scene ·After Hours (1985)

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.

structure
chronology
camerawork
character
themes
close-reading
scorsese
ending
structure
powell

Observation

Paul has been sealed inside a papier-mâché figure to hide him from the mob. Two burglars take him for a sculpture and load him into their van. They drive uptown. At dawn the back door of the van flies open and the figure tumbles out onto the street. It cracks. Paul climbs out, covered in plaster dust, and looks up at the iron gates of the building where he works. He walks in, sits down at his desk, and the working day starts around him.

Over the end credits the camera moves around the office as the staff arrive. When it passes his desk again, it is empty.

What the sources say it is

Sterritt's account in the Companion catches both the providence and the joke:

When he finally makes it back to his office in the last scene, providentially deposited by the thieves' van exactly where he is ordained to be, he is greeted by name by the computer network that serves as the godlike spirit of the place.

— smc 101

And the last shot: the credits unspool "over a slow panning shot around the office as others arrive and take their places at their workspaces as Paul has done – but when the camera returns to Paul's appointed desk, he is nowhere to be seen" (smc 101). Ebert noticed the same thing: "close examination of the very final credit footage shows that he has disappeared from his desk" (Scorsese by Ebert, unpaged).

How it got there

This ending is the fourth one the film had, and it was shot last. Scorsese signed "on the understanding that we would come up with a good ending" (sos 100).

Minion's script: "Paul going out to buy an ice cream for June down in the basement, and that was it" (sos 100).
The womb: June grows, Paul disappears inside her, and he is born again on a New York street. David Geffen, who was paying, stopped it ([[Paul was nearly born on the West Side Highway]]).
The first cut: Paul still in the statue, driven off by the burglars. Scorsese's father and Michael Powell were angry. "Michael said, 'That's outrageous, you can't do it, we want to know what happens to him'" (sos 100).
This one: Powell's idea, reshot over "the extra four days" that Geffen paid for (sos 101). See Michael Powell wrote the ending.

Connotation code by code

Structure

The ending makes the film a circle: it opens at the terminal and closes there. That is what Powell saw. Griffin Dunne: "he just thought of the most simple, elegant, satisfying ending that was right in front of us all, you know, the circularity. Back at work, it's perfect" (Dunne on After Hours (2024)). A circle can mean two opposite things, and the next heading is the argument.

Themes: saved or damned?

Scorsese says saved. "That's why in After Hours it was best not to end with Paul stuck in the truck; the wonderful thing is that he survives" (sos 111). He puts it in the terms of his own life at the time:

I do think the endings of After Hours and The Color of Money maybe have a little more hope in them than my earlier pictures. Once you make a decision at a certain point in your life that you're going to live, when you realize you've got to go on, then that glimmer of hope will show in your work.

— Scorsese on Scorsese, sos 111

Kelly's version is the same, in one word of Scorsese's: "'We need a resurrection,' Scorsese said" (Kelly, unpaged). The plaster breaks like a tomb and the man inside walks out at dawn.

Sterritt sees the other side. Back at the terminal, "Pitched back into the tedium of processing other people's words – the incessant monotony that drove him to his hopeless, fruitless quest for adventure and romance – he seems less like a redeemed soul than a damned one" (smc 103). The empty desk in the credits is the film refusing to settle it.

Chronology

The night is continuous and the ending is a cut to morning. Everything in the film has been "possible — in that order, highly improbable — but all possible", Scorsese says, "and I directed each one realistically so the bottom line was always that it could happen" (sos 100). That is why the womb ending had to go: it was the one impossible event, and Sterritt agrees it "does not precisely comport with the story preceding it, which presents no impossible events alongside its many improbable ones" (smc 101). The van door opening at exactly the right gate is improbable. It is not impossible. The film stays inside its rules by a hair.

Character

Paul does not choose any of this. Kelly: "Only when he gives up trying to impose reason on irrationality can he be saved" (Kelly, unpaged). He is carried home as an object, which is the logical end for a man who has spent the night being handled by everyone he met.

Audience

Boggs uses this film in The Art of Watching Films as the textbook case of an ending changed for an audience. His account is that the first version, with Paul "carted away toward an unknown, but surely ugly future", tested badly, and that "audiences expressed a clear preference for the happier ending" (awf 47). Dunne, the star and co-producer, gave him the principle: "If the last five minutes are disturbing, it has an overriding effect on the first ninety" (awf 47). Scorsese's own account never mentions a preview; his is a story about friends. Both can be true.

Compare

Taxi Driver — the shoot-out — another Scorsese ending that looks like a rescue and may be a sentence, and another one the people who made it cannot agree on (Schrader and Scorsese disagree about the ending).
Nobody agrees whether Johnny Boy dies — Mean Streets ends in a car in the dark with its fate unsettled. After Hours ends in daylight with its meaning unsettled.
After Hours — the diner — the other end of the circle.

Writing leads

Freeze the credits on the empty desk. Is it a mistake, a joke, or the film's last word? Ebert and Sterritt both noticed it; neither calls it an accident.
Put Scorsese's "glimmer of hope" next to Sterritt's "damned one" and decide which the last shot supports. Then decide whether it matters that the ending was chosen by committee.

Go on, then

scene After Hours — the diner A man alone with a Henry Miller paperback, a woman at the next table who knows the book, and a camera that pounces. Ten minutes that set up the whole night, and borrowed more than anyone admitted at the time.
idea Paul was nearly born on the West Side Highway One planned ending had Paul climb inside June to hide from the mob and be born again, naked, on a Manhattan street. David Geffen, who was paying, asked if they had lost their minds.
film 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.
idea Michael Powell wrote the ending The director of The Red Shoes, by then married to Scorsese's editor, saw a cut of After Hours with Scorsese's father, hated the ending, and suggested the one in the film. He also mentioned Kafka, whom Scorsese had never read.
idea Nobody agrees whether Johnny Boy dies A gunman played by Scorsese empties a pistol into the car. Critics have him killing Johnny Boy, sparing him, or leaving it open. The film doesn't say.
idea Killing the protagonist at minute 47 Psycho spends its first act building a protagonist by the book, then murders her at the mid-point of act two.