Who’s That Knocking At My Door?

Year: 1967

Grade: B-

Country: USA

Director: Scorsese

Review

scorsese has five (so far as i’ve seen) certifiable masterpieces – taxi driver, mean streets, raging bull, casino and goodfellas. this film i would consider above gangs of new york and bringing out the dead, but below the aforementioned fab five. it was his first feature film and you can see him experimenting all over the place. this is both the strong suit of the picture and its ultimate downfall. he experiments with editing – both in terms of mixing up time to enhance part of the current action (decline of the american empire does the same thing) and to be stylistic…a few times he edits a sequence in a way that replays one part of the sequence a few times at different speeds or from different angles – much in the way an action director might do during a critical action sequence. he toys with music quite a bit – paving the way for his best usage of music in casino…sometimes he’ll cut out all incidental noise and leave just the music and the images and sometimes he’ll use music in a more typical montage sequence. the dialogue in the picture is naturalistic as always, but the broader strokes of the screenplay definitely could have used some refining. there’s a lot going on in the film and i’m reviewing a day after i’ve seen it so it’s hard to recall everything, but suffice it to say that it’s a decent, though flawed, film. really it’s just scorsese feeling in the dark, trying to find his style. unlike 99% of upstart filmmakers though, scorsese takes his experiments in all sorts of different directions and experiments recklessly rather than in a reserved, uninteresting way. as a result he was able to become a genuinely unique filmmaker later in his career. edit 9-22/06: go ahead and add aviator to his list of masterpieces.