After Hours in Nighttown

Circa 1988, when I came to work at Roger Corman’s Concorde-New Horizons Pictures, a strange new script crossed my desk. Called Daddy’s Boys, it was an outrageous dark comedy about a family of Depression-era bank robbers. If it read like something that had been cranked out in a hurry, this was because it had. It seems that Roger, looking at the rather effective period sets that had been built for Big Bad Mama II, became nostalgic for those early days when he’d shoot an outlandish movie (like Little Shop of Horrors) over a weekend, on sets left over from someone else’s project. My soon-to-be buddy, Daryl Haney, wrote the weird and wacky screenplay, while also playing the film’s hillbilly lead.. And its director, making his very first feature, was Joseph Minion.

 I doubt it was accidental that Roger knew Joe Minion’s work, because Joe had written the screenplay for one of Martin Scorsese’s most unique small films, 1985’s After Hours. Scorsese, of course, was one of Roger’s outstanding protégés, having made Boxcar Bertha for Corman’s New World Pictures in 1972. But after such major artistic and commercial successes as Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980), Scorsese had hit the skids. His 1982 The King of Comedy was not well received, and a major studio had backed out of funding his passion project, based on Nikos Kazantzakis’ controversial novel, The Last Temptation of Christ. At a creative impasse, Scorsese decided to take a chance on Minion’s eccentric little script, teaming with Griffin Dunne, who also played the hapless lead.

 After Hours is not the obvious Scorsese film: no gangsters, no major production values. It’s a simple but riveting story, set on the streets and in the seedy byways of Lower Manhattan, over the course of one very long evening. Dunne plays Paul, an uptown Manhattan office worker, now heading down to artsy, scruffy SoHo at the invitation of a quirky young blonde (Rosanna Arquette) who appreciates his taste in Henry Miller novels. He finds her in an artist’s loft, where her mostly undraped roommate (Linda Fiorentino) proves challenging company. I won’t go into too many details: suffice it to say that Paul is thwarted at every turn: his last $20 bill flies out the window of a cab; a new acquaintance abruptly commits suicide; he’s drenched by a sudden rainstorm; every woman he meets quickly turns against him, to the point where he’s racing through back alleys because someone suspects he’s the burglar who’s been preying on the neighborhood. All he wants is to go back home, but somehow that doesn’t seem to be in the cards.  

 After Hours presents am increasingly phantasmagoric view of the world as the night plays out south of Houston Street. (One detail I’ll long remember: Paul fleeing through the mean streets of Lower Manhattan, chased by a Mister Softee ice-cream truck driven by none other than the late Catherine O’Hara. And then there are those strange moments involving hippie comics Cheech & Chong, as well as the papier-mâché bagel-and-lox paperweights that keep showing up when least expected.) Film scholars have some fascinating things to say about Scorsese’s borrowing of stylistic elements from surrealists like Hitchcock and Kafka, I’d add that there’s something here reminiscent of the “Circe” section of James Joyce’s greatest novel, the part that became an unlikely 1958 Broadway hit titled Ulysses in Nighttown.    

 Which hardly means this film is for intellectuals only. It should appeal to anyone who looks for a way out of a humdrum existence but finds the adventure ultimately too much to bear.  I’ve been there; have YOU?