Scorsese Shorts (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by David Sterritt

What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?

Written and directed by Martin Scorsese; cinematography by James Newman; edited by Robert Hunsicker; starring Zeph Michaelis, Mimi Stark, Sarah Braverman, Fred Sica, and Robert Uricola. B&W, 10 min., 1963. 

It’s Not Just You, Murray!

Directed by Martin Scorsese; screenplay by Martin Scorsese and Mardik Martin; cinematography by Richard H. Coll; edited by Eli F. Bleich; production design by Lancelot Braithwaite; starring Ira Rubin, Sam DeFazio, Andrea Martin, Catherine Scorsese, and Robert Uricola. B&W, 16 min., 1964.

The Big Shave

Written and directed by Martin Scorsese; starring Peter Bernuth. Color, 5 min., 1967.

Italianamerican

Produced by Elaine Attias and Saul Rubin; directed by Martin Scorsese; treatment by Larry Cohen and Mardik Martin; cinematography by Alex Hirshfeld; edited by B. Lovitt; starring Catherine Scorsese, Charles Scorsese. B&W, 49 min., 1974. 

American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince

Produced by Bertram Lovitt; directed by Martin Scorsese; treatment by Julia Cameron and Mardik Martin; cinematography by Michael Chapman; edited by Amy Jones and Bertram Lovitt; starring Steven Prince, Martin Scorsese, George Memmoli. Color, 55 min., 1978.

Bu-ray and DVD. A Criterion Collection release.

Martin Scorsese made his feature debut in 1967 with Who’s That Knocking at My Door, but he had already completed a handful of shorts, two of which—the antic What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? (1963) and the jittery It’s Not Just You, Murray! (1964)—have been almost impossible to see apart from occasional YouTube postings that came and went as such postings habitually do. Shorts continued to arrive alongside his growing number of features, circulated in low-quality transfers on videocassettes and laserdiscs that turned into hard-to-find collectors’ items. The Big Shave (1967) won the Prix L’Age d’or at the International Festival of Experimental Cinema in Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium, before playing the New York Film Festival in 1968. Italianamerican (1974) and American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince (1978) also screened at the New York event, and Italianamerican became an instant favorite of Scorsese aficionados.

All five of these formerly elusive items are now available in Scorsese Shorts, a well-produced DVD/Blu-ray compilation from the Criterion Collection, which numbers a surprisingly small number of Scorsese pictures in its mostly admirable catalogue. It’s interesting to note that the Scorsese features released by Criterion to date, The Age of Innocence (1993) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), are uncharacteristic works, falling outside the sphere of contemporary urban angst, friction, and violence that has always been his primary arena. The pictures on the new disc are atypical in terms of length, but in other respects they plug directly into career-long Scorsese preoccupations, however different they are from one another in form, style, and specific content. Whether or not any of them qualify as great cinema—for me, only Italianamerican comes close—they offer unique glimpses into the evolution of America’s finest living filmmaker.

The supplements on the Criterion disc are a video interview with Scorsese by critic Farran Smith Nehme, a scattershot discussion by filmmakers Ari Aster, Josh Safdie, and Benny Safdie, and an audio recording of a Scorsese radio appearance from 1970. There’s also a booklet containing an essay by Bilge Ebiri and a few of Scorsese’s early storyboards, showing that the impromptu tone of the shorts arose from plenty of planning and forethought. This combination of advance preparation and seemingly off-the-cuff results jibes with Scorsese’s respect for John Cassavetes, whose Shadows (1958) helped convince him that low-budget film could be an outlet for personal artistic expression. But as anyone familiar with Scorsese’s creative personality is aware, the inspirations for his films are numberless, and he’s always ready to name, praise, and elucidate them. Italian neorealism and the French New Wave loom large, as do avant-garde works by the likes of Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas, the experiments of Shirley Clarke in The Connection (1961) and The Cool World (1963), and the European auteur cinema of the Sixties, which produced so many masterpieces that Scorsese says keeping up with them was almost “annoying.” It’s an understatement to say he was fired up by all this. As he tells Nehme in their conversation, “You could not not make a movie.”

Scorsese’s earliest extant shorts have wordy titles decked out with punctuation marks, a reminder that What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? and It’s Not Just You, Murray! are products of his student days in New York University’s film department; their ornate titles suggest youthful high spirits and an understandable desire to make a distinctive mark in a mildly competitive milieu. In fact, pretty much everything about those brief pictures (ten minutes and sixteen minutes, respectively) shouts out high spirits and freewheeling stylistics, as well as obliquely autobiographical touches, such as the fact that What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? centers on a wannabe writer who becomes enthralled by a randomly encountered photograph, then obsesses over paintings by his lover and ultimately vanishes into one of the artworks he adores. It’s hard not to see the filmmaker’s hopes and fears lurking just below the pictorial surface of this nervous, elliptical tale.

It’s Not Just You, Murray! is more ambitious. The title character is an egotistical crook who goes into bootlegging with a guy named Joe, serves time behind bars, marries a woman who clearly likes Joe better, fails to notice that their kids look an awful lot like Joe, and presides over the slam-bang finale, a bargain-basement homage to Federico Fellini’s hallucinatory 8½ (1963), a big influence on the film, as are (by Scorsese’s own account) early François Truffaut, William A. Wellman’s 1931 The Public Enemy, Raoul Walsh’s 1939 The Roaring Twenties, and the Road to… series with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope (1940–62). Murray and Joe also make a surprising foray into show business, giving Scorsese the chance to shoot what Ebiri calls “a dime-store Busby Berkeley number” and prefiguring the fascination with the entertainment world that surfaces periodically in his pictures.

For all its energy, inventiveness, and glimmerings of such central Scorsese themes as criminality, trust, betrayal, and deception, It’s Not Just You, Murray! lacks the larger meaning, the “philosophy,” that one of Scorsese’s teachers said every true artist must have. His next film, The Big Shave, was a big step backward in cinematic ambition but a small step forward in larger meaning. It has a single character, setting, and action: a young man, a gleaming bathroom, and a bloody horrific job of shaving, all with a 1937 recording of the romantic song “I Can’t Get Started” providing wry counterpoint. Scorsese made the film for a contest sponsored by a color-film manufacturer, but the movie’s full-frontal onslaught of cutting, slicing, and relentless redness was meant less as a technical feat than as a sardonic comment on the then-raging Vietnam conflict—the gnomic phrase “Viet ’67” appears in the closing titles—and to a seething darkness in his personal mood at the time. Audiences at the Belgian and New York festivals greeted it with tumultuous laughter, which Scorsese says came as a huge surprise, although the film’s comic dimension (it’s a deadpan satire of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho, among other things) seems unmissable to me. Its underground reputation has been strong ever since, and it vividly anticipates the iconic bloodletting in many another Scorsese movie. He sees it as his break with the juvenilia of his previous films.

Italianamerican is Scorsese’s best-known short, and its relatively high level of sophistication is a function of its clear and sympathetic purpose—it’s an affectionate portrait of his parents, shot in their modest Manhattan apartment—and also of its later date, coming when he was a seasoned filmmaker with Boxcar Bertha (1972) and the remarkable Mean Streets (1973) under his belt and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) due for imminent release. It doesn’t hurt that Charles and Catherine Scorsese are natural-born amateur stars, quick-witted (especially her) and laid-back (especially him) throughout their forty-nine minutes of screen time. The director has screen time as well, asking questions, guiding the conversation, and occasionally interacting with the camera crew. In the filmmaker discussion on the Criterion disc, Josh Safdie likens the movie’s reflexive elements to those in Abbas Kiarostami’s 1997 Taste of Cherry, and while the Scorsese opus couldn’t be more different in subject and mood, the comparison makes a certain amount of sense, connecting two auteurs who draw no strict distinction between the action before the camera and the action of the camera. Here also is Scorsese’s longtime fondness for breaking the fourth wall, already prominent in It’s Not Just You, Murray! and a key to the intimacy and warmth of this winning family project.

Scorsese regards documentary and fiction as two sides of a single indivisible coin, and he has come to see Italianamerican as a companion piece to Mean Streets, made in the same period and rooted just as deeply in the folkways and mores of the Little Italy where he spent most of his formative years. By the same token, he calls American Boy a counterpart to Taxi Driver, which arrived two years earlier and gave Steven Prince an indelible cameo as a fast-talking gun dealer. The focus on the anecdotes of a colorfully off-kilter raconteur also links American Boy directly to The King of Comedy (1982) and indirectly with Scorsese’s many films about performers and performance, from New York, New York (1977) and The Last Waltz (1978) to his long documentaries on Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and other pop-culture heroes. The main attraction is Prince, erstwhile entrepreneur, heroin addict, Neil Diamond tour manager, and cameo actor. But here again Scorsese is an active presence on the screen, piloting the show like the leader of a jazz combo and occasionally—in a radically reflexive move that makes this one of his most emphatically postmodern ventures—interrupting the seemingly sincere and spontaneous flow of Prince’s storytelling to demand repetitions of the material with more sincerity and spontaneity. Prince is the American boy and Scorsese is the American puppet master peeking out from behind the curtain.

Stylistics aside, American Boy is the most revealing and problematic of Scorsese’s shorts, casting a bright and sometimes troubling light on issues of masculinity and manliness that surge through his whole filmography. Shot in the home of actor George Memmoli, best remembered for his brief appearance in Mean Streets, the movie starts with apparently tangential images of Prince and Scorsese lounging in a hot tub, followed by Prince and Memmoli having a rough-and-tumble scuffle in the living room like a pair of naughty little boys. Prince’s anecdotes then commence, moving from the innocuous—how he set up a youthful business selling hot bagels in his Long Island community—to the lurid, as when he was privy to an accidental electrocution, escaped a drug bust that ensnared his friends, killed an intruder at a gas station, and saved an overdosed woman by injecting adrenaline into her heart, an incident Quentin Tarantino borrowed for Pulp Fiction in 1994. It’s not clear how much literal truth resides in these tales, and some details seem pretty questionable. While a few other people are visible in the room, only males (Prince, Scorsese, Memmoli) get to say anything. Violence is the frequent topic and very frequent subtext of the talk, and Scorsese heightens the discursive darkness by strategically darkening the look of the picture. None of his other films more pithily encapsulate his infatuation with masculinity and his inner doubts and suspicions about that infatuation.

In his Criterion essay, Ebiri quotes Truffaut’s remark that a filmmaker’s first 150 feet of film augur the nature of the filmmaker’s entire future. That’s not a comment to take too seriously, but Scorsese’s early shorts do carry an enormous number of tells, hints, and harbingers as to what his later work would bring. The most reliable quality of his filmography is its insistently personal nature, varying its modes of expression over the years but remaining quintessentially Scorsesean from the Sixties to the present day. Looking at It’s Not Just You, Murray! or The Big Shave is like perusing a family album stocked with photos that are valuable not because they’re perfect or even excellent or even adequate but because we recognize the seeds of things to come in the past that gave birth to them. Their blemishes notwithstanding, Scorsese’s shorts are beguiling glimpses into one of cinema’s most illustrious careers.

David Sterritt is editor-in-chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video, film professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and author or editor of fifteen books.

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