Who’s That Knocking At My Door. 1967. The first Scorsese-directed full length movie.
I basically have two trains of thought about this movie. There comes a shift at around the middle in which the main character played by Harvey Keitel allows his boyish naivete to fester into cruelty, as his desire to be “good” and have a “good girl” to marry bring out the worst in him. I was worried about how the film would handle this but it did a powerful job of showing the horror that Keitel’s character was denying and belittling. It made me hate him, and also made me feel guilty and implicated because I had been so ready to put myself in his shoes.
Up until the turning point I was totally captivated by the dialogue and the sex scenes, which surprised me because I don’t think of Scorsese as a particularly “sexual” director. Mainly they seemed very honest and lived-in that raw way that you sometimes get with first movies/books/etc. It made me wonder if Scorsese had done what I find myself doing sometimes, which is trying to remember every detail of a conversation or a person’s face or a night of sex because it feels so new and alive you want to create something out of it right away. The movie’s not as polished as his later work but it feels honest and alive, like a polaroid of a moment just passed.
Visually there were a lot of elements that are present in later Scorsese movies- the use of slow motion, the constantly and deliberately moving camera, the way he illustrates a scene with focus on simple details and dialogue-free montage. Especially the use of 60’s pop music to go against the tone of a scene and thus make it stronger and stranger. But there’s a lot of “first movie” experimentation here too. The simple stark Western stills in place of footage during a scene with gunshots. A sudden interruption of a scene to fall into a dreamlike sexual interlude, intercut with harsh closeups of Keitel’s face and eyes and body.
The presentation of past sex like a strange dream, the preoccupation with warped ideas about religion and violent sexuality, and the euphemistic use of seemingly unrelated footage was pretty strongly reminiscent of Midnight Cowboy, which came out two years after this film. I’m sure Schlesinger was aware of Scorsese and vice-versa. I wonder if those elements are also just products of/reactions to the moods and trends of the late sixties.
The black and white was striking and you could see he was trying to do a lot with it. The best use of it was the way wide, smokey shots full of shades of gray would abruptly disappear in favor of Keitel in a stark white room, the sudden contrast making him look impossibly dark, strong and bright.
These strange dreamlike cutaways, which served to evade and underline violence and sexuality, made it all the more harsh and jarring when it was time for the narrative to focus on violent sexuality directly. But while those scenes are strong and dramatic, to me the most memorable parts are the simple scenes of dialogue with Keitel and his friends or with his girlfriend, and it feels like everyone just has their ear open to the buzz of conversation and the details of life going on around them and are trying to capture it all on film as best they can.
Overall it felt vital, newborn, brash and clumsy, the way a first movie should feel.
Next: Boxcar Bertha
