But what\u2019s more compelling \u2013 and informative \u2013 about these films is how they function as a hinge between the film student and the filmmaker. Like most great directors, Scorsese has never been shy about lifting and repurposing images and ideas that appeal to him, but the influences are particularly clear here: Bergman-eseque close-ups, French New Wave-style black-and-white photography and confessional narration, a full-on 8 \u00bd<\/em> homage. Many a filmmaker has done the same; everyone needs a few rounds of being someone else to figure out who they are. But such exploration is usually done in private, in independent or student films that might not even see the light of day; to his credit, Scorsese allows us to watch him synthesizing his various inspirations into his own voice. Scorsese Shorts<\/em> becomes, in effect, a game of connect the dots \u2013 both to the filmmakers he idolized, and the thematic ideas and visual motifs he would revisit later in his career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His first two student films, What\u2019s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This<\/em><\/strong>? <\/strong>(1963) and It\u2019s Not Just You, Murray! <\/em><\/strong>(1964) each run a reel or two, and have the infectious energy of a short comedy \u2013 coupled with an already omnipresent freshness to his visual approach. They\u2019re also propelled by Scorsese\u2019s abundant love for cinema; the latter, for example, stops cold for an absolutely out-of-nowhere musical number, which gives us the sense that the young director was simply hungry to try everything<\/em>. Maybe he wouldn\u2019t get a chance to make a musical later, he may have thought, so he tries it here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Murray<\/em> generates the most interest among Scorsese scholars for its place as his first gangster narrative, its title character a not-altogether-bright guy who introduces himself by ticking off the cost of his clothes and car (\u201cYou see this tie? Twenty dollars. See these shoes? Fifty dollars\u201d). The connection to Goodfellas<\/em> is crystal clear, especially in the presence of Scorsese\u2019s mother Catherine as the criminal\u2019s proud mama, forever feeding him pasta \u2013even through the mesh of the prison visiting room. In moments like that, it\u2019s clear that Murray<\/em> is more like a spoof of gangster movies than the real thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No such mirth penetrates The Big Shave<\/em><\/strong> (1967), which was his first color film, and which uses it well. The premise is simple: as soothing big band music plays, a young man enters his bathroom, lathers up his face, shaves, and applies his aftershave. He then lathers up again and shaves more, nicking himself in the process, a little cut that turns into a cascade of blood; the liquid is a deep, dark red, so it hits the sparkling clean white sink with maximum impact. The short, a broad metaphor for the bloodshed of Vietnam, would be just another late-\u201860s protest piece if it bore just about any other director\u2019s name; here, it\u2019s noteworthy for the deep, spattered blood that points the way towards later works like Taxi Driver<\/em> and Bringing Out the Dead<\/em> (or even The Last Temptation of Christ<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the centerpieces of the collection are Italianamerican <\/em><\/strong>(1974) and American Boy <\/em><\/strong>(1978), each running just under an hour, from the period in which Scorsese was no longer a student, but one of the \u201cmovie brats\u201d so hot in the New Hollywood. Throughout this period, he would often chase his narrative features with documentary meditations on (roughly) the same subjects; The Last Waltz<\/em> pairs with New York, New York <\/em>(musicals), American Boy<\/em> with Taxi Driver <\/em>(more on that presently), and Italianamerican <\/em>with Mean Streets<\/em>, another portrait of the Little Italy neighborhood Scorsese called home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The background here is fascinating (and, frankly, funny): contacted by the National Endowment for the Humanities to contribute an episode about Italian-Americans for a documentary series on the immigrant experience called A Storm of Strangers<\/em>, Scorsese decided to forgo the customary all-encompassing approach and focus squarely on his parents. There is some archival footage and a few photos, but not many; his focus is on their memories, of immigrating, of tenement life, and of the growth (sometimes painful) of the neighborhood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unsurprisingly, it\u2019s one of Scorsese\u2019s most personal films \u2013 and for my money, one of his best \u2013 offering the unique perspective on a personality that you can only get from observing the people who raised them. Catherine and Charles Scorsese carry themselves quite differently, but in both, you can hear the rhythms of the neighborhood vernacular so key to his pictures; she\u2019s something of a chatterbox while he\u2019s a quiet observer, and just in that contrast, you can see the shadows of Tommy and Paulie, two quintessential Scorsese characters, in Goodfellas<\/em> (so it\u2019s not surprising that Catherine played Tommy\u2019s mother). But they\u2019re also telling a story of long-lasting love, which he hasn\u2019t really told elsewhere in his filmography; in the way they interrupt, jab, and top each other, we\u2019re hearing a two-act these two people have spent decades perfecting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is, in fact, an occasion here; as in so many households, Catherine makes a big pasta dinner every Sunday, and during the interview, she\u2019ll jump up, sometimes mid-thought, to go stir the sauce. (The recipe is included in the end credits, and in the Blu-ray insert.) When the meal is ready, the conversation works its way over to the dinner table, where husband, wife, and son continue to tell stories and argue about their memories, and as the film unwinds, we realize Scorsese is doing something seemingly simple but next to impossible: he\u2019s replicating the experience of hanging out with these people. They\u2019re both wonderful storytellers, to be sure, but this is not an earth-shattering event – it\u2019s just an entertaining family dinner, something he does all the time. But he decided he wanted to document it, and by the end of the 49-minute running time, we feel like we know these two people, like we\u2019re family ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n American Boy <\/em>captures the feeling of a very different hang: up all night, getting high with your friends, and trading war stories. (No drugs are consumed on camera, but if you\u2019ve read anything about this period in Scorsese\u2019s life, you get the feeling there were plenty just out of frame.) The focus is on Steven Prince, a hard-living type who worked in various corners of show business, as a tour manager and carpenter, and even occasionally as an actor (he plays the gun salesman in Taxi Driver<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n But more than anything, Prince is a raconteur, and most of American Boy <\/em>finds him telling his best drug stories (and they\u2019re all drug stories, even the ones that are just about the kind of people you\u2019re around when you do a lot of drugs). The real darkness of these stories reveals itself, occasionally but strategically; that darkness is offset (or perhaps heightened, your call) by the old home movies from Prince\u2019s past that Scorsese uses as interstitials \u2013 reminding us that this was a child of the \u201850s, as Robert Klein once put it, and thus the very picture of picket-fence normalcy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Scorsese and his subject come from markedly different backgrounds. Prince is from the Midwest, his father was a colonel in the army, and, in sharp contrast to Italianamerican<\/em>, Prince\u2019s mother \u201dcooks, no doubt, the most bland food in the world. No taste at all!\u201d That all-American childhood, and Prince\u2019s descent into various underworlds, makes him not far removed from Taxi Driver<\/em>\u2019s Travis Bickle, and indeed he tells a story of shooting a stick-up man in a desert gas station that sounds like a variation on Travis\u2019s first bodega kill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Film buffs will also note a much more explicit lift. In talking about his life as a high-functioning addict (\u201cIt\u2019s a life juice, and you don\u2019t need that much sleep\u201d) he tells a story of saving an overdosing woman via an adrenaline shot to the heart, and so many of the details reappear in Pulp Fiction <\/em> – the necessary \u201cstabbing motion,\u201d consulting a \u201cmedical dictionary,\u201d the practical application of a magic marker \u2013 that there seems little doubt that Quentin Tarantino\u2019s fabled Video Archives carried a copy of the only previous official release of the film (alongside Italianamerican<\/em>, on a VHS tape), and that it was part of his video store film education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One thread runs through both the fictional shorts and the documentary films: awareness of the camera. Early in It\u2019s Not Just You, Murray!<\/em>, the title character stops in mid-sentence and informs the director, \u201cCut what I\u2019m doin\u2019, I forgot to introduce myself.\u201d Similarly, Scorsese begins Italianamerican<\/em> by including the opening moments of filming and his instructions to his parents; when the film ends, he includes that footage as well, as his mother barks, \u201cNow that\u2019s enough for today, Marty,\u201d hurries over to switch the air conditioning back on (New York window units are far too loud for sound recording), and pleads, \u201cNow listen, can I put my furniture back?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But American Boy\u2019s <\/em>conclusion is the most instructive. Prince concludes by telling a heartfelt, sincere story about a conversation he recently had, about the state of his life, with his dying father. As the film continues to run, Scorsese asks him to tell it again, and then a third time \u2013 telling him to take and retake this personal moment to make it a little more poignant, \u201cdirecting\u201d him to a more affecting \u201cperformance.\u201d It\u2019s an incredible conclusion, and easy to read as something of a self-indictment by the filmmaker. But the message is clear, in these moments that blur the too-simple demarcation between his fiction and non-fiction, it\u2019s all the same art form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Only the aesthetics are in play; it\u2019s all staged, you could say. And you could also say that it\u2019s all true. ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/murray-1024x740.png\")
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