The Grim Cellar

1985, US, Directed by Martin Scorsese

Colour, Running Time: 96 minutes

DVD, Region 1, Warner, Video: Anamorphic 1.78:1, Audio: Mono

Simply put, After Hours focuses on one man’s night of pure bad luck. The fantastic Griffin Dunne (American Werewolf…) plays New Yorker Paul Hackett, someone who leads the most ordinary, mundane life imaginable. One night after work he’s wasting some time in a café reading a book when one sultry Marcy Franklin (Rosanna Arquette in her peak) gets chatting to him and ends up giving him a number where she can effectively be contacted (through a friend who sells paperweights). Later on (after eleven in fact) he decides to give her a ring and ends up catching a taxi downtown to Soho where she and her friend are. What he finds is a disturbed person with layers of complexity beneath an attractive exterior, too much to deal with for a guy who’s essentially interested in a quick fling. So he makes a rapid exit hoping to find his way home despite losing his taxi money on the way over. Thus begins a string of one mishap after another with the totally strange inhabitants of the darker side of Manhattan, a place seemingly populated by lonely characters who have become wrapped up in the idiosyncrasies of there own little microcosms without actually realising what they’ve become. His situation escalates to a point where there’s a vigilante mob out for his blood based on flimsy evidence that the stranger is guilty of a string of robberies in the area. The night brings about a wake-up call to a man whose life appeared, up until that point, to be eventless in the extreme.

The producer team, which included Griffin Dunne himself alongside Amy Robinson, were actually in talks with Tim Burton to shoot After Hours (then a script called Lies by newcomer Joseph Minion) when it was announced that the filming of Last Temptation of Christ had fallen apart. A distraught Scorsese, who had already seen the script prior to Burton’s involvement but was already wrapped up with Last Temptation… at the time, showed great interest in taking on a much smaller project and Burton obligingly stepped aside. Whilst I admire some of Burton’s very visual work I believe this was the best thing for the film because, having a great understanding of film mechanics, Scorsese was able to bring a clinical accuracy to the shooting of the movie, capturing brief but meaningful reactions in addition to facilitating perfect execution of lines that help to characterise in beautifully subtle manner the inhabitants of the weird dimension that Hackett finds himself trapped within. Both the editing and acting on the part of most of the participants exhibit an intuitive sense of timing, ensuring that the comic elements are funny even over repeat viewings. Dunne’s performance in particular is so acutely excellent it surely must be his career best. Paul Hackett is a man that most people should be able to identify with and Dunne warms you to the character with skill, his increasingly frantic reactions being realistic whilst retaining an awareness of comedy that keeps the material purely in the entertainment category without becoming too dramatic or dark. Returning along with much of the crew from Baby It’s You, Rosanna Arquette captures the unpredictable nuances of her screwed up character; why she’s screwed up we’re not entirely sure: she at one point suggests that she was raped but then tells Hackett that it was actually her boyfriend and she slept through much of it anyway, then there’s the ambiguous burns issue, plus her marriage that apparently only lasted three days (to a man who was obsessed with Wizard of Oz). All of these points help to build up a mystery feeding the paranoia that Hackett is swept up in. There are threads of plot that initially seem to have little relevance but ultimately wind up influencing the outcome of events significantly, the most important being the spate of burglaries that Hackett is unconcerned with but later blamed for thanks to him being in the wrong place at the wrong time and meeting the wrong people. These plot strands are entangled together with great imagination and much of the credit for that must go to Joseph Minion, who has since hardly been prolific unfortunately. Though it may partly have been the result of the recognition that might arise from having worked with Martin Scorsese, German Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus had his American career kick-started by his work on this film, later going on work on many of his director’s subsequent films as well as more commercial fare such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Air Force One, Outbreak, etc. The lighting on After Hours is notable for the fact that the team shot at night to authenticate the atmosphere, these conditions bringing about the freedom that would enable Ballhaus to much more so control what was actually being captured to film. These nocturnal working hours also of course aided the actors in realising their characters’ behavioural patterns. Finally, Howard Shore proved even at this early stage that he’s one of the best composers working in Hollywood with a score that perfectly complements the lonely Hopper-esque world that Hackett saunters (and sometimes runs) through, speaking of which, some of the settings on offer here really did remind me of the barren worlds that Edward Hopper painted - obviously the most notable being the empty café that Hackett finds himself in on several occasions, ala Nighthawks. The team’s chosen locations - the darker, quieter side streets of New York - really embellish the increasingly frightening atmosphere. For me After Hours is the ultimate black comedy and remains one of the few viewing experiences to induce similar delight to what I might have experienced ten or fifteen years ago watching a favourite movie.

Once available as part of a boxed set in the UK or by itself in the US, I’m real glad Warner put this out - the image looks amazing (though at 1.78:1 not quite correctly framed) while the audio reflects the fact that it was recorded and mixed in the mid-eighties (and on a small budget). We get an 18 minute retrospective featurette mostly featuring Griffin Dunne and Amy Robinson plus a few snippets from Scorsese himself, it’s nevertheless quite informative. There are 8 minutes of deleted scenes: generally it’s understandable why these would have been removed but there are one or two smiles to be had even here. The first rough cut ran excessively long at 2 hours 40 minutes so there’s probably a lot more footage lying around somewhere; not referring to a desire to see an ‘extended cut’ in any way - the film’s just about perfect as it is - but they’d make nice extras some day. Featuring a lot more input from the director there is also a commentary that only covers around 78 minutes of the film and is oddly included as a separate entity rather than with the main feature itself. Still, it’s a welcome addition and again very informative. Treasure something like After Hours for it’s not often we see something this simultaneously smart and funny.