Who’s That Knocking at My Door: How the world met… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

Who’s That Knock­ing at My Door: How the world met Mar­tin Scorsese

15 Nov 2017

Words by Mark Allison

A black and white portrait of a serious-looking man with intense eyes and a focused expression.
A black and white portrait of a serious-looking man with intense eyes and a focused expression.
It’s 50 years since the direc­tor announced his arrival as a major new force in Amer­i­can cinema.

The year 1967 is right­ly laud­ed as a land­mark in Amer­i­can cin­e­ma. The likes of Bon­nie and Clyde, The Grad­u­ate, In the Heat of the Night, and The Dirty Dozen ush­ered in a new era of main­stream film-mak­ing which unashamed­ly dealt in graph­ic themes of vio­lence, sex­u­al­i­ty, and race. Yet amid the sound and fury of these provoca­tive films, the arrival of anoth­er pio­neer­ing film-mak­er is often over­looked. It was in Novem­ber that year that a young grad­u­ate of the New York Uni­ver­si­ty pre­miered his direc­to­r­i­al debut. Fifty years ago, at the Chica­go Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val, the world was intro­duced to Mar­tin Scorsese.

Orig­i­nal­ly screened under the title I Call First but now com­mon­ly known as Who’s That Knock­ing at My Door, Scorsese’s debut may not be as well regard­ed as his lat­er work, but it’s influ­ence is every bit as per­va­sive. Shot on a minus­cule bud­get and cob­bled togeth­er over sev­er­al years, the film would pro­vide a touch­stone for the rest of the young director’s pio­neer­ing career. Draw­ing upon his own expe­ri­ences, Scorsese’s first film is an uneven but com­plex med­i­ta­tion on Ital­ian-Amer­i­can iden­ti­ty, faith, and mas­culin­i­ty – all themes which have con­tin­ued to pre­oc­cu­py his work for the last half century.

The film start­ed life as a stu­dent project in 1965, curi­ous­ly titled Bring on the Danc­ing Girls. Har­vey Kei­t­el, then work­ing as a court stenog­ra­ph­er, was enlist­ed for his act­ing debut in the lead role of JR”. The result­ing first cut was a large­ly plot­less, 65-minute effort which fol­lowed JR and his friends as they goofed, got drunk, and pur­sued women across Lit­tle Italy. In Scorsese’s own words, the ini­tial screen­ing was a dis­as­ter” and his work was uni­ver­sal­ly hated”.

The fol­low­ing year, Scors­ese pro­cured the finance nec­es­sary to extend the scope of the film and intro­duced a roman­tic side-plot. Kei­t­el was reluc­tant­ly brought back for reshoots and Zina Bethune cast as his girl­friend. These scenes were shot on low­er-qual­i­ty film stock and spliced with the exist­ing footage, the only give­away being the fluc­tu­at­ing length of Keitel’s hair. It was this ver­sion of the film, now titled I Call First, which screened at Chica­go in 1967.

A black-and-white image showing a man and a woman sitting together, looking serious.

Despite the film’s stilt­ed pro­duc­tion, Scorsese’s tal­ent was quick­ly recog­nised. Roger Ebert instant­ly described the film as a great moment in Amer­i­can movies”, and lat­er reflect­ed that it had announced the arrival of an impor­tant new direc­tor”. Nev­er­the­less, the film did not receive a wide dis­tri­b­u­tion for over a year, when it was picked up by exploita­tion dis­trib­u­tor Joseph Bren­ner and a graph­ic sex scene was hasti­ly added in order to court the exploita­tion mar­ket. The new title was tak­en from the song by The Genies which plays over the end credits.

Like many of his con­tem­po­raries, Scorsese’s ear­ly films owes a great debt to the French New Wave. His errat­ic edit­ing style and mono­chrome pho­tog­ra­phy echoes Jean-Luc God­dard, but Scorsese’s sub­jects are dis­tinct­ly Amer­i­can. With this debut film, the direc­tor chose to cast a light upon the envi­ron­ment and cul­ture in which he’d grown up, and in doing so gives a pro­found­ly authen­tic impres­sion of the Ital­ian-Amer­i­can experience.

Keitel’s JR is a thin­ly veiled sub­sti­tute for Scors­ese him­self. In one charm­ing scene, JR meets a girl on the Stat­en Island Fer­ry and pro­ceeds to clum­si­ly deliv­er a spiel on the bril­liance of John Ford’s The Searchers. In this way, JR and his friends are total­ly detached from the mafioso stereo­types which often define Ital­ian-Amer­i­cans on-screen. Gang­sters are periph­er­al fig­ures, and the clos­est thing to a shoot-out is a slow-motion play-fight over a pock­et-sized revolver. The direc­tor would lat­er proud­ly state that Who’s That Knock­ing At My Door was the first film to show what Ital­ian-Amer­i­cans were real­ly like”.

Cen­tral to the world in which Scorsese’s char­ac­ters live is the con­tra­dic­to­ry role of reli­gion, per­haps unsur­pris­ing con­sid­er­ing that the direc­tor once flirt­ed with join­ing the priest­hood. Catholic guilt is a pre­dom­i­nant theme through­out Who’s That Knock­ing at My Door, specif­i­cal­ly the rela­tion­ship between JR’s con­ser­v­a­tive upbring­ing and the sin­ful real­i­ty of his exis­tence. This is a con­tra­dic­tion he projects onto the women in his life, whom he divides into two, dis­tinct groups; nice girls and broads”. The pure, vir­ginal image he cre­ates of his nice girl” girl­friend is dis­rupt­ed when she con­fides that she was once raped by a past boyfriend. Unable to accept that it was not her fault, he dis­miss­es her as a whore” and shuns her.

JR’s warped under­stand­ing of female sex­u­al­i­ty ulti­mate­ly leads him to sac­ri­fice his poten­tial hap­pi­ness, but this is root­ed in the tox­i­c­i­ty and con­fu­sion of his own desires. He fan­ta­sis­es about casu­al, unin­hib­it­ed sex with expe­ri­enced women, but refus­es inti­ma­cy with his own girl­friend because he believes her to rep­re­sent an ide­alised image of celi­bate romance and Chris­t­ian mar­riage. His expec­ta­tion that women con­form to the arti­fi­cial stan­dards of a nice girl” or a broad” mere­ly act as a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for his para­dox­i­cal yearnings.

This con­fused dual­i­ty between improp­er” desire and prop­er” romance crops up in many of Scorsese’s male pro­tag­o­nists. In Taxi Dri­ver, Travis Bick­le is thwart­ed in his attempts at romance because he is unable to dis­tin­guish between the two, choos­ing a pornog­ra­phy cin­e­ma as the venue for a sec­ond date. For Jake La Mot­ta in Rag­ing Bull, sex­u­al­i­ty and vio­lence go hand in hand. He repress­es his phys­i­cal desire in order to save ener­gy for box­ing match­es, but lat­er his impo­ten­cy caus­es him to lash out vio­lent­ly against his loved ones. And in The Age of Inno­cence, New­land Archer is torn between his love for his chaste fiancé May Welland and the rebel­lious divorcee Ellen Olen­s­ka. Clear­ly, the self-destruc­tive nature of mas­cu­line sex­u­al­i­ty is a top­ic which has con­tin­ued to fas­ci­nate the Man­hat­tan­ite director.

All this, of course, would come lat­er. What Who’s that Knock­ing at My Door does illus­trate, how­ev­er, is that Scors­ese nev­er saw the world as one of heroes and vil­lains or clear-cut moral­i­ty. Despite its hum­ble ori­gins, this film offers a unique­ly ambigu­ous per­spec­tive on mid-’60s Amer­i­can life and the con­flict­ing human impuls­es which drove it. As Roger Ebert pre­dict­ed in 1969, Scors­ese would go on to explore these ideas with greater depth and pol­ish in lat­er films – in many ways, 1971’s Mean Streets feels like a high-gloss remake of this ini­tial effort. Like so many oth­er young direc­tors, Mar­tin Scors­ese was knock­ing on the door of Hol­ly­wood, and it wasn’t long before he was answered.

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