After Hours

After Hours (Martin Scorsese, 1985) "Different rules apply when it gets this late, ya know what I mean? It's like...'after-hours.'"

Radio monologist Joe Frank died January 15, 2018 and several podcasts who have depended on the spoken word for their medium of choice remarked on his passing. 

But, what seldom came up was the lawsuit. 

Joe Frank sued the producers of After Hours for similarities to his monologue called "Lies." Details of the settlement have never been disclosed, but when you listen to "Lies" and you watch After Hours and it is obvious down to some very specific details that the movie's first portion is a bunch of "Lies." I mean, "bagel and cream-cheese paperweights?" That's the sort of detail that can't be dismissed as the coincidence of two competing "Earth-hit-by-asteroid" movies or "Truman-Capote-writes-"In-Cold-Blood"" movies.* That sort of "coincidence" is right on the proboscis.

Soho

Lawsuit aside, After Hours is one of my favorite Scorsese films** (and I have several of those) as it perfectly captures the bizarre sense of a city's nocturnal side, especially when one is "up" past one's comfort zone due to circumstances beyond one's control with looming consequences once the sun decides to crash the party. I've had nights like that, wandering for miles in the dead of night in the one section of town that doesn't seem to have a gas station at any close proximity—would it be open if there was? But, stuff happens. It just doesn't pile up like this: 

"My God, Marcy finally met Mr. Right"

Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) is a corporate drone where he...oh, who cares what he does, it isn't important, but it has something to do with computers or computer training ("I'm just a word processor, for Christ's sake!" he will scream to the heavens at one point). Whatever. It doesn't matter. But, after droning away another day, he goes back to his meticulously arranged apartment, checks out what's on cable—and nothing's on—he goes to eat a lonely dinner at a lonely diner, head down in a book (Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer"***) when he looks up and sees Marcy (Roseanna Arquette) watching him. They nod, they smile, and they start to talk...

They talk about "Tropic of Cancer"—she likes it, can quote from it ("'This is not a book, it's a prolonged insult; a gob of spit in the face of art; a kick in the pants to Truth, Beauty, God' something like that...that's all I remember")—and it seems they have a lot in common...enough to continue the conversation. About the cashier "making these strange movements," about how she's going to her friend's loft downtown Soho and she's a sculptress making plaster-of-Paris paperweights of bagels with cream-cheese. She gives him her friend's phone number and later on, he calls her and she's had a fight with a friend and is feeling vulnerable—why doesn't he come over? She's glad he called.

And that's all it takes.

After a "Mr. Toad's wild-cab-ride" that is so violent he loses the $20 bill he was going to use to pay the fare, he goes up to the apartment of Kiki Bridges (Linda Fiorentino), who is working on a sculpture of Edvard Munch's "The Scream." Marcy's not there; she's at the all-night drugstore ("She all right?" "It's under control") although she calls ("Well, of course he's here, you invited him...it's your problem, Marcy, I'm not gonna tell him...) and Kiki asks him to help with the sculpture. His shirt gets messed up and Kiki offers to launder it, giving him a replacement to wear for his "date". They talk about how the plaster is hard work and screws up your shoulders and Paul offers her a massage and after he mentions she has a good body, she agrees, remarking that she doesn't have any scars—"some women are covered with them head to toe...horrible, ugly scars...I'm just telling you now"). He brushes that off, starting a story of how, as a child, he'd spent a night in a burn ward and, before he can get to the meat of the story, she falls asleep. Then, Marcie walks in.

They retire to Marcy's room and her first question is "What'd you do to her?" which makes Paul defensive, and Marcy shrugs it off just as quickly. Saying that she's going to take a quick shower, she asks "I hope you don't have to get up early or anything. Because I think you're somebody I can really talk to. Tonight, I feel like I'm gonna let loose or something. I feel like something really incredible is going to happen here. I feel sooo..excited. I don't know why. I feel it. I'm glad you came." And she laughs semi-hysterically. And then she winks, which Scorsese emphasizes with a forward-travelling shot. 

Marcy's phone rings and Paul hesitantly answers it: "She can't come to the phone now." "Tell her Greg called" and hangs up. Kiki appears in the door-way, stripping off her bra: "She back?" Paul can only lamely answer: "Yeah." She sulks away, and Paul can only shake his head. Weird. He takes advantage of Marcy's shower-time, to look at her bag—the prescription she got was an ointment for second-degree burns, then the shower stops, and Paul hurriedly puts the ointment back in the bag just in time to not be detected. It's then that the conversation takes on what Frank describes as "a slightly pathological cast." "Hey, I thought I told you to stay on the bed..." (she hadn't), then tells him to wait. At that, point Howard Shore's original score kicks in with a back-beat of ticking (Paul is constantly checking the time on his watch) as barely-registered whispers between Marcy and Kiki can be overheard in the next room.

Marcy pokes her head in the doorway, looking troubled. "Did you say something?" (He hadn't) "I thought I heard you say something." (He didn't). Her mood changes and she tells Paul that she'd been raped in that very room. Paul is horrified. "It's alright, it was an ex-boyfriend of mine. I slept through most of it" A change of subject and venue seems called for and they go out for coffee at a diner, run by Peter (the late and sadly-missed Dick Miller), who knows Marcy well. Paul asks about "Franklin" the name on the door-bell of the apartment and she tells him that's her husband. Paul registers another pause, trying not to react—he'll do that a lot. Seems they weren't married very long, that he lives in Turkey and is a film-freak, whose favorite movie is The Wizard of Oz. In fact, on their wedding night, when they were making love, he kept yelling "Surrender, Dorothy!" "Naturally," she says, as he takes his hand "I don't like to talk about it." "Can we get the check?" Paul asks suddenly.

It's then that Peter delivers that signature line at the top of the post. "It's on the house," he says. "After-Hours." Marcy and Paul go back to the Franklin loft, where he tries to make out with Marcy, but she starts to break down, they retire to her room, Marcy has another whispering session with Nikki, and then Paul turns petulant, as if all of the delays, intrigues, and feints have worn thin. He becomes a real jerk and Marcy goes crying to Nikki (ostensibly so Paul can buy one of their bagel and cream-cheese paperweights—"...as we sit here chatting, there are important papers flying rampant around my apartment 'cause I don't have anything to hold them down with!") and Paul goes out into the night where it is pouring down rain, and he becomes soaked. But, he can't get home, even by subway, because he only has ninety-seven cents...and fares go up to $1.50 at midnight.

Paul can't even go the Men's Room without being confronted with dread.

That is just the first half-hour of After Hours, and already it is so filled with a sense of dread, mystery, paranoia, miscommunication and misdirection that if Kafka were in the audience, he might run to the comfort of the lobby to soak his head in hot butter.

Paul will spend the night as it ticks away in an increasingly threatening waking nightmare. During the course of the evening, he will lose $20.00, find another, and lose that and his apartment keys, discover a dead body by suicide and be suspected of murder, as well as being a burglar, a pervert, and nearly having his head shaved, on top of being chased by a vigilante mob who know him because his face has been plastered on ever corner light pole. The very boundaries of Soho are a trap that he can't reach, without being attacked, killed (or worse) being accused of something else, by an increasingly misunderstanding and self-obsessed citizenry.

What makes the screenplay (and resulting film) interesting—and what sets it apart from Joe Frank's original source—is its intricate machinations in setting up this Kafkaesque Soho-scape of incomplete information and missed opportunities. But, it does so in a limited scope where Paul Hackett is only one among the Soho nighthawks who knows the complete story (or as much as he can) and his very knowledge of what's going on in the moving, changing landscape is what makes him suspected of the activities that the people he encounters are sensitive to. He's the stranger in a strange land, walking into an established and tenuously connected environment that he, by his movements—and resulting twists of Fate—disrupts. Soho has a barely functioning cohesion to begin with, but Paul's presence sends it spinning off its axis. He may ultimately be blameless for what happens, but it might not have turned out this way were he not there—making him totally to blame. Consider him the anti-George Bailey from It's a Wonderful Life, whose existence determines the difference between Heaven and Hell (or, specifically, Bedford Falls and Potterville). Maybe they should've called this "It's a Horrible Night." 

The world is an intricate mechanism, but throw your shoes into it and you're a saboteur. Rather than be a boon to the community, Paul is the salt in the sugar-shaker, and, as a result, he gets plastered for it. All he can do is retreat to familiar surroundings and know his place, while the rest of the world moves on around him.

After Hours, despite its opening "lifts," is a wholly derivative but amazingly original film. And it's one of my favorites in the Scorsese output.

* Curiously enough, there's an "L.A. version" of After Hours that came out about the same time: the more plot-driven Into the Night, directed by John Landis and starring Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Pfeiffer.

** The first choice of director was Scorsese, but he was embroiled in pre-production of The Last Temptation of Christ, and so producers Amy Robinson and Griffin Dunne turned to neophyte director Tim Burton, after they'd seen his short "Vincent." Plans to start went into place and then The Last Temptation of Christ fell through, which put Dunne and Robinson in an awkward position: how to tell Burton. When Burton was told that Scorsese was interested, he immediately responded: "I gracefully withdraw from the project. I do not want to stand in the way of anything Martin Scorsese wants to do." Burton would make his feature directing debut with Pee-wee's Big Adventure in 1985, and Scorsese released The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988.

*** A very After Hours section: "One can live in Paris—I discovered that!—on just grief and anguish. A bitter nourishment—perhaps the best there is for certain people. At any rate, I had not yet come to the end of my rope. I was only flirting with disaster. ... I understood then why it is that Paris attracts the tortured, the hallucinated, the great maniacs of love. I understood why it is that here, at the very hub of the wheel, one can embrace the most fantastic, the most impossible theories, without finding them in the least strange; it is here that one reads again the books of his youth and the enigmas take on new meanings, one for every white hair. One walks the streets knowing that he is mad, possessed, because it is only too obvious that these cold, indifferent faces are the visages of one's keepers. Here all boundaries fade away and the world reveals itself for the mad slaughterhouse that it is. The treadmill stretches away to infinitude, the hatches are closed down tight, logic runs rampant, with bloody cleaver flashing."

Silverado

Silverado (Lawrence Kasdan, 1985) Director Lawrence Kasdan took his big box office successes with Body Heat and The Big Chill and parlayed them into a Big Gamble to revive the western genre with this "all-in" tale (co-written by himself and his brother Mark) of four travelling pilgrims who happen to collide and find enough common ground in skill sets and back-story that they end up resolving each others' business. Why they happen to find each other in all the empty space of the West is a bit of a mystery, but I have a feeling it would have been inevitable as the four of them seem to follow the directions of their own individual moral compasses. Despite their differences, they're going to end up in the same place.

Just like the country. Even though it starts out in the dry wilderness of the West, everything seems to be moving to civilizing and taming the wild, except that things aren't exactly going to plan.

"Nothing wrong with the land. It's just the people," says one of the settlers of Silverado. That settler's brother gets an example of that at the very start of the film: Emmett (Scott Glenn) is asleep in a shack—at least it has a wood-stove—when the door burst opens and guns start firing. A reach for a holster and one guy is dead, but bullet-holes start blasting through the walls, and the roof explodes from rifle-fire. Emmett fires sight-unseen, anticipating the movements and when he finally exits into the sunlight, three men are dead, two horses are on the loose, but one has stayed. That horse will come in handy twice in the movie: once as transport and once as a clue to why someone would want Emmett dead.

Title sequence. While Bruce Broughton's classic score* starts with the first tremulous chords as Emmett exits the shack (in a move not to dissimilar from the opening shot of The Searchers) to reveal a dawn landscape and the music blossoms into full-throated Americana with a chime announcing the title of the movie, Broughton's main theme is presented over shots of Emmett's character travelling with the two horses across various picturesque landscapes, finally reaching a desert, where he spies a prone figure baking in the sun....wearing nothing but long-johns, his legs nonchalantly crossed as if he'd fallen from the sky that way. Emmett takes out his canteen and tentatively offers the sun-roasted character some water. He croaks something unintelligible. Emmett leans closer and we hear the first words from Paden (Kevin Kline): "Pleased to meet you."

They're also the first words spoken in Silverado, and already it sets the pattern for the dialogue that acts as series of laconic, well-chosen ironic words that make up the bulk of the film's banter ranging from austere sentiments that can have hidden depths of meaning and lines that are clever for their brevity and what's left unsaid. Kasdan has written many impressive original scripts and adaptations over his career, since his first optioned script (for The Bodyguard, sold in 1980 but not filmed until 1992), but none is as rich as this collaboration between the two Kasdan brothers.

Over nighttime coffee—Emmett always seems to have coffee—the two men share some history—how Paden got into that predicament (robbed of everything and left for dead by some fellow travelers) and his first summation of his experiences with luck, and Emmett's shack shoot-out ("Aw, I had to get up, anyway" is Emmett's comment). Emmett, it seems, has just been sprung from Leavenworth ("Never been there," says Paden) and he's going to meet up with his brother to reunion with his sister's family.  He asks Paden where he's going, and Paden's reply is practically undecided:

"Where's the pinto going?"

To the nearest outpost, apparently. The two make an odd pair, riding into the fort—the dusty cowboy and the guy in his skivvies. Emmett flips Paden a coin to buy some clothes to make himself presentable "I'm good for it," he says, and absent-mindedly tips the memory of a hat at a shocked mother and daughter. He may not be needing that coin. Across the way, he recognizes his horse...and his pants...and his shirt...boots...gun-belt and guns. The guys getting ready to mount up, so Paden runs into a general store, grabs a gun, but is stopped by the proprietor—that gun doesn't equal that coin. "Well, what can I get for this?" says Paden in a hurry.

Not much. The gun he gets is falling apart, the cylinder falling out of it, plus a box of cartridges more destined for dirt than defense, given his firearm. He has just enough time to hastily assemble the pistol, load a couple of shots, while the guy who's second hand Paden is riding down on him, shooting from horseback—one shot takes out the business-end of his long-johns and he takes a studied aim and fires the guy right off his (Paden's) mount.

You don't shoot a guy in the middle of the street without attracting attention and the local constabulary has questions and they're not buying a bum's story about getting robbed "Can't you see this horse loves me?" The Cavalry Sergeant (Sheb Wooley, he of The Wilhelm Scream) isn't impressed. "I had a gal do that to me, didn't make her my wife..." But, Paden's name is on the inside of the saddle he says and when he's asked for clarification, a voice in the crowd speaks up "P-A-D-E-N"

That's what the saddle says, all right, just like the man says. The man is Cobb (Brian Dennehy) and he and Paden have history. "Where's the dog?" is practically the first thing he asks him. It goes unanswered. In Silverado, some things are best left unsaid, but you will find out about them...eventually, and if you're not in too much a hurry.

Despite the shared past and Paden's recent change of fortunes (or maybe because of them) Cobb offers him a job working with him again. "I've given that up..." Paden says evasively. "So have I," replies Cobb. "I have a legitimate job now." The two commiserate just long enough for one of the men that Cobb HAS hired to be released from the stockade. It's Tyree (Jeff Fahey), who also knows Paden...only too well. "Where's the dog?" he sneers as he rides past him.

Emmett and Paden (with his clothes hanging back on him, again, but still missing his hat) make their way to the town of Turley: Emmett's going to "meet a guy on the way to Silverado." Paden rides along once he finds out there's a saloon and women there. 

And breakfast. They're on their way to eat when they're mistaken for a couple of trail-hands supposed to lead a wagon-train to the town of Silverado. When the two actually show up, they eye the hands suspiciously when they actually don't count their pre-job half of their wages. Odd.

At breakfast, a tall, dark, dusty stranger named Mal (Danny Glover) walks in and asks for a drink of whiskey and a bed (he's been without either for ten days). He's served, but the place's owner comes out and gets ugly and demands the stranger leave, which he doesn't. That's when three rough types decide to interfere and the stranger makes quick work of them and is only interrupted by the Turley Sheriff Langston (John Cleese) with a Pynton-esque "What's all this, then?" Langston advises Mal that he is not welcome in Turley, as it is his job to keep the peace. "That ain't right," says Mal, but his only defiance is to take a long pull from his whiskey, satisfied.

Langston, charged with keeping the Turley peace, sits down with the other two strangers, Emmett and Paden, and asks their business ("We'd like to stay," says Paden meekly). Emmett inquires about the man he's looking for—"about my size, full of juice, wears a fancy two-gun rig." "I know where that gentleman is..." says Langston.

Next stop: jail, where Emmett's brother, Jake (Kevin Costner) is delighted to see him. But, there's an issue—Jake is in jail for, in his view, "kissing a girl." But that act resulted in unpleasantness escalating to Jake killing a man...for which he is scheduled to be hung the following dawn. Emmett opines that this will certainly disappoint their sister, and he and Paden leave the jail. On their way to the local saloon, Emmett says regretfully he'll have to spring Jake, and Paden tells him he can't be any part of that.

He's spoken too soon. Upon entering the saloon, he recognizes a familiar sight—his hat, on a particularly surly gambler, who, when challenged, briefly stands to draw and quickly sits down again, dead from a shot by Paden.

He does get his hat, but also a night in the pokey, at the very least. "It was self-defense!" he says lamely as the door swings shut and locks with a clang. "That what I said!" says his new cell-mate, Jake.

True to form, there is a jail-break made, despite previous protestations, an inside job between the men sharing the cell, and Emmett who has created a distraction by burning down Jake's intended gallows and been standing by the now-three horses to make their escape. They are pursued by a hurriedly pulled-together posse led by Sheriff Langston, but they are stopped in their tracks by some welcome interference from the banished Mal and his Henry rifle.

"Now, I don't want to kill you, and you don't want to be dead..."

And as, the four have mutual interests in the direction of the town of Silverado, they ride together and director Kasdan and composer Broughton make a big show of their side-by-side cantering as a unit, galloping across a magic-houred vista. It's mean to be a "Moment," showing solidarity and unification of purpose as four strangers become one, for a moment, galumphing to a common destination, even though, in their minds, anyway, heading for different destinies.

But, I've always found it amusing—one of those moments where Silverado invokes the overblown melodrama of the "horse-opera" days of the western, edging up to the fence of "camp," but not quite crossing over. The four guys are just too precise of marksmen, always have that "just-so" reply, despite some flecks of shadow seem to be compelled to be on the side of virtue...as when they come across that wagon train again, and volunteer to help recover the party's "stake" after it's been stolen by those very trusting trail-hands they'd encountered earlier. All four are all too willing to risk life and limb in a well-coordinated intervention for a bunch of strangers. Of course, they're the good guys.

That moment of equine synchronicity is always a matter of amusement to me—but not derisively, mind you—not only because it's a bit overblown, accompanied as it is with Broughton's tripletting trumpets, but also because it's just amusing for me to see these four New York Method trained actors riding four abreast like natural cowboys. They carry it off, but it still brings a smile to my face every time.

"After a while, I won't be so pretty. But, this land will be."

It's emblematic of a generally quirky, but nonetheless scrupulous casting that also includes Dennehy's Cobb, Cleese's Sheriff "not from these parts", Jeff Goldblum's snaky gambler (named "Slick"), Roseanna Arquette's prairie flower love-interest, and especially the character of Stella, as portrayed by 4' 9" Linda Hunt ("The world is what you make of it, friend. If it don't fit, you make alterations.")—none would be found at the top of the 8x10 stack as obvious choices for their characters, but there's something about their heft—or lack of it—that immediately communicates a contrast in their interactions that allows the realization of their principled places in the universe to an audience far beyond what the sometimes circumspect dialogue insinuates.

"Welcome to Heaven..."

That goes for The Big Four, too. As the story progresses, fortunes rise and fall, loyalties are tested—sometimes to their limits—but that shot of the four riding astride stays in the mind throughout the movie. You can't imagine these four hombre's of differing, but no less expert skills, going against each other, despite how each one handles (or man-handles) a conflict. But, you can imagine that they make a formidable team, each acting separately, but with similar intentions, choosing their battles and and taking care of them the best way they know how.

Take, for example, the big ending action-piece in the town of Silverado, where, once and for all, personal goals having been met, they take on the last remaining bad guys who have insinuated themselves into the affairs of the town, in a four-fronted military action, each to their own fashion (familiar ones to those folks who have seen a lot of Westerns): Jake goes in loud and flashy;

Mal goes personal with some close-order street-fighting.

Emmett goes street to street, using the whole town as a back-drop, a defense and a weapon;

and Paden—he gets the old-fashioned mano-a-mano gun-down.

Despite their different methods, personalities, and their personal battles, they are still bonded together as a unit as they approach the town of Silverado, where their stories and challenges center on family, loyalty, and their repercussions.

No matter what movie associated with Kasdan I've seen—and I've seen just about everything including the recent standalone Solo (written by Kasdan and his son and directed by Ron Howard)—the strongest, most fully realized, and least dog-eared movie he's made is Silverado (Body Heat comes in a close second). It's almost too perfect, with the dialogue pointed and full of call-backs and reflections ("Didn't have much choice," "Bad luck" "That ain't right..." "Sounds good...") and a sureness of direction that's direct, not too fancy, but does take advantage of the film's widescreen field.

And it is just fun, with nice touches of malice to raise the stakes and make it a bit less larky—to spoil the mood and make you root for the good guys to win. It's an entertainment machine, with heroes who are too competent to fail and rarely miss their mark, with either bullets or words, and all the actors—all of them—are enjoying the ride, and that's infectious.

Silverado feels like family.

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