|
|
Occupation: Director 
AwardsMartin Scorsese may be the most consistently passionate, committed and inventive director to have worked regularly in the American cinema over the past two decades. His work is often rooted in his own experience, exploring his Italian-American Catholic heritage and confronting the themes of sin and redemption in a fiercely contemporary, yet universally resonant fashion. Scorsese made his name working largely outside the traditional Hollywood establishment, making films on relatively small budgets, which attracted relatively small, yet dedicated, audiences. Although he has never enjoyed the box-office success on the level of THE GODFATHER films or an E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL , he has earned an almost uninterrupted run of critical kudos that has made him the envy of many of his peers.
Scorsese was raised in New York's Little Italy and flirted with the idea of the priesthood, even studying at Cathedral College, a junior seminary. Rather than devote himself to the Church, he enrolled in New York University and soon discovered the religion of film. By 1966, Scorsese had received his master's degree, shot several successful short films including IT'S NOT JUST YOU, MURRAY, an ironic portrait of a gangster, and commenced production on a feature titled WHO'S THAT KNOCKING AT MY DOOR?. The film was shown at the 1967 Chicago Film Festival but failed to gain theatrical release at the time.
In 1969, after having spent some time in the Netherlands, Scorsese was teaching film history classes at NYU and helping fellow student Michael Wadleigh edit the mammoth rock documentary WOODSTOCK. His career was boosted when producer Joseph Brenner offered to distribute WHO'S THAT KNOCKING?. With a gratuitous sex scene thrown in, the film was released in New York that year. It stars Harvey Keitel as J.R., an Italian-American who has been conditioned by his strict Catholic upbringing to see all women as either "girls" (virgins who make good wives and mothers) or "broads" (purely sexual creatures about whom he fantasizes). The film was critically praised for its realism and inspired camerawork.
After working on the documentary STREET SCENES (1970), Scorsese was assigned by Roger Corman to direct BOXCAR BERTHA (1972), a Depression-era allegory which parallels—within the limitations of an exploitation picture—the relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ. Barbara Hershey (who gave Scorsese a copy of the novel Last Temptation of Christ during filming and would play Mary Magdalene in Scorsese's film of that book) plays Bertha, a good-natured whore, and David Carradine is labor leader Bill Shelley who, at the film's end, is literally crucified on the side of a boxcar. The film introduced one of Scorsese's central thematic concerns, the figure of the "sinner" who has temporarily slipped from grace, only to enjoy a final, if ambiguous, redemption. In 1973 came the film that assured Scorsese a starring role in contemporary film history: MEAN STREETS , the story of a group of young hoods living and dying on the streets of New York (shot, surprisingly, almost entirely in Los Angeles). Charlie (Keitel), the film's central character, juggles his concern for his crazy friend Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro), a secret romance with Johnny's cousin, and his ambition to run an uptown restaurant. At his best here, Scorsese combines a cinéaste's passion for film noir with an actor's obsession with rich characters and a loving sense of time and place. The film was Scorsese's first with De Niro (the two were raised in the same neighborhood) and marked the beginning of one of the most productive creative pairings in contemporary American cinema. De Niro would star in many other Scorsese features: TAXI DRIVER (1976), NEW YORK, NEW YORK (1977), RAGING BULL (1980), KING OF COMEDY (1983), GOODFELLAS (1990) and CAPE FEAR (1991).
ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE (1974) marked a departure, if not an act of penance, for Scorsese—it is one of his few films with a woman protagonist and one that isn't suffused with a particularly masculine point of view. The story of a woman (Ellen Burstyn) who takes off with her young son in search of America and a job ironically became a favorite of the nascent women's movement of the early 1970s; it also spawned a successful sitcom. As if in reaction to the feminism of ALICE, Scorsese returned with a vengeance to the macho world of MEAN STREETS with TAXI DRIVER (1976). Scripted by Paul Schrader, TAXI DRIVER was an iconographic street opera which gave De Niro an opportunity for a tour-de-force performance as Travis Bickle, a Vietnam vet turned psychotic vigilante. The film generated considerable controversy, largely thanks to its bloody denouement—a sustained, hallucinatory, brilliantly edited piece of carnage centering around a 12-year-old prostitute (Jodie Foster). The pendulum swung the other way with NEW YORK, NEW YORK (1977), an extravagant, uneven, and dark take on the 1940s-style Hollywood musical rooted in Scorsese's childhood memories of the "Make-Believe-Ballroom" era. RAGING BULL (1980), meanwhile, remains an acknowledged Scorsese masterpiece. Based on the autobiography of Jake LaMotta and scripted by Schrader and Mardik Martin, the film afforded De Niro the greatest performance of his career in this story of the rise and fall of a middleweight boxing champion (De Niro gained over 50 pounds to play La Motta later in life, as a nightclub performer). Shot in black-and-white save for some poignant "home movie" sequences, RAGING BULL won Academy Awards for De Niro and editor Thelma Schoonmaker. (Schoonmaker has stated that her much-praised work in editing the film's horrific but compelling slow-motion fight sequences was all predetermined by Scorsese's fastidious storyboards.) KING OF COMEDY (1983) features De Niro as Rupert Pupkin, an obsessed fan/would-be comic, Sandra Bernhard as his wacko accomplice and Jerry Lewis as a Johnny Carson-type figure in Scorsese's most underrated film, a dark and pointed social comedy. Layered between these features were several documentary projects, most notably ITALIANAMERICAN (1974), a short but rich portrait of his parents, Charles and Catherine Scorsese (who went on to make memorable cameo appearances in a number of their son's movies), and THE LAST WALTZ (1978), a meticulously shot and edited record of the 1976 farewell concert by rock group The Band. After a false start on his long-planned adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis's THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST , Scorsese temporarily turned away from high-rolling, big-budget filmmaking to make AFTER HOURS (1985), a nightmarish black comedy set entirely on the streets of New York during one night. In 1986 he abandoned New York for the streets of Chicago to direct THE COLOR OF MONEY . This career turning point was a relatively bloodless but beautifully stylish sequel to Robert Rossen's 1961 classic, THE HUSTLER. Part of his reason for directing the film, said Scorsese, was to prove that he could make a "studio picture," with a big budget ($15 million) and stars—Paul Newman, Tom Cruise—to match. He also guided Newman to an Oscar.
Scorsese made his TV debut directing "Mirror, Mirror" an intense supernatural episode of Amblin Entertainment's "Amazing Stories" (NBC, 1986) scripted by AFTER HOURS writer Joseph Minion from a Steven Spielberg story. He worked with a superstar from another medium as he collaborated again with THE COLOR OF MONEY screenwriter Richard Price to craft Michael Jackson's "BAD" video (1987). This ambitious and unusual extended video was the only facet of "Michael-Mania" to deal explicitly with issues of race and class.
THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (1988) gave Scorsese the chance to dramatize the historical figure whose struggle between the spiritual and the secular is the most celebrated of all. Scorsese's Christ begins as a social outcast, reviled for making crucifixes, who wavers between good and evil, between the spirit and the flesh, before eventually choosing the path to redemption. In this sense, Christ has an affinity with Keitel's J.R. and Charlie, De Niro's Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin, and David Carradine's Bill Shelley. As written by Paul Schrader and interpreted by Willem Dafoe, this Christ suggested a "Messiah on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown." Although superbly shot, using exotic locations and a galvanizing world music score by Peter Gabriel, the film somehow lacked the emotional power and cohesion of Scorsese's earlier, smaller-scale productions. In any event, this was clearly an intensely personal project for Scorsese and Schrader. The film generated controversy, with religious forces accusing the film of blasphemy. As a result some theater and video chains refused to carry the film. Adapted from Nicholas Pileggi's book Wiseguys about small-time gangster-turned-Federal-witness Henry Hill, GOODFELLAS (1990) marked a return to classic Scorsese form and content. The film captures both the undeniable excitement as well as the tawdry, daily details of life on the fringes of "the mob," pushing audience manipulation to the extreme by juxtaposing moments of graphic violence with scenes of high humor. The film boasts superb camerawork, including several extended tracking shots, and consummate performances by De Niro, Joe Pesci, Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco. Some reviewers rank GOODFELLAS among the finest of Scorsese's achievements. Others, however, found it a less challenging retread of MEAN STREETS—a superior entertainment rather than a genuinely provocative and disturbing work of art. Scorsese's next feature was another matter entirely. CAPE FEAR (1991) was originally slated to be directed by Steven Spielberg. When De Niro signed on, he and executive producer Spielberg decided that their friend Scorsese should come aboard to direct. Unfortunately the result was a slick, pretentious and excessive remake of the compact and powerful 1962 original (itself based on John D. MacDonald's novel, The Executioners, starring Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck directed by J. Lee Thompson. As to be expected, the performances are generally strong (Nick Nolte and Juliette Lewis are particularly good) and the camerawork and editing are impressive in their virtuosity. However, De Niro's showy central performance, while presumably in accordance with Scorsese's half-baked quasi-religious take on the material, is profoundly problematic. The social reality of Robert Mitchum's original rendition of a monster from the working class is discarded to create an improbable contemporary villain that perversely incorporates elements of Mitchum's psychopathic preacher in THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955). Moreover, the film's extended HALLOWEEN-STYLED climax should have been an embarrassment for an artist of Scorsese's stature. Nonetheless, this was the biggest hit of his career to date.
Based on Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning American classic novel, THE AGE OF INNOCENCE (1993) seemed an unlikely choice for Scorsese's next project. A subtle drama of manners set in New York's 19th-century high society seemed a stretch for a master of gritty urban expressionism, but he pulled it off adroitly with a careening camera, sumptuous color and decor conveying the characters' repressed emotions. Scorsese referred to the films of Luchino Visconti, Max Ophüls, Jacques Tourneur, James Whale and William Wyler for inspiration. Brilliantly marketed, the film opened with a torrent of hype (regarding authenticity in costuming, production design, literary credentials, et al.) aimed squarely at all the right upper-middlebrow cultural organs. What could have been a hard sell opened to respectful if not always impassioned reviews and healthy box office.
Set in the 1970s and 80s, CASINO (1995) re-teamed Scorsese with Pileggi, De Niro and Pesci in yet another study of "the mob," this time transposed from NYC to Las Vegas. Filled with iconic images, CASINO was a flawed allegory of America's loss of innocence. Most critics felt that the same issues had been raised (to better effect) in GOODFELLAS. While the technical aspects of CASINO were praised, critics felt that De Niro and Pesci were merely playing variations on characters already seen. Only Sharon Stone as a hustler who marries De Niro and wreaks havoc in his life won critical kudos.
© 2000 Cinemania Corporation and/or its suppliers. All rights reserved.