THE CV: MARTIN SCORSESE

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It’s been an immense career, but an uneven one. With "Shutter Island" now proving to be Martin Scorsese's biggest box-office hit, Tom Shone draws up a list of his eight best films ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Winter 2009 Mean Streets (1973) The more films Scorsese made about the mob, the less he knew why. Shot for $300,000 by a 30-year-old (above), “Mean Streets” knows what it’s for. It’s one of the great debuts: a cock-of-the-walk movie with a skittering rhythm, half early Truffaut, half Ronettes song. Harvey Keitel’s fondness for his wastrel cousin (Robert De Niro) is in every frame and De Niro has never been better: telling tall tales in a porkpie hat, he acts as if cinema was a species of practical joke. One scene (“He called me a mook. What’s a mook?” “I dunno.” “You can’t call me a mook” etc) holds the seeds not just of Scorsese’s career, but Tarantino’s. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) Ellen Burstyn got Scorsese the gig, feeling that the tale of a mother and son going in search of a better life needed pepper. Again, the rhythm transfixes, as Burstyn and her boy (Alfred Lutter) riff like the Marx Brothers: nobody has caught the fond, fractious, flirtatious relationship between mothers and sons better. Scorsese—unnoticed, even by him—is a terrific director of women. Taxi Driver (1976) It could be another bittersweet movie about New York lonely hearts. Cybill Shepherd is working for a presidential nominee, with the cherubic Albert Brooks, when she is noticed by a stringy taxi driver (De Niro) with a cheeky grin. She says yes to a date. Bernard Herrmann’s score swells. And...they watch a porn movie with sperm pulsing across the screen. “Taxi Driver” makes you shudder because it feels flush with De Niro’s fever. Jodie Foster was overawed by him, so he took her out to breakfast every day and bored her awe away. Raging Bull (1980) You know it’s a masterpiece because it’s half black-and-white and has Mascagni on the soundtrack, but it’s OK not to like it. “Raging Bull” is as bleak as they come. “Jake fought like he didn’t deserve to live,” said Scorsese, then ingesting enough cocaine to fell a buffalo. Is it the smuggled autobiography of an artist hitting rock bottom? De Niro is a “thug Othello” in Pauline Kael’s phrase, Joe Pesci lets fly with some brilliant filth, while Cathy Moriarty, at 19, moves with the sublunary grace of a woman who knows how not to get hit. It all feels like the thing La Motta most yearned for: punishment. After Hours (1985) In 2000 Scorsese wrote a fan letter to Wes Anderson, praising the grace of his first two films. Some found this unlikely—a single snort from Jake La Motta’s nostrils would destroy Anderson’s fastidious world—but behind the glower of Scorsese’s reputation lurks a more puckish talent; his rhythm is an inch away from great comic timing. If “The King of Comedy” was mere deconstruction, “After Hours” is the real deal, a screwball misadventure. It was his first film without De Niro in a decade and the giddiness is palpable; Rosanna Arquette has a marvellously nutty soliloquy about sex and “The Wizard of Oz”, neatly summarising the film’s concerns. Goodfellas (1990) Was it the detour into “The Last Temptation of Christ” that recharged his batteries? Whatever, “Goodfellas” was full-tilt film-making, and the first time Scorsese had combined the dark entropic trajectory that had come to fascinate him with the exuberant bravura of his early work. It’s like watching a meteor self-immolate. Tellingly, De Niro was happy to sit mainly on the sidelines, leaving centre stage to Ray Liotta, who laughs like a hyena at the thuggery around him and tries to make peace with his wife (a punchy Lorraine Bracco), and to Joe Pesci, whose “Do I amuse you?” speech—funny, threatening, funny again, then threatening again—is a gem of spiralling dread. The Aviator (2004) Think of one of Scorsese’s trademarks: a fast tracking shot across a room towards an actor as he barks orders or fires a gun, and you see just how ill-suited he is to epic. He’s an agoraphobic, a streetfighter, which makes the epics he made for Harvey Weinstein in the 1990s misbegotten. “The Aviator” at least beats “Gangs of New York”—an epic about an agoraphobic. The early scenes are dazzling, but as DiCaprio’s Howard Hughes descends into bug-eyed paranoia, he fails to take us with him. The Departed (2006) When Scorsese finally won his Oscar, it wasn’t for one of those tony epics, or his portrait of Dylan, but for this jackal of a picture, low and snarling. It was the Irish mob this time, given full-throated voice by the screenwriter William Monahan, with DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson and Matt Damon caught up in a game of cat-and-mouse so cross-hatched with betrayal that only the rat in the closing credits knows what’s going on. It’s a strange centreless movie, beset by tonal wobbles, and climaxing in a bout of blood-letting so Jacobean in its intensity as to teeter into black comedy. Martin Scorsese's "Shutter Island", starring Leonardo DiCaprio, is in cinemas now (Tom Shone is a former film critic of the Sunday Times. His first novel, "In the Rooms", is published by Hutchinson. His last article for Intelligent Life was about masterpieces: who needs 'em?)