For instance, it opens with a strange sequence featuring Scorsese’s mother baking a meat “pie” for a group of children, accompanied by a very minimalist percussive soundtrack. Who’s That Knocking at My Door is a work full of behavioural ticks and autobiographical asides. Scorsese’s debut feature is now most fascinating for the appropriately piecemeal pleasures and insights it offers – as a literally fragmentary work akin to something like John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959, with which is shares many narrative and aesthetic commonalities) (5) or even such a contemporaneous Australian film as Pudding Thieves (Brian Davies, 1967) (6) low budget films in thrall of a potential cinema made outside of the system and collated or accreted over time – rather than as a fully satisfying or unifying work of art. Its sense of unkempt energy provides a pleasing alternative to the depleted pleasures of films like Gangs of New York (2002) and The Departed (2006) (4). Who’s That Knocking at My Door is definitely a naïve, relatively blunt and dramatically and aesthetically uneven work, but its seemingly “disarmingly straightforward” qualities have become much less obvious. (3)īut it is only now with the fuller passage of time, and Scorsese’s uneven and less enervating passage through the last 15 years, that the film’s true qualities and innovations can be properly assessed. Who’s That Knocking at My Door is a disarmingly straightforward film: a rough draft for Mean Streets in which Scorsese spells out his guidelines, his symbols and his meanings without ever quite welding them into an imaginative whole. Such a disavowal was characteristic of the critical response the film received upon its British “re-release” in the wake of the success of Mean Streets (1973), Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) and Taxi Driver (1976) (2). In some respects, Who’s That Knocking at My Door is probably a film that looks and plays better now that the weight of cultural and authorial expectation has receded. The contrast between the material filmed in 1964-65 and that in 1968, for instance, is particularly marked, the changes in style and content reflecting broader cultural, aesthetic and moral shifts occurring over this defining period of American history and cinema (the shift from 35mm to 16mm across the film’s two key plot threads is also physically and visibly palpable), as well as in relation to Scorsese’s development as a filmmaker.Īs Scorsese himself has claimed, the film is now probably most interesting as a kind of time capsule, its shifting pictorial and aural “surface”, fashions and quickly “out-of-date”, but still potent, attitudes and mores reflective of a period of rapid social change. Made over a four-year-period – 1965-68, and released in 1969 – Who’s That Knocking at My Door brazenly bares the marks of its convoluted, stop-start production history. Sometimes dismissed as little more than an extended film school exercise, it is in fact a significant and quite revelatory document that provides important insights into both the director’s key thematic preoccupations and his development as a truly distinctive, even idiosyncratic filmmaker. Martin Scorsese’s first feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, is a curious beast. “Like Samuel Fuller, Scorsese fills his movies with personal talismans like Werner Herzog, he riddles them with documentary subtexts.” (1)
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