After Hours (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by David Sterritt

Produced by Griffin Dunne, Amy Robinson, and Robert F. Colesberry; directed by Martin Scorsese; written by Joseph Minion; cinematography by Michael Ballhaus; edited by Thelma Schoonmaker; production design by Jeffrey Townsend; music by Howard Shore; starring Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette, Verna Bloom, Cheech Marin, Tommy Chong, Linda Fiorentino, Teri Garr, John Heard, Catherine O’Hara, Dick Miller, Will Patton, Robert Plunket, Bronson Pinchot, Rocco Sisto, Larry Block, Victor Argo, Murray Moston, and John P. Codiglia. 4K UHD + Blu-ray, color, 97 min., 1985. A Criterion Collection release, www.criterion.com.

The dark-as-night 1985 comedy After Hours is one of Martin Scorsese’s most underappreciated films and one of his most unexpectedly complex. Like many of his pictures, it’s a quintessential New York movie, but it’s also a thinly veiled metaphysical yarn, placing ideas from myth and religion into the off-kilter context of a journey through a dreamlike downtown that could be Orpheus’s underworld, or Dante’s inferno, or James Joyce’s Nighttown, or Franz Kafka’s wherever, all of which are evoked in what plays out as a crypto-Catholic allegory of damnation and salvation. Although it lacks the sledgehammer power of Scorsese’s most characteristic films—1976’s Taxi Driver, 1980’s Raging Bull, 1990’s Goodfellas, 2006’s The Departed—it stands with his most personal works, sustaining a quicksilver series of funny, scary, and uncanny moods from its screwball beginning to its serendipitous ending. It looks as good as ever in the Criterion Collection’s 4K UHD + Blu-ray edition, which includes several new extras along with materials recycled from an earlier release. Its hour may be coming around at last.

Although it has clear ties to Scorsese’s inner life, After Hours didn’t begin as a brainchild of his own. His cherished production of The Last Temptation of Christ had just been abruptly scuttled by Paramount—it would later be revived at Universal, reaching the screen in 1988—and he found himself in a precarious psychological state, fearing that the American film industry had become so routinized and commercialized that his career could be permanently stalled. More immediately, he wondered whether his stamina would hold up now that he’d turned forty. Even more immediately, he was acutely unhappy with his recently acquired loft in lower Manhattan, realizing that the artsy Soho neighborhood, though not yet as trendy and upscale as it would soon become, was dismayingly different from the nearby Little Italy where he had grown up. On top of all this, he had no idea what project might fill the sudden void in his moviemaking schedule. The future was scary, and he decided that the best prospect for reviving his fortunes was to move away from the long, complex shoots of such recent pictures as Raging Bull and The King of Comedy (1982) and return to the faster, cheaper modes of Mean Streets (1973) and other early features. The plan crystallized when producer Amy Robinson sent him a screenplay by one Joseph Minion, then titled “Lies” and ideally suited for the tight, efficient methods he had in mind. He loved its mercurial leaps between farce and melodrama, and he found himself identifying with the main character, a nice, honest guy who somehow feels guilty about almost everything that comes his way.

The nice guy is Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) and, true to his last name, he’s a business-world drone with a tedious word-processing job. In a restaurant one evening, he gets to chatting with a woman named Marcy (Rosanna Arquette), and to keep the acquaintance going he agrees to visit the Soho apartment she shares with Kiki (Linda Fiorentino), a sculptor. Disturbed by the extreme mood swings Marcy soon displays, he decides to head back home, but entering the subway he finds that the fare has abruptly risen to more than he can pay, since his cash flew out the window of the wildly speeding cab that brought him downtown. Now stranded in Soho, he goes back to Marcy’s apartment and finds that she has inexplicably committed suicide. After a series of encounters with other Soho denizens—a couple of women (Teri Garr, Catherine O’Hara), a melancholy bartender (John Heard), a lonely man looking for companionship (Robert Plunket)—he gets mistaken for a burglar who’s been terrorizing the neighborhood, and a posse forms to hunt him down. He finally makes a getaway when a sympathetic artist (Verna Bloom) disguises him as a papier-mâché sculpture that the actual burglars (Cheech Marin, Thomas Chong) then mistake for a work of modern art. Stealing the “statue” and stashing it in their van, they unwittingly take Paul back uptown, and in a miraculous final touch, the back door of their rattletrap vehicle flies open at exactly the right moment for him to tumble out in front of the building where he works. The new day is dawning, and his dark night of the soul, the mind, and the body is finally over. Or is it? He’s gotten out of Soho, but he’s back to the Sisyphean chore of processing other people’s words, the same monotonous grind that drove him into his futile quest for downtown adventure and romance.

The ambience of After Hours is steeped in Scorsese’s grumpiness about living in Soho, especially after hours, when it seemed as deserted and sinister as the streets and dwellings through which Paul gropes his bewildered way; even Paul’s empty wallet parallels Scorsese’s depleted bank account after buying his expensive loft. In a conversation with author Fran Lebowitz on the Criterion disc, he recalls feeling “cast out of paradise” when The Last Temptation of Christ was canceled, and this helps explain his attraction to a story where everything the protagonist touches has danger attached; in typical Soho fashion, for instance, the keys to Marcy’s building must be thrown down from an upstairs window, seeming like deadly little missiles as they hurtle toward Paul’s head. Paul’s return to his office in the last scene echoes Scorsese’s need to restart his filmmaking career, but while the protagonist is stuck in an endless loop—the movie ends with his office computer welcoming him back to his boring rut—the director succeeded in escaping the doldrums he feared, earning back the picture’s production costs and moving on to the rousing success of The Color of Money the next year. For the timing and pacing, Scorsese drew on his admiration for Allan Dwan’s nimble Forties comedies—Up in Mabel’s Room (1944), Brewster’s Millions (1945), Getting Gertie’s Garter (1945)—and their penchant for characters who, like Paul, get locked in situations that are clearly improbable but not quite impossible. Invaluable support came from Scorsese’s steadfast film editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, who helped whittle the 160-minute initial cut to a fleet 97 minutes. Another key collaborator was the German cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, who had worked for eight years with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a director famous for no-nonsense speed and efficiency. His work in After Hours makes the most intricate machinations look fluid and spontaneous; he and Scorsese did six subsequent films together, and he credits this one for solidifying what became a lengthy and illustrious American career.

After Hours lends itself readily to mythological readings, and various voices in the Criterion extras strike that note, starting with Scorsese, who says Paul’s harrowing taxi ride to Manhattan’s lower depths is like a voyage to Hades by a passenger with no money to pay the boatman. In a video about the film’s visual components, costume designer Rita Ryack notes that the cabdriver wears a cap saying “Captain,” again signaling that his car is a ferry to the underworld, and production designer Jeffrey Townsend likens the taxi to the white rabbit in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, so important to the film’s symbolic scheme that the yellow of the cab is a recurring motif, along with the black that signifies Paul’s disquietude in the stygian Soho night. Robinson says in the audio commentary that Paul’s odyssey is a “spiritual journey” carrying him through stages of lust, fear, death, and finally acceptance, which glimmers through a climactic scene accompanied by Peggy Lee’s sublime recording of “Is That All There Is?”

My own take on After Hours involves Orpheus, the mythical poet and musician who visits the underworld to reclaim his wife after her untimely demise, receives permission from the gods to take her home, but violates their order not to look at her until they reach the upper world, whereupon the maenads (female followers of the Dionysus cult) exact murderous revenge by ripping his body apart and throwing the pieces into a river. The likenesses aren’t exact but they’re certainly there: Orpheus is a poet who travels to the underworld; Paul is a word processor who travels downtown. Orpheus is forbidden to look at his wife; Paul tells Marcy about a childhood incident when he was made to wear a blindfold, and later his vision is cut off by a papier-mâché disguise. Orpheus’s impatience and disobedience cut off his wife’s respite from the underworld; Paul’s impatience and edginess may be the spark for Marcy’s suicide. Orpheus is murdered by enraged maenads; Paul barely escapes from Soho vigilantes. Orpheus is torn to pieces; Paul’s papier-mâché shell splinters when he tumbles out of the burglars’ van, flinging bogus body parts around the area, and an earlier scene shows a newspaper report that a man has been ripped limb from limb in a Soho street. The ancient Greek mythos obviously diverges from the Judeo-Christian mythos that Scorsese has always taken with extreme seriousness, but recurring allusions to fire and burning infuse After Hours with hints that a Christian-style Hell à la Dante is not far away; as Vincent Canby wrote in his Taxi Driver review in The New York Times, “Manhattan is a thin cement lid over the entrance to hell, and the lid is full of cracks.” And while flames never threaten Paul himself, his eventual return to a numbing and barren routine suggest that he is indeed condemned, not to the fiery horror of Dante’s outer circles but the icy horror of the terrifying inner circles, where stasis and isolation punish the souls whose wasted lives have brought damnation in their wake. It’s no wonder that Paul appeals directly to the heavens for salvation at one point, throwing himself to his knees and shouting, “What do you want from me? What have I done? I’m just a word processor, for Christ’s sake!”

Modern literature is also in the mix. There are apparent nods to Joyce’s comic epic Ulysses, where the “Nighttown” section, modeled on the “Circe” episode in Homer’s Odyssey, spins out radically dreamlike events in an after-dark urban setting. And there’s no missing the presence of Kafka’s The Trial, especially as the novel is filtered through the luminous gloom of Orson Welles’s 1962 screen adaptation. Like that story’s ill-starred hero, Paul is a seemingly innocent man subjected to a string of inscrutable ordeals and ominous interactions, and when his situation calls for entering a chaotic nightclub, the doorkeeper precisely echoes Kafka’s guardian of the gateway to the Law, saying that Paul might be admitted at some later time but cannot go in now, and then accepting a bribe so Paul will feel he has left nothing undone in his desperate and probably doomed effort. On a lighter note, Scorsese also cites the roguish novels of Joseph Fielding and Laurence Sterne as inspirations, and some of the picture’s references reflect his inveterate cinephilia. O’Hara has the same “King Kong Company” jacket patch that Travis Bickle sports in Taxi Driver, for instance, and if Paul’s metamorphosis into statuary recalls a certain Roger Corman classic, can it be a coincidence that Dick Miller, the star of 1959’s A Bucket of Blood, shows up as a night-shift diner manager here?

This is a lot of freight for a snappy tragicomedy to carry, and After Hours does it with aplomb. Scorsese calls the film an anxiety dream and Schoonmaker calls it a nightmare, but it’s also an intellectual playground and a metaphysical romp. Rarely has a visit to the underworld been so entertaining, and Criterion’s new edition is an excellent vehicle for the trip.—David Sterritt

David Sterritt is film professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and author or editor of fifteen film-related books.

Copyright © 2023 by Cineaste Magazine

Cineaste, Vol. XLIX, No. 1