In the early 1980s, Martin Scorsese was struggling in Hollywood. His media satire “The King Of Comedy” with Robert De Niro in a role as a stalker was a failure with critics and audiences – although the comedy about the television stations’ greed for tragic stories was miles ahead of its time. And his favorite project “The Last Temptation of Jesus Christ” about the alleged (love) life of the Son of God was not financed. Scorsese, the last rebellious representative of the New Hollywood of the 1970s, was suddenly a director without influence.
The actor Griffin Dunne, on the other hand, not a real star but with his own production company behind him, wanted to have a script made into a film with him in the lead role. This became “After Hours”: The story of a New York yuppie who ends up stranded in SoHo at night after a date with a beautiful stranger and finds himself in a world somewhere between a punk club, a weirdo. Artists and aggressive store clerks have to fear for his life.
No sex, no sleep, just paranoia
When dream director Tim Burton heard that Scorsese was also interested in the material, he is said to have immediately declined. After all, Scorsese is New York, just as Woody Allen is New York: They delivered the most exciting images of their city; Times Square and the 59th Street Bridge appeared in a new light. Griffin Dunne and Scorsese quickly agreed on their film. Before filming, the director is said to have asked his actor to abstain from sex and sleep so that he would feel paranoid.
Without any money – his only $20 bill blew out of the taxi window – the programmer Paul (Dunne) ends up in Marcy’s (Rosanna Arquette) apartment and makes the acquaintance of the sculptor Kiki (Linda Fiorentino). Paul tries to make an impression about their shared interest in the works of the writer Henry Miller, but it quickly becomes clear that he is lost in Lower Manhattan after midnight. The office stallion will have to complete a series of stages by early morning: a mob chases him through SoHo; Marcy commits suicide; he has to flee from a probably German leather fetishist named Horst; makes it to a punk club completely indisposed; is plastered like a sculpture and threatens to suffocate in it. At the end of the film, which runs like clockwork, Paul makes it back to where it all began: at the office desk. The strange night world spat him out again; the past few hours were like a bad but also wild dream.
Martin Scorsese was awarded the Palme d’Or as best director at Cannes in 1986 for “The Time After Midnight,” and the low box office of ten million dollars was at least twice as high as the production costs – so, strictly speaking, the work was a success. Nevertheless, the film is one of Scorsese’s lesser-known films. When you think of him, you think of “Taxi Driver,” “GoodFellas” and “Wilder Taurus,” but the 1980s usually don’t come to mind at all. Scorsese’s works are constantly being re-released, with extensive bonus material, but “The Time After Midnight” is available as a plain single DVD, without sound or image editing.
In any case, “The Time After Midnight” didn’t succeed as a comedy. The slapstick interludes seem placid, cake-in-the-face humor, Griffin Dunne is not a likeable character, and the individual episodes with their characters are difficult to combine into a whole. The funniest scene is when Dunne delivers a parody of those casual subway fare evaders from thousands of US films who don’t want to buy a ticket. He also simply jumps over the turnstile – and makes a point charge in front of the cop who is already lurking.
Manhattan as a theater of war
But Scorsese does a great job of showing a Manhattan that no longer exists, as he did in “The King Of Comedy” two years earlier and in “Taxi Driver” in 1976. Times Square, for example, could be a nervously quiet place by day and dangerous by night. Crime rates in New York have never been higher than in the 1980s; In the “King Of Comedy” the rows of public telephone booths in Times Square, with people screaming into the receivers, are reminiscent of a theater of war. Where Disney now resides, in 1983 you ran into punks (portrayed by the Clash musicians in the film).
Despite the dangers that threaten the programmer Paul, “The Time After Midnight” is almost considerate of its townspeople. Each of the characters portrayed here comes from everyday life, the brutal taxi driver doesn’t have it easy, or this subway ticket seller who insists on every cent, and probably the mysterious exile Horst. The climax of the film takes place in the “Berlin” club after Paul’s escape. Anyone who sees the Goth scene gathered there, described as authentic by the film’s fans, immediately wants to go to this secret place, if only to play mice. “Mohawk this guy!” is one of the harshest threats to Paul – give the desk clerk a haircut! A fashionable hairstyle! This is also about a scene that takes itself too seriously. The “Berlin” club actually existed, not visible from the street, entry only via password.
Scorsese also knew where he belonged in “The Time After Midnight.” The director traditionally incorporates himself into his own films as a cameo actor; in “Taxi Driver” he was the murderous passenger; in “Casino” he counted the money in the back room – and here he lit up, in the truest sense of the word, as the boss the lighting system in his club.
In 1985, some loud city portraits were released in the cinema. In addition to “The Time After Midnight”, the US East Coast was brought into the spotlight by Susan Seidelman’s “Susan… Desperately Wanted”. Director Seidelman attracted attention in 1982 with her subculture portrait “Smithereens”. The punk singer Richard Hell plays in it and in “Susan…”, as well as Rosanna Arquette in “The Time After Midnight” – and of course Madonna in her first film role. She was in good hands here, Madonna took her first steps as a musician on the drums in the Big Apple at the end of the seventies. Seidelman would later move into the television business, including directing the recordings of “Sex and the City”. That was a different New York, of course, light years away from that of the punk club “Berlin”… but also one in which the city glowed magically again.
The year of city portraits
The West Coast, Los Angeles, was also immortalized this year, in both thriller and comedy. In William Friedkin’s brutal “Living and Dying in LA,” the police system is, in the best Ellroy tradition, a hotbed of corruption. The chase sequences in John Landis’s “Headfirst into the Night,” on the other hand, humorously exploit all the prejudices that some Californians have against the hundreds of thousands of Iranians who fled to Los Angeles after the fall of the Shah. Today there would be an outcry at this characterization: Persians as nouveau riche criminals who only take a break from contract killing when they see a bowl of pistachios.
“Time After Midnight” actor Griffin Dunne steadily grew smaller after the film, but director Martin Scorsese’s career continued – even if he didn’t receive the directing Oscar for “The Departed” until 21 years later. In any case, he would return to New York very soon: “GoodFellas” became a milestone in 1990, this time his film opened in Brooklyn.