Wednesday: Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese, 1973 • Heralded as an epoch-defining film upon its release, Martin Scorsese’s third feature is a forceful, unsparing portrait of life in New York City’s Little Italy. Charlie (Harvey Keitel) works as a debt-collector for his gangster uncle, grappling with religious guilt and his love for the epileptic Maria. He becomes the protector of her cousin, Johnny Boy (Robert de Niro), whose uncontrolled rage and mafia dealings lead the two into danger. Scorsese, who grew up in Little Italy and briefly studied for the priesthood, builds a propulsive drama out of the small, familiar details of everyday routine. 35mm

Martin Scorsese, 1974 • Scorsese’s follow-up to Mean Streets unfolds in a world light-years away from Little Italy: the small towns of the Southwest, as experienced by Alice (Ellen Burstyn), a thirty-five-year-old recent widow who leaves Texas with her young son to pursue her dreams of being a singer. Their trip to California passes through myriad taverns and diners, as she moonlights as a waitress and meets men with ambiguous intentions. Scorsese’s portrait of a woman discovering freedom is a richly compelling work that illuminates the gap between women’s dreams and a male-dominated society. 35mm

Martin Scorsese, 1977 • Scorsese’s sole musical is a cinephile’s Technicolor valentine to the Hollywood musical of the ‘40s. Set in a New York built on a studio backlot, the film depicts the turbulent romance of a big-band singer, Francine Evans, (Liza Minnelli) and a saxophonist, Jimmy Doyle (Robert de Niro). Starting with their first encounter on V-J Day, New York follows the peaks and valleys of their relationship as Francine becomes a successful movie star and Jimmy’s alcoholism intensifies. The superb score of classic standards and original Kander and Ebb tunes produced the hit song of the film’s title. 35mm

Martin Scorsese, 1980 • This searing biography of the troubled, rage-fueled boxer Jake LaMotta is perhaps Martin Scorsese’s greatest work; a critics’ poll named it the best film of the 1980s. The film follows LaMotta from his origins in the Bronx slums, through his rise to middleweight boxing champion, to his fall from grace: a prison stint and a post-boxing career as a pathetic stand-up comic. Shot in breathtaking black and white, Raging Bull contains some of the most beautifully stylized boxing scenes ever filmed. The superb cast includes Joe Pesci as LaMotta’s brother, Cathy Moriarty as his wife, and, best of all, Robert DeNiro in the title role. 35mm

Martin Scorsese, 1988 • A dream project of Scorsese’s childhood, this rendition of the life of Jesus was finally realized under the auspices of Universal for a modest budget of $7 million and a shooting schedule of 58 days. The result is the leanest, least spectacular of Scorsese films, a minimalist passion led by an emaciated Willem Dafoe. Adapted by Paul Schrader from Nikos Kazantzakis’s controversial novel, the film likewise provoked a scandal, stoked by luridly exaggerated reports of a scene where Jesus hallucinates a sexual encounter with Mary Magdalene. With Harvey Keitel as Judas and David Bowie as Pilate. 35mm

Martin Scorsese, 1990 • Adapted from journalist Nicolas Pileggi’s book Wiseguy, Goodfellas returns to the New York underworld of Mean Streets. Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) is a half-Sicilian, half-Irish Brooklyn errand-boy whose small jobs for a neighborhood cab-stand initiate his ascent in the closeted world of the powerful Sicilian mob, where he befriends a thief named Jimmy (Robert de Niro) and the brutally violent Tommy (Joe Pesci). The film’s subtleties of detail, mood, and emotion, along with its unyielding momentum, make for a monumental cinematic achievement. With Lorraine Bracco. 35mm

Martin Scorsese, 1991 • A kaleidoscope of disorienting angles and baroque gestures borrowed from Hitchcock, including a Saul Bass title sequence and Bernard Herrmann’s original score, Scorsese’s remake of the 1963 Robert Mitchum vehicle represents one of the cinema’s most glorious examples of style trumping, well, just about everything. As Max Cady, a genius ex-con who seeks revenge on the family of his former lawyer (sketchy Nick Nolte replacing stolid Gregory Peck), Robert De Niro exudes a diabolical dynamism in marked contrast to the imposing inertness of Mitchum’s original. With Jessica Lange and Juliette Lewis. 35mm

Martin Scorsese, 1990 • Scorsese shifts from contemporary settings to the gilded, insular milieu of the wealthy elite who ruled New York in the late nineteenth century. Scrupulously recreating the world of the Edith Wharton novel on which the film is based, Scorsese faithfully conveys Wharton’s vision of a society defined by rigid, unspoken codes of conduct and the nearly imperceptible pressures of a social network determined to preserve the status quo. As a man falling in love with his fiancée’s cousin, Daniel Day-Lewis gives a virtuosic performance in which passion and propriety wrestle for victory.

Martin Scorsese, 1995 • Adapting another of Nicolas Pileggi’s journalistic accounts, Scorsese makes a gorgeous spectacle of 1970s’ Las Vegas. Robert de Niro plays a gambler named Sam (Ace) Rothstein who is hired by the mob to manage a casino for them. He runs the place with finesse until his deranged childhood pal, Nicky (Joe Pesci), turns up and entangles Ace in his crimes. Ace’s obsessive attraction to a mercenary beauty (Sharon Stone) only fuels his downward spiral. Through vibrant color and an eye for the inner machinery of the casino’s workings, Scorsese creates a stunning tableau of excess. 35mm

Martin Scorsese, 2006 • Four years on, the film that earned Scorsese his long-overdue Oscar looks even better. An undercover cop (Leo DiCaprio) must flush out a mob rat (Matt Damon) before the other does the same to him, or is it vice-versa? Aping this hook from a Hong Kong thriller, William Monahan’s screenplay builds a powerful chamber opera of post-9/11 despair out of the medieval world of South Boston criminality. The leads acquit themselves admirably, but it is the whole ensemble, featuring Jack Nicholson, Martin Sheen, and the superb comic duo of Alec Baldwin and Mark Wahlberg, that brings the film to terrifying life. 35mm