After Hours (1985) [The Criterion Collection] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray Combo

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette, Verna Bloom, Thomas Chong
written by Joseph Minion
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) is an asshole. Let’s get that out of the way. He’s doing a shitty, half-assed job of training the new guy, Lloyd (Bronson Pinchot), in his daytime cubicle hell when Lloyd confesses that his dream isn’t mastering the antiquated data-entry system at their non-descript job, but to start a publication where struggling writers might find an outlet for their work. Paul doesn’t bother hiding his…not disdain, but complete disinterest in what Lloyd’s saying, finding himself distracted by the romance of sheaves of financial documents being moved from one desk to another before standing up and walking away. Paul is detestable. He is The Company rep Carter Burke (Paul Reiser) from the next year’s Aliens, the prototypical yuppie who shows up for a late-night booty call with a stranger in Soho wearing dress pants and a button-down shirt and tie. He is the American Psycho. Paul could give a shit about the voice of the oppressed looking for a creative outlet to contribute to the collective pool of art. He’s all about numbers. He is the reincarnation of North by Northwest‘s unctuous, mercurial ad-man Roger O. Thornhill, whose monogram is “ROT.” (The “O” stands for “nothing.”) After Hours, much like North by Northwest, becomes a nightmare of commodification in which numbers are the source of dehumanization and disassociation. The only reason we really like Paul at all is that we can empathize with his desire to go to bed with 1985 Rosanna Arquette.

Indeed, both films emerge from their directors’ frustrations following recent failures and from a feeling that the mechanisms of the movie industry have somehow passed them by. For Hitchcock, the popular (and critical) rejection of his most personal, most Catholic film in a filmography that includes I Confess, Vertigo, led immediately to his callous determination to make a broadly appealing, populist picture about how everyone, including Mother, is a whore. Even the Saul Bass opening titles of North by Northwest suggest the lines of a ledger, and the film’s success cemented Hitchcock’s view of the audience as Rubes and Philistines deserving of punishment with the following year’s Psycho, and then The Birds and Marnie. For Scorsese, in 1983, he was in Israel doing pre-production on The Last Temptation of Christ when it became clear that a major theatre chain was prepared to boycott any finished product, forcing Paramount to pull the plug. Discouraged, beaten-down, worn out by three consecutive 100-day shoots (New York, New York (1977), Raging Bull (1980), The King of Comedy (1983)), Scorsese homed in on this project: tetchy, jumpy, constantly in motion, the prototypical example of what he would describe as an “efficient” entertainment. If the age of the Blockbuster was dawning, then “Marty” was going to out-hustle the perpetual-motion machine while it was still revving its engines in the grid. He said he did it just to feel refreshed again, alive. Undoubtedly true, but I suspect he also did it as a giant “fuck you” to waning attention spans, flagging courage at the executive level, and the end of the greatest period for filmmaking in the short history of this medium.

In the pursuit of multiple goals, Scorsese armed himself with a new cinematographer, Fassbinder favourite Michael Ballhaus, who, fresh from projects with John Sayles (Baby It’s You (1983), also starring Rosanna Arquette) and Marisa Silver (Old Enough (1984)), provided an agile shooting style based on the ability and desire to shoot multiple scenes in quick succession and be guided by references to shots in other movies. As Ballhaus recalled, he and Marty spoke in a shorthand based on “remember that scene in…?” and revelled in solving problems on the fly. Ballhaus marvels in the audio commentary for this film how good the rain looks, as it’s “just a couple of guys on the roof with hoses.” Scorsese remembers Ballhaus teaching him that off-the-cuff could be not just good enough but potentially spectacular. There’s a tiny wobble in the dolly towards Rosanna Arquette’s character Marcy, for instance, when she gives Paul a wink early on in the picture, and it’s a “flaw” that replicates precisely the weakness in my knees and skip in my heart. I think if it was 1:40 am on a restless summer night and Marcy stopped in the door of her bedroom on the way to the shower and, knowing I was watching her go, turned around and shot me that look, I too would betray a tiny wobble.

Here’s the magic of After Hours, the secret of its enduring cult status and, to a lesser but related degree, its status as my favourite Martin Scorsese picture until Silence: every second of it feels familiar to me. It’s emotionally tactile. I have never had a night as terrible as the one Paul is about to, but I’ve experienced pieces of this night: the dread where I sense an evening spiralling out of control; the awful encroaching horror of knowing the people I came with are chemically altering themselves and changing in front of me like werewolves in the moonlight; the unpleasantness of being surrounded by strangers when I’m longing for home and realizing I’m trapped in a Three Dog Night song. Not to mention those moments of anticipatory ecstasy. When the girl is getting ready in the next room, for instance. When the roommate answers the door and looks at you in a way that reveals you were the topic of conversation before you arrived and the verdict is out, but you’re invited in to plead your case. The all-night diner conversations over too much bad coffee, bad coffee that will never taste as good again, with the girl you’re in love with after that concert and before the accident. I left the dorm of a date late one night freshman year and overheard a “he’s nice,” and then, “Maybe too nice?” I remember pausing for a second with my hand on the wall before the long walk across the dark campus alone. The purple of that night, thick and sad, hope trailing out of me like a steady hemorrhage from a wound that wouldn’t heal–that’s After Hours. It feels horrible, and it feels electric, like the place where the mouth swallows the tail in the cycle of hunger and hopelessness. The could never be better and could never be worse of being fully alive: that’s After Hours.

Paul goes out for a burger alone after work, reading a dog-eared, spine-broken copy of Henry Miller’s autobiographical, sexually explicit Tropic of Cancer. (Max Cady will illicitly give a copy of the same book to 15-year-old Danny Bowden in Scorsese’s 1991 remake of Cape Fear.) A girl says she loves it, paraphrases its insouciance “kick in the pants of truth, beauty, God,” trails off with a giggly “or something like that,” and invites herself over to his table. Under her breath, she pulls Paul into a secret about the oddness of the cashier. It seems clear he’s a dancer practicing a few steps to a tune only he can hear. It seems clear, too, that Paul gets that and in a different context would have no problem saying so, but it’s better to share a secret with a girl who looks like Marcy (Arquette) and has read Henry Miller and wants to sit at your table. When she asks Paul if he wants to buy a bagel sculpture by her artist friend Kiki (Linda Fiorentino), naturally he does. She gives him a phone number to call. It’s the first of several numbers Paul will have to remember, or find himself limited by, or that will loom like a destination he can never conquer throughout this night. It’s a good thing Paul like numbers so much, because he’s about to be fucked by them. He tries to write it down after Marcy leaves, but his pen won’t work. He asks to borrow the cashier’s; it’s the first hint this self-obsessed dick will need to develop a little interest in others to make it home.

The story could end here. Paul could recognize that women who look like Marcy tend not to sit by themselves at greasy spoons in the middle of the night or talk to strange men. Moreover, exceptions would not be made for guys like Paul. All of those things could happen–but we used to be better at heeding portents and warnings when unnatural happenings…happen. Part of After Hours‘ prickly appeal is how we participate in shouting at Paul, this prick, this absolute buffoon. I compare its structure to North by Northwest in its odyssey of murder, lust, and mistaken identity, but it’s also like Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man in that, for someone we barely like, we still hope the hero snaps to his senses whenever he’s presented with extravagant and indisputable evidence of reasonable next steps. It’s a comedy of the audience knowing better, leavened by our confession that, well, shit, of course we would go love-simple if Rosanna Arquette (or Eva Marie Saint, or Britt Ekland) expressed interest, left a phone number, and paused on the phone before saying how glad she is you called–even though it’s midnight and you’re contacting a total stranger who got the Miller quote so wrong it oughta give you pause at her intentions. Unless of course you yourself weren’t that familiar with the book and were holding it like that on the off chance a damsel in distress would see it and presume the depth and sensitivity you obviously lack through your choice of bait. Dangling a Miller is like trying to impress a new lover with The Fountainhead. You may get a bite. It won’t be any kind of fish you’d want to take home.

The story should end here. Paul should look at the phone number (243-3460), laugh to himself, and go to bed dreaming of a promotion to middle-management and retirement in another 30 years. Instead, he goes back out into the night with a single twenty-dollar bill he immediately loses out the window of a taxicab. He’s wearing all beige; his apartment is all beige. He is nobody. He is essentially the Jeff Daniels character in Jonathan Demme’s upcoming Something Wild–a schlub about to intersect with a manifestation of chaotic neutral-trending-to-evil. It’s 11:32 pm, and he has to get to Soho, 28 Howard Street. The cab ride costs $6.50, which he doesn’t have now. He’ll eventually try to take the subway home, but he only has $.97, and the fare increased to $1.50 earlier that evening. There are clocks everywhere in After Hours. In a surreal moment on an increasingly surreal night, Paul notices a $20 bill stuck in a papier-mâché sculpture Kiki is working on in the apartment she shares with Marcy, and either wonders if it’s his, or considers stealing it, or both or neither. Maybe he’s just confused to see exactly what he’s lost entombed like that in a human-shaped thing he compares to Munch’s painting “The Shriek.” “The Scream,” Kiki corrects him in a manner so perfectly castrating it reminds me of every friend and loved one of every woman I didn’t care for enough to deserve kindness and consideration. She sees right through him. She puts him to work, and he’s only too eager to give Kiki a massage while they wait for Marcy to return from a mysterious midnight run. He comments on her body, which Kiki agrees it’s nice: “Yes. Not a lot of scars.”

You know who does have a lot of scars, though? Marcy. At least, we think so. When she finally gets home and spirits Paul back to her room before leaving him again to take a shower (and, oh, that wink), Paul gets curious and discovers a book of burn victims among her things. Scorsese offers a shock-edit quick montage of grave injuries that reminded me of an identical scene in Jaws where Mrs. Brody happens on her husband’s book of shark-bite victims while her kids are playing in the water. But what kind of trouble is Paul in? He snoops some more and uncovers a prescription for butesin (picrate), a topical analgesic for burns. This is all a problem for Paul, who has a childhood trauma involving being stuck in the burn ward while hospitalized for tonsillitis. Given a blindfold, he was warned by the nurses not to take it off under penalty of going through his surgery again. Kids being kids… He tells this to Kiki when she says the weird thing about not having many scars, but she falls asleep before he can finish. For Kiki, Paul is another Lloyd. She’s fucking with him. She tricks him into losing his shirt and tie, replacing it with a black, pinstriped number. Soon it’s revealed that she’s somehow branded him with a piece of newspaper, cemented to his back like the $20 bill is cemented to her sculpture’s back. Just like, in fact. Kiki has established Paul’s value as twenty bucks. Not much, even in 1985 dollars.

Here’s the thing: Marcy has no physical defects that we can see. Although she has several prescriptions for painkillers, she appears to be, except for three scratches on one thigh, the very model of perfection. We know this, since Paul later discovers her corpse. Because he’s a creep, Paul pulls back the covers to look at her nakedness–a tattoo identifying the bartender Paul’s befriended as her boyfriend the only ambiguous clue to whatever pain this breathtaking woman was in. Paul blames himself because he’s a narcissist, but if you play it all back, most of what Paul perceives as foreplay from Marcy is her recollection of terrible betrayal, of a six-hour rape ordeal she survived up until tonight, and repeated pleas for someone to keep her company. Paul, here, is finally starting to see the world as populated by other human beings: the waitress (Teri Garr) who hates her job and credits Paul’s studied, aggressive disinterest in her as inspiration to quit; the bright-eyed lunatic (Catherine O’Hara) who wants to make Paul laugh by shouting out numbers as he’s trying to dial an important phone number and takes it badly when Paul lashes out at her; and finally a sad-eyed taxi dancer (Verna Bloom) who encases Paul in a paper tomb to save him from the mob that has assembled to murder him. They want to tear him apart, piece by piece–just like the victim of an unthinkable crime told on the newspaper clipping Kiki has stuck to him.

Should that be his fate, Paul would be Orpheus, right? Rent asunder by drunken Maenads enraged at his sexual apathy, spurred partly by his mourning for his lost love, Eurydice, to the underworld. Orpheus, the musician, the son of muse Calliope and a king of Thrace, an Argonaut who saved the hero Jason by outplaying the sirens’ song after they threatened to capsize the entire mission for a golden fleece. Scorsese would have been influenced by Marcel Camus’s masterpiece Black Orpheus (1959), which updates the myth to a favela during Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro. Its Orfeu (Breno Mello) wanders the city streets at night, encountering beasts and bureaucrats in offices alive with malignant forms and contracts, swirling like swarms of disembodied insect wings. Paul is covered in paper, too, during this hallucinogenic trial and incapable of saving his lost love due to his impulsiveness and what I’ve always read as his childishness. No great artist, Paul has neither the charm nor the charisma to influence the doorman of a punk club he’s trying to crash or a subway cop who keeps him from jumping the turnstile. He yearns to take advantage of a beautiful woman who is clearly damaged and vulnerable, and we stick with him because his desire is basic enough, desperate enough, to feel unfortunately relatable to most of us. After Hours is the romance of the despairing in lonesome, isolated Edward Hopper tableaux.

I have spent 40 years in swoony thrall to this movie. I tremble every single time I watch it. After Hours is an object lesson in sonder. If Paul can’t figure out how to recognize the yearning of others as more important than his passionless ambition, if he can’t unpack his own traumas and recognize the emptiness in his middle (like the sculpture of “Hunger” in Rear Window) as one he’ll never fill with his delusions of superiority over a city of discarded toys as unwanted and outgrown as he is, then he’ll never be full. The obvious comparison is to Kafka’s The Trial, though I think the better one is to his “A Hunger Artist”: two stories of men who starve because they can’t find anything they want to consume. They make a great show of their suffering. Born in guilt, they die martyrs to it. Paul, this jittery, horny, self-absorbed penitent falling to his knees in the middle of a New York street and beseeching the heavens for mercy, is Scorsese himself. Scorsese, the Orphean artist at the mercy of the pull of his loins as much as he is his heart. The seeker, the paranoid, the frustrated. But for a few bucks, he could’ve had it all. Instead, the universe has it in for him. If life is a noir, its femme fatale is everybody else. And like the hero of most noirs (and Hitchcocks, come to think of it), the question of whether or not you deserve to suffer is moot, because everyone is guilty.

Through it all, Ballhaus’s camera swoops and prowls, now taking on the perspective of keys dropped from a rooftop, now spinning around a pole in a diner, jabbing, strutting. Dick Miller, playing the owner of a little hole-in-the-wall dive where the lost commiserate in isolation, says it best as he gives out a free cuppa: “Different rules apply when it gets this late. You know, it’s after hours.” Did I mention Howard Shore’s synth score? It’s the best Tangerine Dream score Tangerine Dream had nothing to do with, giallo music Scorsese intersperses with needle drops such as Peggy Lee’s perverse ode to unimaginable childhood upheaval, “Is That All There Is?” Like Scorsese’s best work still, After Hours exists at the terminal intersection between European and American cinema, achieving art through discredited genres like exploitation, noir, and horror. Consider the unexpected beauty of the Club Berlin sequence, the two leather daddies making out at the “Terminal Station” bar unnoticed while Paul tries to plead his case, or the way Dick Miller catches a blown kiss (one of the great cuts in movie history). After Hours feels like something Godard would have made: the high of the low. It is an impossibly free film about being trapped, a modern The Odyssey with an unfit, unlikeable hero who ends up where he starts–and only makes it that far because he finally begs someone he would have snarled at in the past for just a little of her presence in his life. “Why are you doing this?” Bloom’s aging barfly asks him, and he says, “I want to live. I just want to live.” In her arms, his head against her breast, he lets out a long sigh, long enough to set down all the lies that are his life. She gives it to him because she’s not used to being asked for her humanity rather than her flesh. So she turns him into plaster, and, as an object of perceived value for maybe the first time, he’s purloined and returned by circumstance to his job. Right on time. And that’s all there is.

THE 4K UHD DISC
After Hours lands on 4K UHD disc courtesy of a director-approved 1.85:1, 2160p transfer from Criterion that is as gorgeous as it is long-awaited. The Dolby Vision/HDR10-enhanced image is luminous without aggressively dialling up the highlights or torpedo-ing the blacks, while the wider colour gamut unearths more vibrancy in a palette at the mercy of night and moody expressions of the same. I found myself transfixed not only by the light fixtures in the Airstream diner and the way their reflections create something of a hall of mirrors (previous incarnations had reduced them to indistinct blobs), but also by the grain and weave of the newspaper strips used in Kiki’s art, by the delineation of every fine hair on Marcy’s arm, and by the stucco grain of the weathered paint peeling away from a light pole to which one of Paul’s “Wanted” posters is affixed. The one time I managed to see After Hours projected it was via a degraded 35mm print, so I have to say this is easily the best the film has ever looked to me. Gone is the smothering yellow patina of the DVD; hard to believe that until this Criterion edition, the movie bypassed Blu-ray entirely. The attendant 24-bit, 1.0 LPCM audio is, what can I say, exceptional, and shockingly immersive despite its centre-channel orientation. I jumped a couple of times and can confirm that every aspect of this picture was designed to discourage comfort. The booming punk atmospherics in the Club Berlin–on “Mohawk Night,” no less–are simultaneously disorienting and uncluttered, not simply white noise. It’s what I imagine getting killed with an icicle might feel like: an overwhelming sensory experience nonetheless focused on a specific and lucid source. I’ve started to tell slow adaptors that for all the visual benefits of 4K, what really makes the format shine is its uncompressed audio.

“Fran Leibowitz and Martin Scorsese” (20 mins.) is two friends and rollicking raconteurs chatting with each other about the recent history of New York and how After Hours is an essential time capsule of a particular period in the city’s history. If you’ve never witnessed Scorsese’s joy speaking with Liebowitz, treat yourself. I would have watched a three-hour version of this. Marty, characteristically, makes the technical (high-speed lenses, Ballhaus’s techniques) effortless to understand. A few of the anecdotes are repeated in the lively patchwork audio commentary featuring Scorsese, Ballhaus, producer/star Dunne, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, and producer Amy Robinson. Highlights? When Kiki drops her keys down to Paul, Scorsese wanted the keys to seem deadly; Ballhaus remembers it as nine shots, then counts them as the scene unfurls to come up with 11. Scorsese remembers it as six shots, and says they put the camera on a bungee to capture the keys’ point-of-view… Here, even in the supplements, a dispute about numbers. Though the bulk of the commentary was recorded in 2004, Dunne and Robinson interject with more recent observations exclusive to this disc. This film’s connection at their level, by the way, to Chilly Scenes of Winter–a movie I adore–helped me connect some dots in terms of the quality and breadth of the artists’ community that came together during this period.

Dating back to the 2004 DVD release, “The Making of After Hours” (18 mins.) is likewise fabulous stuff. We learn that while Scorsese was busy with The Last Temptation of Christ, Dunne and Robinson sent the script to Tim Burton, who was preparing to branch out from animation at that point. Burton responded to the material but withdrew once he heard Scorsese was interested–and that, my friends, is how you fucking do it. I liked the tidbit about Scorsese handing out a shotlist to everyone in the film so that no one would be surprised about any one day’s enterprise–a smart, efficient way to get people on board and ready to roll. Dunne remembers that Scorsese could barely contain his mirth while shooting Paul’s trials, and I thought of an apocryphal story about Tennessee Williams buying out the front row on opening night of his plays and, during their most serious, heart-rending moments, bellowing laughter. “The Look of After Hours” (18 mins.) is a new segment with production designer Jeffrey Townsend and costume designer Rita Ryack discussing how the mysterious shapes and structures in the film’s interiors add to its overall inscrutability. When you don’t know why the things are where they are, it makes it all feel like a horror movie, bleeding paranoia into the piece. Ryack describes Paul as dressed to blend into his apartment’s decor, befitting his nondescript status, and points out the taxi driver’s baseball cap emblazoned with the word “captain” as an indicator that this is Charon, ferrying Paul into the underworld. She tells a lovely story about going bra shopping with Scorsese to find Fiorentino already there, trying on a few options. These featurettes are indispensable.

Seven deleted scenes (8 mins.) expand Catherine O’Hara’s Gail’s razor-wire-tense exchanges with Paul; had moments like Gail inviting her neighbours to either go back to sleep or “come out here and sit on my face” been left in, After Hours would’ve gone from having a scene-stealing performance by O’Hara to being a film about Gail. There is also the revelation of a suicide note from Marcy that gives John Heard a nice moment to play but proves redundant and a little bit on the nose–as do a couple of other Dunne-centric scene extensions that threaten to derail the headlong rhythm of the piece. I did love, however, a return to Dick Miller in which he asks Paul to say hello to Marcy for him. I knew a lot of these late-night denizens when I was a kid and even cried on the shoulder of a waitress named “Destiny” at an IHOP that was torn down a decade ago. It was probably a speed bump in the movie proper, but I’m enrichened by it here in the special features. The vintage trailer (2 mins.) is surprisingly listless while still doing a pretty good job of making After Hours look like a Mean Streets redux. Not having Howard Shore’s uncanny score disguises the ethos of the picture, I think. Wrapping things up, Sheila O’Malley’s gratifying essay graces the disc’s booklet, going over the Kafka and Hitchcock of it while offering an excellent overview of the film’s making, Scorsese’s mid-’80s mindset, and the movie’s status as an overlooked classic that has slowly found its place in the canon of great American movies. An identically configured 1080p Blu-ray configured is included with the 4K platter.

97 minutes; R; UHD: 1.85:1 (2160p/MPEG-H, Dolby Vision/HDR10), BD: 1.85:1 (1080p/MPEG-4); English 1.0 LPCM; UHD: English subtitles; BD-100 + BD-50; Region-free; Criterion