Martin Scorsese was at a crossroads in 1985. The King of Comedy had tanked at the box office, and Paramount had recently pulled the plug on his passion project, The Last Temptation of Christ, weeks before production was set to begin. So when the script for After Hours came across his desk via actor-producer Griffin Dunne and producer Amy Robinson, who had appeared in Mean Streets, Scorsese jumped at the chance to helm a small-scale, low-budget black comedy set in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood.
After Hours comes full circle by opening and closing at the workplace of bored data entry drone Paul Hackett (Dunne). In between, Paul’s nightmarish nightlong odyssey sees him repeatedly returning to the same handful of locations and oddball individuals, spiraling ever deeper into an infernal realm of anxiety, paranoia, and free-floating guilt. In this regard, the film shares themes and motifs with other titles in the “yuppie nightmare” subgenre like John Landis’s Into the Night and Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild. These films tend to fold elements of the screwball farce and the film noir into their idiosyncratic mixes.
While reading a well-thumbed copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer at a diner, Paul meets Marcy (Rosanna Arquette), who immediately impresses him by quoting the book’s opening lines from memory. “‘This is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of art,’” she says. This disclaimer of sorts is doubly ironic because not only do subsequent events come to resemble one protracted insult against Paul’s sense of self, but also because so much of After Hours deals, in one way or another, with works of art. For one, Marcy initiates Paul’s journey to the end of the urban night under the pretext of purchasing a sculpted bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweight.
Given the film’s attention to color-coded attire, Marcy’s white ensemble points to her innate guilelessness. This sets her apart from her roommate, sculptor Kiki Bridges (Linda Fiorentino), who’s easy to peg as a bad girl due to her spiky black hair and black bra. It’s just the sort of dichotomous dynamic that fuels classic film noirs like Out of the Past (and becomes self-aware in neo-noirs like David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive). This is the first, almost subliminal, instance in the film of Scorsese toying around with familiar tropes. In addition to noir and farce, After Hours also embraces horror, a genre Scorsese would not return to until Shutter Island.
Paul notices that Kiki’s latest sculpture closely resembles a 3D rendering of Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting The Scream, an iconic representation of overpowering anxiety. This artwork provides one of the film’s through lines: Paul later thinks that it’s been stolen by itinerant burglars Neil and Pepe (Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong), though it’s the one thing in all of After Hours that Neil says he’s paid for. In the film’s absurdist finale, Paul comes to inhabit a sculpture a lot like Kiki’s, becoming the embodiment of apprehension and terror in the process. The artwork is then stolen by the duo, with Neil declaring, “Art is forever.” Or at least until the sculpture falls out the back of their van, smashing open in front of Paul’s workplace.
Themes of art and unease are further amplified by the first scene at the Club Berlin, where Paul seeks to meet up with Kiki and her dominatrix boyfriend, Horst (Will Patton). But the doorman (Clarence Felder) bars his way with cross-armed refusal. After several frustrating demurs, the doorman finally accepts Paul’s bribe, only to say, “I’ll take your money ’cause I don’t want you to feel you left anything untried.” This scene replicates the “Before the Law” parable told near the end of Kafka’s The Trial, which also concerns a man who’s been charged with a crime whose nature he can never fathom. A sense of the Kafkaesque definitely pervades After Hours.
When it comes to the burglaries plaguing SoHo, Paul is clearly an innocent man. He becomes the target of suspicion owing to a series of chance encounters with a seemingly friendly bartender (John Heard), a disgruntled waitress (Teri Garr) whose sketch of him proves useful as a wanted poster, and, most memorably, a literal whistle-blower (Catherine O’Hara) whose Mister Softee truck becomes an ironic vehicle for Paul’s pursuit. The film’s saga of the wrong man points back to many an Alfred Hitchcock picture, several of which Scorsese quotes visually (most notably a shot straight out of Marnie). But here, as with many of the other cultural references peppering the film, After Hours keeps its tongue firmly in cheek.
Fleeing pursuit by an angry flashlight-bearing mob (shades of Frankenstein), Paul experiences an emotional meltdown, throwing himself on his knees and crying to the heavens: “What do you want from me? What have I done? I’m just a word processor, for Christ sake!” Paul has been led by circumstance to suspect that he’s done something wrong somewhere on his life journey. He even questions whether he’s a man or merely a machine. It’s a moment of pure existential crisis, the sort chronicled by Kafka and illustrated by The Scream. Once again, though, Scorsese stages the moment equally for laughs, using a crane shot to achieve a God’s-eye view, parodying the sort of overwrought moment you’ve seen in countless other films.
Joseph Minion’s literate script encourages us to see After Hours through a symbolic and mythical lens. The taxi driver (Larry Block) who takes Paul downtown wears a cap emblazoned “Captain,” making him a metaphorical Charon ferrying Paul across Stygian depths. Throughout the film’s middle section, Paul caroms off characters like he’s being tossed between Scylla and Charybdis. It’s only after Paul finally bottoms out, literally and figuratively, that he gets to start all over again. To paraphrase Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus: “One must imagine Paul happy.” Enlivened by propulsive visuals, razor-sharp editing, and luminous cinematography, After Hours treats its often unsettling existentialist material with sardonic élan.
Image/Sound
Available on both UHD and standard Blu-ray, Criterion’s 4K restoration looks spectacular. Both transfers improve significantly over the 2004 DVD when it comes to black levels (crucial to a film that was shot at night), which are now properly nuanced and completely uncrushed, as well as color saturation, where the HDR allows for a more dynamic representation of hues. The sole audio option is an LPCM mono mix that’s perfectly sturdy, cleanly putting across the dialogue, and keeping Howard Shore’s compellingly off-kilter score front and center.
Extras
The anecdote-heavy commentary track from 2004 stitches together contributions from director Martin Scorsese, actor Griffin Dunne, producer Amy Robinson, cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, and editor Thelma Schoonmaker, with a coda featuring Robinson and Dunne that was recorded in 2023, wherein they briefly discuss the film’s reception and legacy. Some particularly intriguing tidbits: Robinson was first given the script, then titled Lies, at Sundance by Serbian director Dušan Makavejev; Scorsese drew inspiration for the rhythm and pacing of After Hours from Allan Dwan farces like Brewster’s Millions; and the filmmaker advised Dunne to abstain from sleep and sex during the shoot in order to enhance his sense of frustration.
A making-of documentary from 2004 overlaps somewhat with the commentary but contains some fascinating information about alternate endings, including a real doozy that involved Paul’s symbolic rebirth in the middle of the West Side Highway. Eight minutes of deleted scenes include Will Patton’s Horst tinkling at the piano, a stairwell argument between Catherine O’Hara’s Gail and a neighbor, and, most affecting, another encounter between Paul and John Heard’s bartender wherein the latter vents his guilt over the suicide of Arquette’s Marcy.
A featurette from 2023 has Scorsese and Fran Leibowitz (in a format reminiscent of their recent documentary Pretend It’s a City) talking about New York in the mid-’80s, Scorsese’s “anxiety dreams” contributing to his interest in the material, and how changes in technology would affect the storyline today. Another piece from 2023 centers on the look of the film with contributions from costume designer Rita Ryack, who talks about the color coding of the wardrobe, and production designer Jeffrey Townsend, who remembers building several sets in one enormous loft. The foldout booklet reproduces Paul’s wanted poster and includes a perceptive essay from critic Sheila O’Malley that examines the film’s place in Scorsese’s body of work.
Overall
Martin Scorsese’s After Hours mines urban anxiety to unsettling yet often hilarious effect.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
