Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Born in Queens, Martin Scorsese grew up in Manhattan’s
Little Italy, just a few steps from the Bowery. After
seriously considering a vocation to the priesthood, he
went to film school instead, completing his Bachelor of
Arts degree at New York University in 1964. His
shoestring first feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door?
(1968), caught the attention of Roger Corman, the
legendary producer of exploitation films, who offered
him the chance to direct Boxcar Bertha (1972). With
Mean Streets (1973), Scorsese’s career took off, and he has
become one of the most widely praised American
filmmakers of his generation, the first of the so-called
film-school brats.
Scorsese’s work evidences a remarkable thematic
consistency. His collaborations with the screenwriter Paul
Schrader on Mean Streets, Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull
(1980), and Bringing Out the Dead (1999) only hint at this
consistency. Whether he is directing a period adaptation of
Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel The Age of Innocence (1993),
creating a Tibetan epic based on the early years of the
Dalai Lama in Kundun (1997), or returning, as he so often
has, to the formulas of the crime film in GoodFellas
(1990), Cape Fear (1991), or Casino (1995), Scorsese is
fascinated by the story of the hero in revolt against a
stifling culture whose norms he or she has internalized to a
dangerous extent.
Occasionally, as in the feminist road film Alice
Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), the black comedy After
Hours (1985), or the historical epic Gangs of New York
(2002), the hero triumphs or escapes. This triumph is
muted or highly equivocal for the all-too-human Messiah
in the controversial The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
and the inventor/movie mogul Howard Hughes in The
Aviator (2004). More often, as in the ill-fated romance
Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, the musical
extravaganza New York, New York (1977), the nonpareil
ambivalent about the lure of money and the upward
mobility it promises; they have mixed feelings about the
need for the institutional control of antisocial behavior
and are suspicious about the possibilities of justice under
the law. A large number of commentators on the genre,
including Eugene Rosow, Jonathan Munby, and Nicole
MARTIN SCORSESE
b. Queens, New York, 17 November 1942
Crime Films
boxing film Raging Bull, and The Age of Innocence, the
hero succumbs to the pressures of his or her culture, in
which success amounts to personal failure.
This conflict between cultural repression and heroic
but generally futile resistance has special resonance in
Scorsese’s crime films. Taxi Driver is the story of a New
York loner who recoils so violently from the moral squalor
around him that he ends up embodying its worst excesses
as a crazed assassin. GoodFellas and Casino, the director’s
jaundiced response to Francis Coppola’s The Godfather
(1972), present life in the mob as a series of increasingly
corrupt deals, accommodations, and indulgences, with
loyalty unfailingly sacrificed to expedience. More
probingly than any other contemporary filmmaker,
Scorsese has projected the themes of the crime film
outward onto aspiring heroes unable to hold onto their
romances or escape their fatal surroundings because their
instincts are so deeply at war with each other.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
Who’s That Knocking at My Door? (1968), 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 Last Temptation of Christ (1988),
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)
FURTHER READING
Friedman, Lawrence S. The Cinema of Martin Scorsese. New
York: Continuum, 1997.
Scorsese, Martin. Martin Scorsese: Interviews. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1999.
Stern, Lesley. The Scorsese Connection. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press/London, British Film Institute,
1995.
Thomas Leitch
Rafter, have analyzed movie crime in sociological terms.
The movies I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)
and Fury (1936) treat inhumane prisons and lynch mobs
as social problems only partly responsive to social engineering;
likewise, critics view the convincing evocation
and less convincing resolution of the social problems
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