Thursday, November 1, 2012

Speak to me of love


Who’s That Knocking at My Door 1968 U.S. (90 minutes) written and directed by Martin Scorsese, with Mardik Martin and Richard H. Coll; edited by Thelma Schoonmaker.
Martin Scorsese’s first feature film, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, is like a teaser to the body of his work that followed.
It has Scorsese’s mobile, inquisitive camera eye, his ingenuity for telling a story with pictures, his stylistic use of popular music, and his male Italian-American New York neighborhood characters. It also is a movie about movies, filled with references to and discussions of classic movies, scenes and actors.
The story is a simple boy-meets-girl formula. J.R., a young, working class Sicilian-American like the boys Scorsese grew up with in his neighborhood on Elizabeth Street in Manhattan’s Little Italy, meets The Girl, a bright, attractive, well-educated uptown girl, on the Staten Island Ferry. They have a brief relationship which their vast cultural differences probably doom from the start.
Harvey Keitel stars in his first feature role as The Boy, J.R. The Girl is Zina Bethune, a dancer and successful soap opera actress.
The story focuses most on the boys’ background. Scorsese knows this well, particularly the boys’ Manichean view of woman. The movie opens with images of The Holy Mother, from the ceramic Madonna on the bureau to J.R.’s mother (Catherine Scorsese, the director’s mother) whom the camera watches prepare food for a family meal and feed five children. Yet the boys’ hangout—8th Ward Pleasure Club, Private—is replete with centerfold images of wanton sex goddesses. And the boys’ main topic of conversation is ‘broads’—female objects of their sexual fantasies whom they should never dream, much less dare, to marry.
The holy mother on the one hand—church doctrine makes clear that the divine conception was an entirely unerotic, automatic transaction undertaken to make God a man (as presumably were the boys’ own origins); and on the other, the pleasure-giving whore, with sisters and other off-limits relations sexless in the middle. This view clearly makes ‘dating’ and ‘petting’ fraught subjects.   
Coming out of a movie theater together just having seen Rio Bravo (1959), The Girl comments to J.R. on the character played by Angie Dickinson:
‘I really liked the girl in that picture.’
‘Well let me tell you something. The girl in that picture was a broad!’
‘What do you mean, abroad?’
‘A broad! You know, there are girls, and then there are broads.’
The scene cuts to J.R.s visually interpreted definition of ‘a broad,’ a fantasia of J.R. and four prostitutes (Anne Collette, Tsuai Yu-lan, Saskia Holleman and Marieka) having sex, cut-choreographed to Jim Morrison and the Doors’ The End.
The street scene resumes:
‘You know, a broad isn’t really a virgin, you know what I mean? You play around with them, you don’t marry a broad, you know what I mean?’
‘Come on, you don’t mean that?’
‘Oh I mean it. Sure I mean it.’
These words and attitudes, which bear a catechismal echo of fatherly advice, frame The Girl’s ‘secret,’ later told in shots and stills cut-choreographed to The Dubs’ doo wop Don't Ask Me (To Be Lonely) when revealed at the film’s dénouement.
The matter comes down to a consideration of the enchanting creature who, dressed in fantastic expectations, is just another being as mystified in her own way as any male could be. What makes Scorsese’s telling so striking is that while he is so entirely of the boys and their world, he shows us this girl, mystified in her own way, with Ingmar Bergman-like insight and sensitivity.
Bethune is one of the wonders of this remarkable picture. Scorsese said that Bergman’s films had influenced him as a student. Apart from her Nordic looks, Bethune would be an easy fit in a Bergman movie because she has a lively, intelligent, expressive face that also would have made her ideal in silent movies. It is easy to imagine falling in love with her. In this work, Scorsese gets great work out of her: he watches her very closely and his camera loves her.
The film, which began as Scorsese’s thesis, can feel like a patchwork because the finished work is a combination of at least four distinct shoots between 1964 and 1968. The soundtrack is the first clue: it ranges from early 1960s bubblegum doo wop and rhythm-and-blues to The Doors’ spooky The End, first released in 1967. The final title, which changed several times during the film’s long gestation period, derives from the song Who's That Knocking? by the New York-area rockabilly band The Genies. Another tipoff is that Keitel changes from the kid–looking character (aged 25) he appears to be in some scenes to the more knowing adult male (aged 29) in others. This serendipitous tic lends mystique to his character.
The film has an interesting backstory.
Scorsese’s first shoot was the party scene edited to Ray Barretto’s 1963 hit Latin song El Watusi. The highly stylized four-minute scene begins as a slow pan from left to right and turns into a slow motion dance, in which about a dozen young men in sharp suits horse around with pistols at a drinking party in an apartment. It looks and feels as though it were a test run for Goodfellas (1990). Scorsese is among the revelers.
The following February or March (1965), Scorsese shot his main boy-meets-girl story with J.R. and his friends Joey (Lennard Kuras) and Sally ‘Gaga’ (Michael Scala) but no girl. At this stage, The Girl, whom J.R.’s friends never meet, is an unseen presence, the reason for J.R.’s distracted attitude as the trio kill time horsing around in the ‘hood and take a side trip to rural Copake, New York, two hours north of the city in the Berkshires.
About two years later, Scorsese cast Bethune as The Girl, shot her scenes with Keitel, and edited these scenes into the existing work. This version exhibited at the Chicago film festival in November 1967 as I Call First.
Distributor Joseph Brenner subsequently bought the film on the condition that Scorsese add a ‘nudie scene’ to increase the film’s marketability. Scorsese was in Europe in the spring of 1968; he brought Keitel to Amsterdam where they shot the J.R. fantasy sequence, which out-[Jean-Luc] Godards Godard—as most of the rest of the film does anyway. It opened that fall in New York as Who’s That Knocking At My Door.
It is hard not to think this lovely-made, free flowing scene influenced the scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now! (1980) in which Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard has a drunken episode in a Saigon hotel room.
There is a lot more to discover, appreciate and enjoy in this movie. It is far from perfect, but it does many good things amazingly well and intimates the great things that followed it.

Additional music credits:
Jenny Take a Ride, covered by Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels (opening scene)
I've Had It, The Bell Notes
Shotgun, Jr. Walker and the All Stars
Ain't That Just Like Me? The Searchers
The Plea, The Chantels

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