Aviator, 3, 114, 115, 116; in The Departed, 117; in Gangs of New York, 110; in non-­Scorsese films, 110, 124, 128; relationship with Scorsese,

Index • 155

xi, 108; in The Wolf of Wall Street, 5, 124–128 Directors Guild of Amer­i­ca, 25, 66 Disney, 108, 110 documentary films: about Scorsese, x, 15; by Scorsese, xii, 25, 60 Donen, Stanley, 16 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 44, 131 Douglas, Illeana, 90 Douglass, Frederick, 2 DreamWorks, 72 Driver, Adam, 129 Duel in the Sun, A (film), 16 Dunne, Griffin, 72–73 East of Eden (book), 16 East of Eden (film), 16, 38, 145n18 Ebert, Roger, 22, 29, 53, 74, 105, 113, 120 Edison, Thomas, 2 Edward Scissorhands (film), 94 Eisner, Michael, 71, 72, 74 Elvis on Tour (film), 25 embezzlement, 127 Endō, Shūsaku, xviii, 120, 129, 151n43 Entertainment Weekly (publication), 120 Evangelical Sisterhood, 71 Exorcist, The (film), 30, 52 fame, 70. See also King of Comedy, The (film) Farrell, Tom Riis, 104 Fellini, Federico, 15, 28–29 Ferretti, Dante, 82, 99, 110, 123 Film-­Maker’s Art, The (Manoogian), 17 films. See specific film titles Ford, Harrison, 72 Ford, John, 15, 37, 100 foreign film markets, 108, 110 foreign films, 15, 117 Foster, Jodie, 36, 41, 49 Franklin, Benjamin, 2 Friedkin, William, 30 Gabriel, Peter, 77 Gallina, Lucy, 135 Gangs of New York, The (book), 109 Gangs of New York (film), 5, 7, 23, 106, 108–114, 117 Gardner, Ava, 115

Garfield, Andrew, 129 Garland, Judy, 57 Geffen, David, 72 Geffen Com­pany, 72 Gleason, Jackie, 73, 74 Godard, Jean-­Luc, 94 Godfather, The (book), 29 Godfather, The (film series), 29, 44, 56 Gone with the Wind (film), 38, 145n18 Goodfellas (film), 5, 80, 82, 83–87, 100, 108 Goodman, John, 104 “Good Man Is Hard to Find, A” (O’Connor), 91 Hack, Shelley, 68 Hancock, John D., 30 Harris, Leonard, 46 Haskell, Molly, 42 Hawks, Howard, 100 Heathers (film), 94 Heaven’s Gate (film), 56 Hello Frisco, Hello (film), 38 Hepburn, Katharine, 115 Hershey, Barbara, 24, 25, 76 High Noon (film), 15 Hill, Jonah, 127, 128 Hinds, Ciarán, 129 Hitchcock, Alfred, 90, 122 Hoffa, Jimmy, 134, 135, 136 Holliday, Polly, 37 Honeymoon Killers, The (film), 24 Howard the Duck (film), 56 Hughes, Howard, 114, 115. See also Aviator, The (film) Hugo (film), 7, 82, 121, 122–124, 151n31 Hurt, Mary Beth, 95 Hustler, The (film), 73–74 I Call First (film), 22. See also Who’s That Knocking at My Door (film) I Heard You Paint Houses (book), 134 immigrant experience, 3–4, 9–10, 135 Imperioli, Michael, 87 Infernal Affairs (film), 117, 118, 119 Initial Entertainment Group, 110, 114 Invention of Hugo Cabret, The (book by Selznick), 122, 151n31. See also Hugo (film)

156  •  Index

Ireland, Marin, 136 Irish immigrants, 4, 135 Irishman, The (film), xiii, 30, 82, 100, 132, 133–136, 152n3 Italianamerican (documentary film), xii Italian heritage and culture, 3–4, 9–10. See also Catholicism It’s Not Just You, Murray! (film), 19–20, 22–23 I Vietelloni (Fellini), 28–29 Ivory, James, 95 Jaws (film), 56 Jhabvala, Ruth, 95 J.R. (film), 22. See also Who’s That Knocking at My Door (film) Kael, Pauline, 30–31, 43, 60 Kamiński, Janusz Zygmunt, 110 Katzenberg, Jeffrey, 71, 72, 74 Kazan, Elia, 16 Kazantzakis, Nikos, 25, 71, 76 Keitel, Harvey: in Alice ­Doesn’t Live ­Here Anymore, 40, 42; in The Irishman, 30, 76, 135; in The Last Temptation of Christ, 76; in Mean Streets, 26, 29, 30; in Taxi Driver, 49; in Who’s That Knocking at My Door, 8, 22 Killers of the Flower Moon (film, unreleased), 152n3 King, Graham, 110, 123, 124 Kingdom of the Fairies (film), 123 King of Comedy, The (film), 6, 27, 66–71, 78, 79, 84 Kingsley, Ben, 121 Kristofferson, Kris, 37, 41, 42, 47 Kubozuka, Yôsuke, 129 Kundun (film), 5, 7, 103–104, 105, 108, 110 Kurtzuba, Stephanie, 127 Ladd, Diane, 36, 41, 42 LaMotta, Jake, 60. See also Raging Bull (film) Lang, Fritz, 2, 35 Lange, Jessica, 92 Last Temptation of Christ, The (book), 25, 71, 76 Last Temptation of Christ, The (film), 71–72, 76–79, 87, 94, 103, 131

Last Waltz, The (rock documentary), xii, 60 Laurie, ­Piper, 73, 74 Lavin, Linda, 37 Law, Jude, 123 Lee, Spike, 99 Lehane, Dennis, 121 Lewis, Ellen, 94 Lewis, Jerry, 66–70, 67 Lewis, Juliette, 92, 93 “Life Lessons” (film segment), 82–83, 92 Lin, Robert, 103 Lincoln (film), 110 Liotta, Ray, 80, 84 ­Little Italy, New York City: festival in, 29; as film location, 3, 22, 25; Scorsese ­family and, 10, 11, 15 Lloyd, Norman, 97 LoBrutto, Vincent: on Dalai Lama and Jesus Christ, 104; on Scorsese’s films, 29, 59, 105, 114, 117; on Sicilian culture, 10; on studio industry changes, 74 Logan, John, 114–115, 123 loneliness, 44, 47, 137 Lucas, George, xi, 24, 27, 56, 59, 87 Lucas, Marcia, 36, 59 Lutter, Alfred, 42 MacDonald, John D., 88 Main Event, The (film), 61 Mann, Anthony, 37 Mann, Delbert, 29 Manoogian, Haig P., 17 Margolyes, Miriam, 95 Martin, Lori, 88 Martin, Mardik, 17–18, 29, 61 Marty (Mann), 29 Mastrogiacomo, Gina, 86 Mathison, Melissa, 103 Matilda (film), 61 McDowell, Christina, 127 Mean Streets (film), 26, 28–35; character development in, 46; credits of, 72; funding and production of, 25, 27; plot of, 5, 12, 100, 104, 125; reception of, 55 Medicine Ball Caravan (film), 24 Méliès, Georges, 2, 123 Menzies, William Cameron, 38, 145n18 Merchant, Ismail, 95

Index • 157

MGM, 56 Midnight Cowboy (film), 52 Milioti, Cristin, 125 Million Dollar Movie, The (tele­vi­sion series), 15 Minion, Joseph, 72 Minnelli, Liza, 54, 57–58, 59 Minnelli, Vincente, 57 Miramax, 108, 110, 114 Mitchum, Robert, 88 Monahan, William, 117–118 Morris, Helen, 122 Morris, Jonathan, 136 Mortimer, Emily, 121 Motion Picture Acad­emy, x–xi musical films, 16, 20, 57. See also New York, New York (film) ­music documentaries, xii, 25, 60 myth, defined, 1. See also American Dream, overview Neeson, Liam, 111, 129 Netflix, 135–136 Network (film), 52 Newman, Paul, 73, 74, 75 Newsweek (publication), 70 New York, New York (film), 6, 27, 56–60, 71 New Yorker (publication), 52, 60 New York Review of Books (publication), 84 New York Stories (film), 82–83 New York Times (publication), 60, 93, 113–114, 122 New York University (NYU), 17, 19, 20, 23–24 Nicholson, Jack, 118, 119 1941 (film), 56 Nolte, Nick, 83, 89, 91–92 Notes from Under­g round (book), 44 Obsession (film), 44 O’Connor, Flannery, 91 Ogata, Issei, 130 omerta, 10, 129–131 Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (film), 121 One from the Heart (film), 56 On the Waterfront (film), 64 Ordinary ­People (film), 65 Ovitz, Michael, 71, 76, 82, 108

Pacino, Al, 134, 135 Paquin, Anna, 135 Paramount Pictures, 20, 56, 71, 135 Peck, Gregory, 88, 90, 92 ­People (publication), 70 Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies, A (documentary film), x, 15 Pesci, Joe: in Casino, 3, 100; in Goodfellas, 80, 84; in The Irishman, 132, 134, 135; in Raging Bull, 61 Pfeiffer, Michelle, 94, 96 Phillips, Julia and Michael, 44 Pileggi, Nicholas, 83–84, 99, 134 Pitt, Brad, 121 Pollack, Sydney, 43 Pollock, Tom, 76 pornography, 43–47 Powell, Sandy, 110, 135 power and plea­sure theme, 9, 107. See also American Dream, overview Price, Richard, 74, 83 Primus, Barry, 24 Principe, Frank, 13 prostitution, 49, 76 provincial-­cosmopolitan strug­g le, 5, 78 Puzo, Mario, 29 Questlove, 93 Quinn, Aidan, 76 Rafelson, Toby Carr, 36 Raging Bull (film), 3, 6, 27, 60–65 Raiders of the Lost Ark (film), 56 Randall, Tony, 66 Redford, Robert, 65 Red Granite, 127 Reiner, Rob, 126 religion: classic films on, 15; Gangs of New York (film) and, 111; The Irishman (film) and, 133, 136–137; Kundun (film) and, 103–104; Mean Streets (film) and, 33; Scorsese’s background and, 3–4, 9–10, 12–14, 107; Silence (film and book) and, 129–131; Taxi Driver (film) and, 43, 51. See also Catholicism; Last Temptation of Christ, The; rituals Requiem for a Heavyweight (film), 62

158  •  Index

Rhames, Ving, 104 Risky Business (film), 74 rituals, xiii, 4, 13, 15. See also religion RKO, 56 Robbie, Margot, 127–128 Robertson, Robbie, 25, 60 Robinson, Amy, 72 rock documentaries, xii, 25, 60 Rocky (film series), 61 Rolling Stone (publication), 70 Roman, Cynthia, 104 Room with a View, A (book and film), 95 Rosen, Robert, 74 Rossellini, Isabella, 60 Rossellini, Roberto, 28, 60 Ruffalo, Mark, 121 Ryder, Winona, 93–94, 99 Sarris, Andrew, xi Savalas, Telly, 88 Schickel, Richard, 40, 53 Schindler’s List (film), 87 Schoonmaker, Thelma, 23, 65, 72, 82, 121, 135 Schrader, Leonard, 43 Schrader, Paul, 43–44, 61, 76, 104 Scorsese, Catherine (child of Martin), 21 Scorsese, Catherine (­mother of Martin), 10, 84 Scorsese, Francesca, 122, 123 Scorsese, Frank, 10, 11 Scorsese, Joe, 11 Scorsese, Luciano “Charlie,” 10, 11, 13 Scorsese, Martin, viii, ix–­xiii; awards and nominations for, 53, 55, 65, 93, 99, 114, 121, 124, 128, 136; biography on, 10; cameos by, 123; documentary film about, x, 15; early film influences and education of, 14–18, 19, 20; ethno-­religious heritage of, 3–4, 9–10, 12–13, 107; ­family and early life of, 10–16; health of, 11, 57, 60; Spielberg on, 27; student films by, 18–20, 21. See also specific film titles Scott, A. O., 114, 122 Scott, George C., 73, 74 Searchers, The (film), 15 Selznick, Brian, 122 Serrone, Christopher, 85

Seymour, Cara, 113 Shadows (film), 28 Shane (film), 15 Sheen, Martin, 118 Sheeran, Frank, 134–137 Shepherd, Cybill, 3, 34, 46 Shone, Tom, 117, 122 Shutter Island (film), 121–122, 124 Sicilian heritage and culture, 3, 9–10 Silence (film), xviii, 76, 82, 121, 128, 129–131 Silence: A Novel, xviii, 121, 129, 151n43 “­Simple Art of Murder, The” (Chandler), 32 Singin’ in the Rain (film), 16 Sizemore, Tom, 104 Slate (publication), 128 Sopranos, The (tele­vi­sion series), 87, 125 Sorvino, Paul, 80, 85, 87 Spielberg, Steven: Cape Fear (film) and, 87, 92, 93; Dreamworks and, 72; films by, 56, 87, 110; New York Stories (film) and, 82; as peer of Scorsese, xi, 24, 56; success of, 27 Stallone, Sylvester, 61 Star Is Born, A (film), 57 Star Wars (film series), 56, 59 Stevens, Dana, 128 Stevens, George, 15 stock market, 124–125. See also Wolf of Wall Street, The (film) Stone, Oliver, 23 Stone, Sharon, 100, 101, 103 St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City, 13, 30 Stratton Oakmont, 124–127 Strick, Wesley, 7 studio system, 55–56, 108 Taplin, Jonathan, 25 Taxi Driver (film), 3, 5, 27, 43–53, 146n4 Tayback, Vic, 37, 41 tele­vi­sion series: Alice, 37; Amazing Stories, xiii; Boardwalk Empire, xiii, 87, 125; The Million Dollar Movie, 15; The Sopranos, 87, 125 Tevis, Walter, 74 Thompson, J. Lee, 88 Thoreau, Henry David, 1

Index • 159

3-­D filmmaking, 122–124 Time (publication), 23, 53, 70, 76 Titanic (film), 110, 128 Top Gun (film), 74 Touchstone Pictures, 74 Tracy, David, 4 transcendence theme, 9, 107. See also American Dream, overview Trip to the Moon, A (film), 123 Truffaut, Francois, 15, 18 20th ­Century Fox, 56, 93 Ufland, Harry, 71 United Artists, 56, 61 Universal Studios, 77, 82 upward mobility theme, xii, 6, 9, 81–82, 107; in The Aviator, 115, 116; in The King of Comedy, 67–71; in Mean Streets, 33, 34; in Taxi Driver, 34; in Who’s That Knocking at My Door, 23, 28, 34. See also American Dream, overview Variety (publication), 90 Vidor, King, 16 Village Voice, 42 Vincent, Frank, 84 von Sydow, Max, 121 Wadleigh, Michael, 23 Wahlberg, Mark, 118 Walden (book), 1 Walker, Madame C. J., 2

Wallace, George, 44 Warner ­Brothers, 38, 41, 56, 118 Wedding Party (film), 30 Weinstein, Bob, 108 Weinstein, Harvey, 108, 110, 114 Weintraub, Sandra, 36 Weir, Peter, 72 western films, 15, 16, 37–38, 100 Wharton, Edith, 93, 95 What’s a Nice Girl like You ­Doing in a Place like This? (film), 18–19, 22–23 Who’s That Knocking at My Door (film), 5, 8, 22–23, 28, 34 Winkler, Irwin, 61, 82, 84, 135 Winstone, Ray, 123 Winter, Terence, 125, 128 wisdom theme, 9, 107. See also American Dream, overview Wiseguy (Pileggi), 83–84, 134 Witness (film), 72 Wizard of Oz, The (film), 6, 38, 145n18 Wolfe, Thomas, 44 Wolf of Wall Street, The (book), 124–125 Wolf of Wall Street, The (film), 5, 121, 124–128 Woodstock concert (1969), 23 Yakuza, The (film), 43 Zaillian, Steven, 135 Zimmerman, Paul, 66 Zinneman, Fred, 15, 37

About the Author

teaches history at Greenwich Country Day School in Greenwich, Connecticut. He is the author of numerous books, among them The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation, A Short History of the Modern Media, and Those Were the Days: Why “All in the Family” Still Matters. His essays and reviews have appeared on CNN.com and in the Washington Post, USA Today, Rolling Stone, and the American Historical Review, among other publications. A father of four, Jim lives with his wife, Sarah Lawrence College historian Lyde Cullen Sizer, in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

JIM CULLEN