![]() ![]() With photography from the pair of Richard Coll and Michael Wadleigh (the former’s only feature credit, while the latter is a storied documentary photographer) the film has an energy and a liveliness to each frame that Scorsese rarely taps back into. It’s also one of his aesthetically playful as well. Ostensibly a neo-realist melodrama (think if Cassavetes did All That Heaven Allows but instead of small town America being the ultimate judge of one’s life, God takes this film’s lead), the film takes a lively performance from a rarely better Keitel and an unsung turn from Bethune and turns this into one of Scorsese’s most human and humane portraits of guilt and forgiveness to date. Strikingly real and visceral, many of their sequences feel as if Scorsese simply outlined the scene and let the actors go where they felt like going (there’s a rooftop sequence that really brings that to life), and in this type of grainy, deeply lo-fi picture, these type of ground level performances are almost the equivalent of watching two expert jazz musicians lighting their sheet music on fire instead letting each other lead, one note at a time. Their moments together are particularly well crafted, as the relationship feels as if it’s ripped right out of a Cassavetes picture ( Faces would arrive just one year later). Led primarily by the pair of Keitel and Bethune, each bring a great deal of depth and energy to the picture. ![]() ![]() A story about deeply entrenched Catholic guilt and ultimately forgiveness, this breathtakingly energetic drama is both one of the most definitively “Scorsese” pictures the auteur has ever made, and also one of his most vital and engaging.įirst things first, the performances here are top notch. discovers that she had been raped by a past boyfriend, he bolts as fast as he can. The two spark a relationship, only to fall mutually head over heels in love. With a close knit group of friends opposite whom he paints the city as red as he possibly can, he one day becomes entranced by a beautiful young woman whose name we don’t learn throughout the film, but whom is played by the effervescent Zina Bethune. (Harvey Keitel), stuck in the streets of New York. However, even this legendary, generation defining auteur had to start somewhere, and boy, was his debut feature an announcement of what was to come from this master filmmaker.Īs one would expect a first film from Scorsese to touch upon, the film tells the tale of a young Catholic, Italian-American man named J.R. Arguably one of today’s most beloved and revered auteurs, Scorsese has been churning out films for going on six decades now, ranging from legendary character pieces to thrilling experiments in genre work, and even branching off into the world of documentary cinema, and now even the art of film restoration. Be it a failure, a solid (but minor) piece of work, or in the case of the film from which the above quote is drawn, one of its director’s most interesting and enthralling works, a lot can be seen in, and said about, a director’s very first feature length piece of work.įor director Martin Scorsese, it all began with the 1967 masterpiece, Who’s That Knocking At My Door. While every legendary director, names like Spike Lee, Steven Spielberg or the like, seem picked directly out of the cinematic heavens with only the ability to create interesting, masterfully crafted pieces of art, they all have a beginning. ![]() Solve everybody’s problems if they liked Westerns. ![]()
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