After Hours turns 30

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The lower Manhattan neighborhood of Soho—for you out-of-towners, that’s short for South of Houston Street—is now a tourist AND native attraction clotted with high-end retail shops and snooty bistros. But a mere thirty years ago it was a comparatively desolate pioneer district filled with arty loft dwellers who were really into Philip Glass, or who maybe even WERE Philip Glass. That’s not quite the Soho depicted in Martin Scorsese’s frantic, absurd 1985 black comedyAfter Hours, now streaming on Amazon Instant Video after being theatrically released 30 years ago this week.

Director Scorsese had made a name for himself for, among other things, his unsparing and accurate depictions of his hometown New York, New York. When budget restrictions confined him to Los Angeles for the shootings of certain scenes in his breakthrough ‘70s feature Mean Streets, the director was sufficiently obsessive that he measure curb lengths in the California locations that were meant to stand in for Little Italy, where the movie is set (and where he did get to do a week or so of location shooting). The depictions of the fleshpot hellscapes of ‘70s Times Square were captured almost documentary style in Taxi Driver. But for After Hours, Scorsese took a more stylized approach to Soho.

The movie depicts Paul Hackett, a bored cipher-yuppie played by Griffin Dunne, who leaves his anonymous-looking Uptown comfort zone in pursuit of comely Marcie, the comely Rosanna Arquette, whom he meets semi-cute in a diner, discussing the fine points of literary dirty-book-writer Henry Miller. Impulsively cabbing it down to Soho on the pretext of buying a papier-mâché bagel from Marcie’s kinky sculptor pal Kiki (Linda Fiorentino, in a breakout role), things get crazy for Paul as his cab navigates avenues in fast motion, and he loses the twenty with whom he had meant to pay the driver. That his fare from the East ‘90s to the edge of Chinatown only came to $6.50 is one of the movie’s many delightful anachronisms. (Another occurs at the beginning of the movie, at Paul’s office, where his trainee, played by a then-unknown Bronson Pinchot, says that this office job is, for him, only temporary, and that his true New York ambition is to “create a magazine…my own magazine…that would be a forum for writers…” Dunne’s eyes glaze over, and mine did too, when I first saw the movie, and again on rewatching this week, for entirely different reasons.)

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