Martin Scorsese opened up the 1980s with a movie plenty of people called the best of the decade when 1990 rolled around – just as he opened up a new decade with Goodfellas, yet another best-of candidate that would endure past moderate box office and some awards attention. Even Scorsese’s first film of the 2000s, Gangs of New York, while not nearly so universally acclaimed, set the tone for his 2000s as a big-budget epic starring Leonardo DiCaprio, who would become his new-millennium De Niro. But jumping back to those turbulent ’80s: It’s possible that the most genuinely influential Scorsese picture of the decade wasn’t Raging Bull, or his decade-closing Last Temptation of Christ, or his popular hit The Color of Money. No, the Scorsese movie from that era that may actually be imitated most readily these days is After Hours, his 1985 palate-cleansing comedy that just turned 40 years old.
Looking at After Hours 40 years on, it sticks out from Scorsese’s filmography, and not just because it’s pitched as a comedy. Almost every Scorsese picture of the past half-century, save his Dalai Lama project Kundun, has at least one pretty major star; there’s De Niro and DiCaprio, of course, who collectively appear in over half of his fiction features, but also Paul Newman, Tom Cruise, Daniel Day-Lewis, Nicolas Cage, Willem Dafoe, Liam Neeson, Michelle Pfeiffer… even Hugo has Sacha Baron Cohen. The familiar faces of After Hours are a little less marquee-ready – well-known, for sure, but not generational movie stars. The lead character, an office worker lost in darkest SoHo, encounters weirdos played by Teri Garr, Linda Fiorentino, Rosanna Arquette, Bronson Pinchot, Catherine O’Hara, and Cheech & Chong.
At the center of it all is Griffin Dunne, who then might have been best-known for An American Werewolf in London and now is probably best-known for, well, After Hours. He plays Paul Hackett, a computer-desk drone working in Manhattan, lured into SoHo for a date with Marcy (Arquette); led astray by downtown horniness, in other words. Paul loses his money, can’t get a cab, goes off on side quests in search of subway fare, narrowly eludes an unwanted haircut, gets mistaken for a burglar, and so on. It’s a different sort of New York story for Scorsese, who rather than extracting dark comedy from dire situations, as in so many of his crime movies, lets an undercurrent of menace flow beneath through superficially lighter, screwier mishaps.
Most immediately, After Hours belongs with other playful expressions of yuppie-meets-counterculture anxiety like Something Wild, from the following year, or Into the Night, wherein John Landis bent space and time to make a poor man’s After Hours six months before After Hours actually came out. These movies the noir convention of a normal guy getting drawn into a shadowy world of intrigue, also common in Hitchcock thrillers. After Hours specifically turns that into a more Kafkaesque scenario; there’s no big scheme or noir plot for Paul to unravel, or even to chew him up. It’s just cyclical nightmare logic everywhere he turns, a world too comically unruly to offer him typical narrative structure. This is a New York that cannot be outwitted because it’s acting on pure, not-quite-evil instincts.
Plenty of comedies before and after have used the one-crazy-night structure, but Scorsese helped to redefine it. Adventures in Babysitting and its sorta-remake The Sitter are basically After Hours with kids, and therefore less dangerous. Game Night is After Hours as a group activity; again, less danger, but similar normies-go-to-the-underbelly idea. Newer late-night pictures like Under the Silver Lake and Good Time are more explicitly crime-related – they don’t have Scorsese’s boldness to set their protagonists so completely adrift – while clearly drawing influence from how After Hours plays this stuff for laughs. And though Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love is ultimately more sincere and doesn’t share the overnight structure, it’s similarly a comedy of genuine tension – a sorta-farce where the outlandish turns of events feel like they could turn on a dime into tragedy (or at least ghoulishly darker comedy).
The recent Caught Stealing pays direct homage to After Hours by casting Dunne in a supporting role; he plays a grungy Lower East Side bar owner named Paul, as if the office drone finally shook off his corporate drudgery and moved downtown for good. (This Paul is technically too old in the movie’s 1998 to be the same guy, but it’s still a fun thought experiment, and of course Caught Stealing shares some of the Scorsese film’s New York absurdities, albeit often in a less comic register.) Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest has a dash of After Hours, too, though in contemporary Manhattan the direction is reversed: the rich mogul played by Denzel Washington goes from his Brooklyn penthouse to way up in the Bronx to mix it up with unknown quantities of New Yorkers.
The lack of certain Scorsese trademarks might make it seem easier to place After Hours alongside those other movies than his own work, especially considering that it was followed by the decidedly non-New York-set Color of Money and Last Temptation of Christ. But After Hours flows well into the Nicolas Cage drama Bringing Out the Dead, set in early-’90s Hell’s Kitchen, on overnight paramedic shifts; they both depict a version of Manhattan that’s harder to locate these days; they’re two different tones of NYC purgatory that understand the city better than so many local-news caricatures. Raging Bull and Goodfellas still stand as two of Scorsese’s, and Hollywood’s, best ever, but as his career has expanded in time and scope, seeming detours like After Hours somehow seem more important, not less. Appropriate for its downtown setting, After Hours may be the closest Scorsese ever came to punk rock.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.