Why the destabilizing lunacy of Martin Scorsese's After Hours still resonates

Martin Scorsese is an august lion of cinema now, best known for his hard-hitting dramas (and his occasional vivisections of Marvel movies), but The Wolf of Wall Street was no crazy outlier—Scorsese has always had a wicked sense of humor. Rich supporting evidence can be found in After Hours, his darkly comic romp from 1985.

“I think the reason the movie remains timeless for so many people is, despite the anachronisms of cell phones and the internet and all that kind of stuff, what is omnipresent and constantly relatable is a growing madness in American behavior, in extremities,” the film’s star, Griffin Dunne, tells The A.V. Club. “You see crazy people on Tik-Tok, and Karens and Trump and things are at a heightened level, and I think that kind of madness just translates for moviegoers, generation after generation.”

One of Scorsese’s most loose-limbed offerings, After Hours is a pleasurably disorienting work of unique kinetic energy. A tricked-out, director-approved Criterion special edition Blu-ray of the film, with a new 4K digital restoration approved by editor Thelma Schoonmaker, deleted scenes, and new features, released this week, brings a renewed appreciation of the title.

The beguiling film leans into the cascading, Kafkaesque catastrophes that befall Dunne’s Paul Hackett, a Manhattan office worker who ventures out to SoHo late one night with a hookup on his mind. Mistaken for a serial burglar and waylaid in his attempts to simply secure subway fare and return home, Paul becomes a magnet for all sorts of destabilizing energies.

Producer Amy Robinson says, “What I’ve heard much more, which I find interesting, is that people say, well, your movie is the reason I moved to New York. So all of the horrible and frightening things that happen to Paul made them want to come here.”

A roster of strange and volatile characters

Shot by Scorsese on an aggressively downsized budget in the summer of 1984, After Hours came on the heels of the director’s The King Of Comedy, a commercial failure in 1982, and the last-minute shelving of The Last Temptation Of Christ, on which Scorsese had been in preproduction for more than a year. (The latter would eventually be made, and released in 1988.)

In this regard, both the staying power and narrative of After Hours perhaps makes perfect sense—the film’s roster of strange and volatile characters (its excellent supporting cast includes Rosanna Arquette, Linda Fiorentino, Teri Garr, John Heard, Catherine O’Hara, Will Patton, and Cheech Marin) serving as emotionally recognizable figures for people who had traumatic or unstable home lives growing up. Thus, more than three decades on, it still beckons, like a flame to a moth.

In the moment, deeper readings weren’t necessarily part of everyday discussions. Dunne recalls that he and his cohorts threw themselves into a production that was fully immersive owing to its night shoots. “My cousin Tony was a grip on the film and he came to my apartment with black muslin and blacked out all my windows, so I could sleep during the day,” says Dunne. “So you just get into a rhythm where the sun comes up and it’s time to go to bed. I went to this totally blacked-out apartment and rose like a vampire to start work.”

“Marty, at least then, was a tremendous night owl,” adds Robinson. “He stayed up all night and just watched movies. So though it was tiring for some people, I think Marty got stronger as the shoot went on, because he was in his element, to be shooting at night.”

‘A state of increasing anxiety and sexual frustration’

The production itself inspired Dunne in ways that expanded the set of tools in his actor’s grab-bag. “It was totally born of this film, and encouraged by Marty’s energy and his appreciation for the actors to try out new things and just keep things alive,” Dunne says. “I had to stay in a state of increasing panic and anxiety and sexual frustration, from the first frame all the way until the end.”

The screen-captured apex of his experimentation can be glimpsed late in the movie. Without reading his director in on his specific intent, immediately after Scorsese called action on a sequence, Dunne raced around the corner from the stage where they were shooting to the historic Ear Inn Bar, burst in, and loudly announced free drinks for everyone, to a resounding cheer. Dunne then scrambled back to set, walking into a shot with Verna Bloom which opens the scene. “It was just something that sort of helped me, it was fun and games,” he recalls with a laugh. “I have no idea if anybody paid the bill or not. I didn’t stick around to find out.”

Roger Ebert was an early big fan, but many critics didn’t seem to grasp After Hours’ indulgence of screwball paranoia as a snapshot of the times, and a statement on social dislocation. “Having always wanted to be in a picture that was reviewed by Pauline Kael, who I admired so much, I would’ve preferred she didn’t say I was a second-rate Dudley Moore,” says Dunne. “That, I still remember.”

Still, After Hours earned Dunne a Golden Globe nomination, and Scorsese Best Director honors at the Cannes Film Festival when it played the Croisette the following year. It also won Best Feature and Best Director prizes at the Independent Spirit Awards.

‘Mystified’ by the reviews

“Quite honestly, we were mystified by these tepid reviews from intelligent reviewers,” says Dunne. “But this was my second time around with this befuddlement. When An American Werewolf In London came out it also received tepid reviews, and its criticism was how dare (writer-director John) Landis combine humor and horror. Now that is de rigueur for every horror movie. And as time passed with After Hours, it’s become its own genre in itself. But at the time these certain critics who we give so much credit for their intelligence, they didn’t see it.”

Marvin Mattleson’s evocative poster—of Dunne’s head representing the crown on a wristwatch, being gripped and twisted by a pair of manicured, red-polished nails—should have probably clued in more viewers as to the surreal mayhem that awaits in the movie. (“I have to tell you, I hated it at the time. It really disturbed me,” says Dunne of the artwork. “But I get it, it is an arresting image.”)

But perhaps After Hours was always destined to be a diamond in the rough, discovered in unlikely fashion and time. Dunne tells an anecdote that certainly makes that seem the case. “We got crew jackets that had my picture on it saying ‘Find Him!,’ from the wanted poster (in the movie), and every now and then one will show up. I’ll see someone wearing it on Instagram,” he shares. “But the most surreal time was back when they had bicycle messengers, I had something delivered. And they’re always strange people who are the bicycle messengers, quite eccentric fellows. So this guy had the After Hours jacket, but it had been covered in filth and it was ripped up. I said, ‘Where did you get that?’ And he said, ‘I found it in the trash.’”