THE EXPECTATION surrounding Martin Scorsese’s 19th-century epic
Gangs of New York shows that there is probably not another US director alive whose films are more keenly awaited. Scorsese’s name is now a byword for all that is daring, passionate and brutal in American cinema, a cheering antidote to Hollywood’s machine-tooled, bread-and-circuses culture.
Even now, with Scorsese turned 60, young guns dream of being him. For them he’s still the rebel poet of urban squalor. They can recite whole scenes (usually the foul-mouthed gangster talk uttered by Joe Pesci), and describe lovingly the way in, say, Goodfellas, the camera moves all the way into the Stork Club by the back entrance and down corridors in a single, continuous tracking shot.
But then Scorsese’s heady mix of bravura film-making and testosterone brutality has always attracted the true obsessives. After all, it has been claimed that Taxi Driver was the inspiration for John Hinckley’s attempt to kill Ronald Reagan. (“If the movie really had been great he would have killed him,” the left-wing producer Bert Schneider grumbled at the time.) Unlike such directorial peers as Francis Ford Coppola and Brian De Palma, Scorsese has maintained prestige and a relatively untarnished image. During the Eighties and Nineties, when the high-concept blockbuster ruled, he accepted such director-for-hire projects as Cape Fear, an unnecessary remake. But he also took on as a studio assignment Casino and turned a tale of Vegas villainy into a fragmented three-hour personal statement about the vacancy of contemporary America.
His devotees will also point out that there’s more to the street-smart Italian-American than tough movies about the mob. He’s also the man who almost became a priest. The man who risked his career by putting everything into The Last Temptation of Christ, its depiction of a mortal Messiah drawing high-profile condemnation from Christian fundamentalists. And the man who might well have made Disney’s most abstract movie, Kundun, a portrait of Tibet’s 14th Dalai Lama.
Never mind that his last film, Bringing Out the Dead, in which tortured paramedic Nicolas Cage drives through Taxi Driver’s sulphurous visions of nocturnal streets splashed with garish neon, seemed to be almost pastiche Scorsese. Never mind that he’s always struggled to portray satisfactorily his female characters. He’s American cinema’s leading tortured artist with integrity bleeding from every vein.
Nothing captured his creative personality on screen better than the portraits of self-destruction from Robert De Niro: the street hood Johnny Boy, dazzling but crazy in Mean Streets (1973); Travis Bickle, not just a psychotic appalled by the scum of New York but also a warped saint who needs to rescue a child from damnation in Taxi Driver (1976); and Jake La Motta, the paranoid boxer in Raging Bull (1980), beating his head against a bare wall.
More than any other film-maker since Godard, Scorsese has made it respectable, honourable even, to treat film as being as important as life. The fact that he’s been married five times suggests that film has often overshadowed life. He is also renowned for watching films repeatedly, for having video machines taping movies at all hours, in case a rare classic crops up on TV. When he edits his films, he locks himself away for months at a stretch.
Such commitment to his craft has earned Scorsese a loyal band of supporters over the years and a mythic aura: Leonardo DiCaprio described the atmosphere on the set of Gangs of New York as being serious, “a testament to everyone’s respect for ’Swork”; fellow actor John C. Reilly was so awed he could only address the director as “sir”.
You can sense the disappointment in the US critics that Gangs isn’t the masterpiece they were hoping. “It falls somewhat short of great film status, but is still a richly impressive and densely realised work,” said Variety. “A near-great film that, as time goes by, may well make up the distance,” wrote the New York Times.
Scorsese’s status as revered auteur must make it tough for him as a director, knowing that every frame he shoots will be scrutinised. But past acclaim has not led to the kind of box-office success that allows total artistic freedom. Not being the type of film-maker to improvise cheaply on high-definition video, he still needs studio finance to realise his cinematic ambitions.
For Gangs of New York he wanted a meticulous re-creation of the crime-ridden Five Points section of 1860s New York that only an estimated $100 million budget could buy, right down to the cobblestones on the streets.
Scorsese developed an eye for detail from an early age. As a weak, asthmatic boy in Little Italy, New York, he observed through fearful eyes the local neighbourhood characters that would people his breakthrough movie, Mean Streets. Watching his 1974 documentary Italianamerican about his family, it’s easy to see from whom he inherited his fascination for criminals as his mother giggles at the shady characters she grew up with.
Unable to play with the other kids on the street, Scorsese devoured Hollywood’s Technicolor fantasies at the cinema. But every Friday night, when the TV networks screened Italian movies for New York’s vast immigrant population, Scorsese’s family would congregate around the television. Films such as Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves offered a brand of realism that Scorsese had never seen before.
When he went to film school in the 1960s, he never forgot that blend of documentary and fiction. With its climactic sequence of fast-tracking shots and its story about friends struggling to break the cycle of monotony that determines their lives, Fellini’s I Vitelloni (1951) played an integral part in the evolution of Mean Streets.
The influence of Italian cinema has continued in Scorsese’s work (and, arguably, his personal life as he was briefly married to Rossellini’s daughter, Isabella). The code at the heart of Goodfellas — “Never rat on your friends and always keep your mouth shut” — was learnt watching films about Sicily such as Alessandro Blasetti’s 1860. The opera sequences in Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence referenced such Visconti films as The Leopard.
It’s perhaps no surprise, then, to find Scorsese making Gangs of New York, his most ambitious film to date, in Italy. But shooting the movie in the spiritual home of his beloved Rossellini and De Sica cost Scorsese dearly; he not only halved his $6 million directorial fee to help towards the escalating budget but found the film’s release delayed for more than a year, reportedly due to arguments with the studio over its length, content and tone.
Nowadays Scorsese, the man who in the Seventies became the benchmark for bloody-minded creative integrity in the face of money and Philistinism, knows more than anyone that even living legends have a price to pay.
