35 years After Hours
On September 11, 1985, Martin Scorsese's film "After Hours" premiered in New York.
The script for the film was written by Joseph Minion, and it was his undergraduate coursework at Columbia University Film School, New York. The famous Yugoslav director Dusan Makavejev, who accepted this work, gave an excellent mark.
The film, scripted by Joseph Minion, was originally intended to be directed by Tim Burton. Martin Scorsese at that moment, and this was in 1983, began work on the film "The Last Temptation of Christ." But with this film, Scorsese had problems, and the project was frozen. And at that moment Minion's script fell into his hands, and aroused great interest in him. Tim Burton decided not to get in the way of Scorsese.
Scorsese originally set out to make the film as a parody of Hitchcock's style. To this end, he made some amendments to the Minion script.
In US cinemas, "After Hours" was watched by more than 3 million moviegoers. The film's box office in the USA was $ 10 million, more than double the film's $ 4.5 million budget. In principle, rather modest results, although the film paid off at the box office.
The film community in the United States was not very enthusiastic about Scorsese's film. For the Golden Globe, the film received only one nomination - actor's - and that lost. The film did not receive any nominations for the Oscar at all.
Washington Post journalist Paul Attanasio tried to explain the cool reception of this Scorsese's film from both the American public and the film professionals: "That "After Hours" fails to satisfy, that it derails, that even its own director tires of the material halfway through, would disappoint no one if the name of Martin Scorsese didn't appear above the title. Anyone who loves movies loves Scorsese, the director of "Raging Bull," "Taxi Driver," and "Mean Streets"; expectations run so high that a movie like this, which admits its small ambition, inevitably falls short."
However, the Russian film critic Sergei Kudryavtsev explains the reasons for the sluggish interest in the film on the part of the American public in a different way: "Brilliant direction ... balances between the style of intellectual comedy about "yuppies in danger" and mystical farce about the reverse essence of New York, being a kind of "grand guignol" in an American way. Surely this manner seemed complicated to American audiences." Absolutely right! Pay attention to which films the journalist of the leading American publication cites as the heights of Scorsese's work. The films are certainly wonderful and outstanding, but ... Action, blood, scuffle, etc.
And, indeed, what turned out to be "not in the minds" of a significant part of the American public and the cinematic public was to the liking of the Europeans. Filmmakers in Europe rated this film much higher. At least the film received major award nominations from some of the most prestigious European film forums.
At the 1986 Cannes International Film Festival, the film was nominated for the Palme d'Or. The festival jury, headed by the American filmmaker Sydney Pollack, awarded the victory to Roland Joffe's film "The Mission". The company of relative "losers" to the film "After Hours" was, in particular, the film "Down by Law" by Jim Jarmusch and "Sacrifice" by Andrey Tarkovsky. But Martin Scorsese did not remain without an award: he was awarded the prize for Best Director. (By the way, Tarkovsky's "Sacrifice" at this festival received the Grand Prix of the jury.)
A year later, "After Hours" was nominated for the French César Award, but that award went to Jean-Jacques Annaud's "Der Name der Rose (The Name of the Rose)". Along with Martin Scorsese's film, César nominations were made, in particular, for Woody Allen's film "Hannah and Her Sisters" and the already mentioned film "The Mission".
However, not all Americans found Martin Scorsese's film "After Hours" unsuccessful. The guru of American film critic Roger Ebert, who gave the film the maximum 4 stars in his system and included the film in his list of "Great Movies", wrote about it in his 1985 review: ""After Hours" is a brilliant film, one of the year's best. It is also a most curious film. It comes after Scorsese's "The King of Comedy," a film I thought was fascinating but unsuccessful, and continues Scorsese's attempt to combine comedy and satire with unrelenting pressure and a sense of all-pervading paranoia. This time he succeeds. The result is a film that is so original, so particular, that we are uncertain from moment to moment exactly how to respond to it. The style of the film creates, in us, the same feeling that the events in the film create in the hero. Interesting."
59% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users rated this film from 8 to 10. Taking this into account and the above, the rating of Martin Scorsese's film "After Hours" according to FilmGourmand's version was 8,458, which put it 337th in the Golden Thousand.
