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After Hours (1985)

A word processor goes downtown for a date, loses his last $20 out of a cab window, and cannot get home. Scorsese's comedy of paranoia, shot in forty nights for $4 million after Paramount killed The Last Temptation of Christ.

camerawork
point-of-view
editing
structure
setting
lighting
character
formula
scorsese
comedy
independent
new-york
night

Directed by Martin Scorsese; written by Joseph Minion; shot by Michael Ballhaus, the first of their films together; edited by Thelma Schoonmaker; music by Howard Shore; produced by Amy Robinson, Griffin Dunne and Robert F. Colesberry for Double Play and The Geffen Company; released by Warner Bros. in September 1985; 97 minutes (sos 227).

Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) trains new staff on the word processors of a midtown office. One evening in a diner he gets talking to Marcy (Rosanna Arquette), who gives him a number downtown. He calls, takes a cab to SoHo, and watches his only $20 blow out of the window on the way. From there the night will not let him go. Marcy turns strange, then turns up dead. The subway fare has gone up past what he has in his pocket. Everyone who offers help (Kiki the sculptor, Tom the bartender, Julie the waitress, Gail in the ice-cream truck) turns out to cost him something, until a neighbourhood mob decides he is the burglar who has been working the street. June, a sculptor in a basement, hides him inside a papier-mâché figure. The real burglars steal it. It falls out of their van at dawn, in front of his office.

Scorsese's own description of what he was up to:

I thought it would be interesting to see if I could go back and do something in a very fast way. All style. An exercise completely in style. And to show that they hadn't killed my spirit.

— Kelly, unpaged

Why it is in the journal

Because it is the film where the Scorsese of the 1970s is taken apart and rebuilt cheaply. Paramount had cancelled The Last Temptation of Christ at the end of 1983 with the sets built (The Last Temptation collapse, 1983). He needed a film "any film we could get our hands on — and immediately" (sos 97), and this is the one that came through his lawyer's door. It is his first feature without De Niro since Alice, his first with Ballhaus and his first with Howard Shore, and it is the first time since Taxi Driver he tried to make a film in forty days (sos 99).

It also connects backwards. One of its producers, Amy Robinson, was Teresa in Mean Streets, and she saw the same director come back to life: "He was in the vibrant, creative mood he had been in when we did Mean Streets" (Kelly, unpaged). The steam rises from the SoHo streets "as they did in Scorsese's Taxi Driver, suggesting that Hades lurks just below the field of vision" ([[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert|Scorsese by Ebert]], unpaged). And the plot is Hitchcock's innocent man wrongly accused, played for laughs (The Wrong Man taught the camera to be paranoid).

Scenes

After Hours — the diner — a Henry Miller paperback, a woman at the next table, and a camera that jumps over her "as if it were a hawk". Also where the film's debt to a radio monologue starts.
After Hours — the keys — a cab ride in fast motion, a $20 bill out the window, and a set of keys falling toward the camera's own lens.
After Hours — back at work — the statue falls out of the van, the office gates open, and in the credits his desk is empty.

What it demonstrates

Codes

Camerawork is the whole method: every shot drawn in the script margins, about 500 of them, at sixteen set-ups a day (Five set-ups a day became sixteen). Point of view is the film's comic engine. The camera takes the keys' point of view as they fall (After Hours — the keys) and cuts to close-ups of light switches and locks that mean nothing (Close-ups for no reason), so the audience shares Paul's paranoia and learns to distrust its own grammar. Editing is where the comedy was found. Schoonmaker: "Being a comedy, of course, it had to be cut a certain way. We had to take out stuff we both loved in order to get it to work" (Kelly, unpaged). Lighting is Ballhaus's joke on German Expressionism: shadows on stairwells for a film in which, Scorsese says, "nothing of film noir or psychological horror really occurs. It's all in his head" (Kelly, unpaged). Setting is SoHo at night before the money arrived (SoHo before the money, 1984).

Conventions

Structure is one night, one escalating chain. Ebert found a better name than "Kafkaesque": "screwball logic", where what happens to Paul "is like what happens to Buster Keaton: just one damned thing after another" (Ebert, unpaged). Formula is Hitchcock's wrong-man thriller run as a comedy: "a Satanic version of the classic Hitchcock plot formula, The Innocent Man Wrongly Accused" (Ebert, unpaged). Character is a man with no goal bigger than getting uptown. Kelly puts him at the end of a line of Scorsese strivers: "Paul Hackett (After Hours) just wants to get uptown" (Kelly, unpaged).

Contexts

The Last Temptation collapse, 1983 is the Personal context, and Scorsese accepted the reading: Ebert says "he was quite willing to describe it as a reflection of his state of mind after everything went wrong" (Ebert, unpaged). It is also the Commerce story of a director proving he could work cheap. SoHo before the money, 1984 is the neighbourhood as it was, at the point it started to change.

Ideas

Disputes worth keeping

The budget. $3.5 million when Fox Classics was backing it (sos 97). "About $4 million" once Scorsese signed (Kelly, unpaged), and Ballhaus remembers "less than $4 million" (Kelly, unpaged). The final cost was $4.5 million, "including a quarter of my normal salary" (sos 101), after Geffen paid for four extra days to reshoot the ending.
How many shots. Scorsese says his drawings "worked out at about 500 shots" (sos 99). Ballhaus remembers a producer telling Scorsese "they're 600 shots" (msk 125).
Who drops the keys. Kelly's narration says "Marcy must drop her keys to Paul"; Amy Robinson, in the same book, says "Kiki drops the keys", and so does Ebert. It is Kiki's loft. See After Hours — the keys.
How Marcy dies. The filmography says she "has died from an overdose" (sos 227). Kelly says "she kills herself", Ebert "a shocking suicide", Sterritt that she "has killed herself" (smc 100). The film shows the body and leaves the cause to you.
Who found the ending. Scorsese credits Michael Powell and his own father at a screening, then Terry Gilliam and Steven Spielberg (sos 100–sos 101). Griffin Dunne remembers test cards and "Brian De Palma and Steven Spielberg" (Dunne on After Hours (2024)). Boggs says preview audiences chose between two endings (awf 47). See Michael Powell wrote the ending.
Kafka. Every critic reaches for him. Scorsese, told about Kafka by Powell: "I said that I'd never read Kafka and didn't know anything about that" (sos 100).

Where it sits

It won Scorsese Best Director at Cannes in 1986, a prize he did not collect: "I didn't go, among other reasons because of my fear of flying" (sos 122). The editors of Scorsese on Scorsese sum up the rest: "although its commercial success was modest, his career now seemed revived" (sos 104). The Companion calls it "yet another calling card for a rebuilding Scorsese, showing studios he could work quickly and within a budget" (smc 31), and the Oxford history says he "scaled himself down to fit within the industry's needs" (ohwc 764).

The critics split, and the split is fun. Ebert in 1985: "After Hours is a brilliant film, one of the year's best" (Ebert, unpaged), a film that "earns its place on the list with his great films: Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull." Scorsese, in the foreword to Ebert's own book, says that enthusiasm "puzzles me a little bit (his pieces on those films are critical minority reports)". David Cook, in a textbook, uses it as a stick to beat a later film: Bringing Out the Dead "is an unwatchable variant of After Hours" (hnf 682).

On Axis of Action

Nothing yet. The AoA Scorsese season lists After Hours as week 7, upcoming, with the line "One night, one escalating structure — the tightest plot machine he ever built." The three scene notes here are written to be turned into that page: the keys shot is the obvious playback lesson in Point of view, and the ending is the lesson in Structure.

Sources for this film

Scorsese on Scorsese (pp. 94–104) is the core: the collapse of Last Temptation, the script, the shoot and the ending, in Scorsese's words. Kelly has the producers, Ballhaus, Dunne, Arquette and Schoonmaker. Scorsese by Ebert has the 1985 review and a Great Movies reconsideration. In [[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese|the Companion]], David Sterritt reads it as a Christian fable (pp. 100–104) and another chapter reads it as a film about gentrification (pp. 354–356). On the web: Dunne on After Hours (2024), Robinson and Dunne on After Hours (2023) and After Hours oral history outtakes (2023).

Go on, then

scene Alice — the prologue Ninety seconds of counterfeit 1940s Hollywood, built at real 1940s expense, existing to be destroyed by one cut.
scene After Hours — the keys A cab ride in fast motion that eats Paul's only $20, then a set of keys dropped from a loft window with the camera riding them down at his face. The point-of-view shot as a joke, a threat and a stunt that nearly went wrong.
film Mean Streets (1973) Four young men in Little Italy, a debt nobody will pay, and a would-be saint who keeps putting his hand in the fire. Scorsese's first film in his own voice, made in Los Angeles for almost nothing.
scene Mean Streets — Tony's bar Charlie walks into a room lit like hell in slow motion; later Johnny Boy walks in on the downbeat of 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' with a girl on each arm. Two entrances, one room, and the camera's opinion of both.
context SoHo before the money, 1984 After Hours was shot at night in a neighbourhood of artists' lofts that money was about to discover. The film catches the moment, and treats the uptown visitor as the intruder.
scene After Hours — back at work A plaster statue falls out of a burglars' van at dawn, cracks open, and the man inside walks through the gates of his office and sits down at his terminal. Rescue or sentence? The film was shot without an ending, and it shows the seams on purpose.