Martin Scorsese's Short Films

For a long time now, perhaps since Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese has been called “America’s Greatest Living Director". But for a long time before that, Scorsese was as often as not dismissed as “a talented disappointment” by the very same critics who were to later hail him as both a “national treasure” and a sign that the mainstream cinema could still take risks. To put it another way, it’s taken a generation for critics and film fans to catch-up with Scorsese.

What’s so great and valuable about Madman’s excellent new release of Scorsese’s early short films and docos is that they reveal the maturity and passion of the nascent artist; the director’s deeply personal sensibility was, one could argue, right there from the very beginning. These films are a summary, in a way, of who Scorsese is and where he came from, both as an individual and an artist. What’s startling (even to long term fans like this writer) is that so much of what we consider signature to the director’s style – both in terms of style and content – are present in the work of the twentysomething film student. For Australian fans, this disc is a major event since until now it’s been impossible to see American Boy at all on DVD.

What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? (1963)
A guy buys a painting and becomes obsessed with it, to the point that he loses his identity completely to its mysteries. Fast, darkly funny and energetic, this 9min short made at NYU on 16mm is, in its technique, a sustained celebration of the French New Wave with which the director freely mingles NYC Italian-American slang, a love for stand-up comic Ernie Pintoff and the fiction of Algernon Blackwood. Scorsese’s high-speed dolly tracks, associative editing and his talent for choreographing movement with music are all explored here; indeed he used Nice Girl as inspiration for Goodfellas.

It’s Not Just You Murray (1964)
A yarn about a small time hood, Murray, who is blind to his own bleak reality by his loyalty to the ‘wiseguy’ lifestyle, is a funny, surreal and adventurous 15min ‘epic’ made at NYU on 16mm. The film derives its humour and energy from referencing ‘30s gangster films and musicals. But it was also a chance for the director to rehearse themes that informed his later features: betrayal, loyalty, friendship, and the macho guy and his capacity for self-delusion in the face of a more appealing ‘life-giving’ fantasy. It won Scorsese a major student prize and he says its success gave him “a swelled head.”

The Big Shave (1967)
Against Bunny Berrigan’s 1937 classic tune I Can’t Get Started, a dark young man enters a pristine, white bathroom and has a shave… it all ends in a bloody mess. It’s bleak and blackly comic metaphor for the US’s ‘suicidal’ involvement in Vietnam, a brilliant exercise in the then-fashionable ‘sick humour’ and a personal statement from a promising talent who felt like his career had stalled. It’s a sort of metaphysical music film and a dark gem.

Italianamerican (1974)
A 50-minute documentary about Scorsese’s parents, Charlie and Catherine, shot in their cramped Little Italy apartment in 6 hours over 2 days, in verité style. While Scorsese’s mother prepares her speciality, tomato sauce and meatballs (the recipe is a family heirloom), the couple tell stories about what it was like to be working class and Italian American in the US of the ‘30s and ‘40s. The couple start off self-conscious but they end up baring their souls. Largely eschewing the conventions of the bio-doco, the director lets his parents do the talking; setting the template for his later films on Bob Dylan and the blues. What emerges is Scorsese’s debt to his roots, his neighbourhood and his family, and a unique love story. Like all of Scorsese’s great movies, it’s so moving because it is just so honest and unsentimental.

American Boy – A Profile of Steven Prince (1978)
Prince played the scary, nervy gun-salesman, Easy Andy, in Taxi Driver, and Paul Schrader claims there was no acting involved. An old pal of Scorsese’s from the late ‘60s, Prince came from a respectable East coast family, fell into show biz and entered a fast lane of rock ‘n’ roll, heroin and violence. Wise, very, very funny and deeply felt, American Boy begins with a brilliantly funny vignette; Prince and Scorsese are sharing a hot tub. “Feels good,” the director says, and Prince rejoins: “Guilty huh? We’re all guilty.” American Boy is more than a movie about a ‘60s casualty; it’s about obsession, self-destructive behaviour and the need for redemption. Like Italianamerican, it seems deceptively simple. The setting is a lounge room in the modest home of a mutual friend. Prince is a talented raconteur, and Scorsese lets him ‘perform’, only rarely prompting him as he tells one funny anecdote after another. But as the movie progresses, the stories grow darker. It ends with a tale of meaningless violence, and Prince finally drops his wise guy pose to reveal a guy who is desperate from some real connection with his family.

True to form, Madman have done an excellent job on the sound and image, and that’s particularly admirable considering the age of the materials. The major feature on the disc is a commentary track on each of the films by writer and Scorsese fan Mark Nicholls, Senior Lecturer in Cinema Studies at Melbourne University and the author of Scorsese’s Men: Melancholia and the Mob. It’s insightful and interesting if a little unpolished, though he does a good job at providing a historical context for each of the films.