Martin Scorsese

American film director

• Born: November 17, 1942
• Place of Birth: Flushing, New York

Scorsese emerged with the group of new American directors of the 1970s that included Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and Robert Altman. Combining Italian neorealism’s preoccupation with place and class with the French New Wave’s innovations in camera work and editing, Scorsese developed a personal cinematic style while working in a broad variety of film genres. He also developed the Scorsese antihero, a person tormented by existential doubt at the validity of their culture’s values and who achieves ambiguous redemption in a violent act of self-immolation.

Early Life

Martin Scorsese was born in Flushing in Queens, New York. His parents, Charles and Catherine Scorsese, were Sicilian immigrants who moved to Little Italy in Manhattan when Martin was still a boy. He witnessed the street life of “goodfellas” and “wise guys” later documented in many of his films. A small, sickly youth, Scorsese abandoned plans for entering the priesthood to attend New York University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in English (1963) and an MFA in film (1966).

Scorsese maintained strong ties to both parents and later featured them in minor but important roles in his films (his mother played the role of Joe Pesci’s mother in Goodfellas). While somewhat obsessive on the subject of religion, Scorsese recognized the importance of the worldly values of loyalty, family, and good food of his Sicilian background. His documentary Italianamerican (1974) features unscripted reminiscences by his mother and father about their lives and culture.

Life’s Work

Scorsese’s film career began with student projects influenced by absurdist theater and European avant-garde filmmaking. The Big Shave (1967), a short film protesting the Vietnam War, depicts a man shaving himself so obsessively he finally cuts his jugular vein. His first feature-length film, Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967), features actor Harvey Keitel as a young man unable to accept that his fiancé was sexually assaulted. The low-budget film won the approval of critics and fellow filmmakers. His innovative editing landed him a job editing Woodstock (1970), the film of the famous 1969 concert. Indeed, Joe Cocker’s performance in this film reveals Scorsese’s trademark work, detected in split-screen sequences. Scorsese directed another film featuring musicians. The Last Waltz (1978) was a star-studded concert picture featuring the Band’s final performance.

Producer Roger Corman tapped Scorsese to make the low-budget Boxcar Bertha (1972) and distributed Scorsese’s first landmark film, Mean Streets (1973). Mean Streets, set in Manhattan;s Little Italy among the bottom-feeders of the city's underworld of organized crime, established the Scorsese film template in its central conflict between the guilt-ridden, religion-obsessed Charlie (Keitel) and his friend and foe, the Dionysian, self-destructive Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro). The theme of violence as a form of spiritual purgation was further developed in Taxi Driver (1976), also featuring De Niro and Keitel, and one of the seminal American films. Obsessed loner Travis Bickle (De Niro) is an existential hero looking to perform an act that will redeem the wicked street life of New York but also give meaning to his rootless existence. The film ends with a violent assault by Travis as vigilante-avenger on the pimp (Keitel). Travis’s unexpected fame by a public craving law and order is an ironic testament to America’s ritual need for violence.

Taxi Driver marked the first collaboration between Scorsese, scriptwriter Paul Schrader, and lead actor De Niro. The second collaboration would be Raging Bull (1980), perhaps Scorsese’s most fully realized work. The film deconstructs the conventions of the Hollywood biopic to explore the relations between inner demons and outer violence in its subject, middleweight boxing champion Jake La Motta. Like Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, the film eschews chronology, jumping back and forth in episodes from various stages in La Motta’s life trying to put the jigsaw pieces of his history together into a coherent whole. However, like Welles, Scorsese demonstrates the paradoxical limitations of the film medium (or of art itself) to make an authorized narrative or definitive statement on its subject.

The third collaboration with Schrader as scriptwriter was The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). While Taxi Driver and Raging Bull explored the spiritual dimensions of worldly characters, The Last Temptation of Christ (adapted from Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1951 novel) reinvented Jesus Christ as a Roman-period Travis Bickle or Jake La Motta, a man at war with himself, body against soul. The film provoked a backlash from religious conservatives in the United States, who objected to Kazantzakis’s imaginary final temptation of Jesus during his crucifixion: renunciation of his divine sacrifice to settle down for a domestic life with Mary Magdalene and children. Ironically, the religious critics of the film failed to see that the novel and Scorsese’s rather faithful adaptation both opt for a humanized Jesus overcoming his last temptation to fulfill his divine mission. The controversy made the film a financial, if not critical, success and set the paradigm for Scorsese’s later career in which sweeping, often ponderous epics replaced his smaller, more focused early work.

The King of Comedy (1983), featuring De Niro and Jerry Lewis, seemed to recycle Taxi Driver as a self-parody in which Travis Bickle, would-be savior, becomes Rupert Pupkin, would-be comedian. Despite Lewis’s depiction of a tough-as-nails funny man, the film failed to reach an audience. In The Color of Money (1986), an update on the pool-hall classic The Hustler (1961), Paul Newman reprises his role as Fast Eddie Felson, now mentor to an up-and-comer played by Tom Cruise. Newman won the Academy Award for best actor more in honor of his career than his performance in the film itself, which lacked the dynamism of the original.

Goodfellas (1990) was hailed as a return to form for Scorsese. If Coppola’s Godfather trilogy examined the underworld from the lofty point of view of the Dons, Scorsese provided a definitive view of the violent world of the capos and crews. The verve of the performances, tautness of the editing, and the barrage of classic rock-n-roll in the soundtrack all but created a subgenre ranging from the work of Quentin Tarantino to the television series The Sopranos.

Scorsese’s career after Goodfellas was not as well received, and some critics suggested that he had exhausted his major themes. The Age of Innocence (1993), a period romance based on an Edith Wharton novel, bombed at the box office. Casino (1995) was criticized by some as a carbon copy of his own Goodfellas, though it was a commercial success. Gangs of New York (2002) received generally favorable notices, particularly in regards to the acting and production design, but most critics noted that it fell short of the quality of his earlier work, with a somewhat weak plot, confused themes, and many historical inaccuracies. The Departed (2006), closely adapted from Andrew Lau’s acclaimed Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs (2002) and also loosely based on real-life Boston gangster James "Whitey" Bulger's corrupt relationship with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), won Scorsese the Academy Award for best director, which had eluded him on four previous occasions. The film, though, is at best a well-acted bravura potboiler that has none of the depth of theme and character of his best work.

Since The Departed, Scorsese's output has been varied and includes two rockumentaries; the film Shine a Light (2008), which highlights interviews with and a concert performance by the Rolling Stones, received generally favorable reviews. His film George Harrison: Living in the Material World (2011), offered a glimpse into the life of the enigmatic Beatle and was, on the whole, stronger than his look at the Rolling Stones. Hugo (2011), an animated children's movie, earned several Oscar nominations, including one for best director, and highlighted Scorsese's mastery of detail, although due to the target audience, the writing lacked the complexity of some of Scorsese's earlier works. He was the executive producer of the popular HBO program Boardwalk Empire (2010–2014), which signaled a return to the themes of crime and corruption that defined his earlier works. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) took those themes in a new direction for Scorsese, telling the story of a New York stockbroker mixed up in large-scale securities fraud. Critical response was generally positive and the film became a box office success. The Wolf of Wall Street was nominated for five Academy Awards, but won none, although its lead, Leonardo di Caprio, won best actor at the Golden Globes for his performance.

The second half of the 2010s saw two new Scorsese-directed feature films released. The first, 2016's historical drama Silence, served as another examination of faith that was set in Japan in the 1600s and had a cast that included Liam Neeson, Adam Driver, and Andrew Garfield. Though it received somewhat mixed reviews, Scorcese went on to return to the world of crime-drama with 2019's The Irishman, which streamed on Netflix. Based on real-life figures, the film focuses on the life and work of Frank Sheeran (played by De Niro), including his friendship with Jimmy Hoffa (played by Al Pacino), while exploring the dynamics of organized crime and labor unions in the twentieth-century United States. Largely very well received, The Irishman was nominated for several Oscars at the 2020 ceremony, including one for Scorsese for Best Directing as well as one for Best Picture. After serving as an executive producer for the 2020 drama Pieces of a Woman, in 2021 his documentary series Pretend It's a City, centering upon Fran Lebowitz, premiered on Netflix.

In May 2023, Scorsese’s next major picture, Killers of the Flower Moon, debuted at Cannes Film Festival, with a theatrical release date scheduled for later that year. The film, which featured an ensemble cast including Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert DeNiro, Lily Gladstone, and Brendan Fraser, was based on a series of murders that occurred in the Osage Nation, a Native American nation in Oklahoma, during the 1920s. The film earned Scorsese an Oscar nomination for best director.

In Scorsese’s sixth decade as a filmmaker, he continued to be active, with a variety of projects in 2024. Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints, was a multi-part docudrama about eight Catholic saints for Fox Nation. He also served as executive producer for the Celina Murga film, The Freshly Cut Grass, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Scorsese also began filming a documentary on Mediterranean shipwrecks near his ancestral home of Sicily.

Significance

Scorsese was one of the first directors in the post-Hollywood studio-system era to create a signature style based on innovative camera work and editing, the use of soundtrack as a kind of Greek chorus commenting on the action, and the use of violence to elucidate the inner moral struggles of characters. Scorsese, along with Sam Peckinpah, is responsible for developing the use of violence in serious films, elevating it above the body-count mayhem of mere action pictures. In films such as Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, Scorsese transcended easy genre definitions to create works as unique and ultimately indefinable as their central characters. Despite periods of mixed critical success, widely acclaimed films such as The Departed and The Wolf of Wall Street reasserted Scorcese's status as a leading American filmmaker at multiple points over the course of his decades-long career.

Scorsese’s early critical success as a maverick filmmaker with a personal vision, consistent from film to film, placed him in the company of great directors such as Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, and Akira Kurosawa.

Bibliography

Baker, Aaron, ed. A Companion to Martin Scorsese. Malden: Wiley, 2015.

Biskind, Peter. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. New York: Simon, 1999.

Davis, Clayton. "Ranking All 26 Martin Scorsese Movies: From ‘Who’s That Knocking at My Door’ to ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’." Variety, 22 May 2023, variety.com/lists/best-martin-scorsese-movies-ranked/. Accessed 20 August 2024.

De La Fuenta, Anna Marie. "‘The Freshly Cut Grass,’ Executive Produced by Martin Scorsese, Debuts Trailer Ahead of its World Premiere at Tribeca Fest (EXCLUSIVE)." Variety, 3 Jun. 2024, variety.com/2024/film/global/martin-scorsese-tribeca-fest-infinity-hill-celina-murga-rio2c-1236023017/. Accessed 20 August 2024.

Kuznicov, Selena. "Martin Scorsese Partners with Fox Nation for New Docudrama ‘Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints'." Variety, 27 Mar. 2024, variety.com/2024/tv/news/martin-scorsese-saints-docudrama-fox-nation-1235953618/. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Miliora, Maria T. The Scorsese Psyche on Screen: Roots of Themes and Characters in the Films. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004.

Nevius, James, and Michelle Nevius. Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers. Guilford: Lyons, 2014.

Raymond, Marc. Hollywood’s New Yorker: The Making of Martin Scorsese. Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 2013.

Schickel, Richard, and Martin Scorsese. Conversations with Scorsese. New York: Knopf, 2013.

Scorsese, Martin. Scorsese on Scorsese. Rev. ed. Ed. David Thompson and Ian Christie. London: Faber, 2004.