Martin Scorsese
Blake, Richard
SCORSESE: A WORK IN PROGRESS MARTIN SCORSESE A Journey Mary Pat Kelly Thunder's Mouth Press, $21.95, 336 pp. Richard Blake rom Mean Streets (1973) through the brilliant Taxi Driver (1976)...
...While he grows as an artist, the critical literature will grow with him...
...The effort to make it preoccupied him for years, and the hysterical reaction of the religious Right must have made the project doubly memorable...
...The introductory chapter provides an illuminating discussion of Scorsese's Catholicism, his use of ritual and images, and his preoccupation with characters who sin and seek redemption, whether they know it or not...
...Their long relationship has given this new book a depth and texture rarely found in film biographies...
...Readers expecting interpretation and analysis of the films will be disappointed...
...After a brief introduction to each of her chapters, Kelly weaves together, without a seam showing, snippets of interviews with Scorsese and his family, Commonweal 28 February 1992: 25 friends, and collaborators, ranging from his parents and parish priest at Old St...
...Scorsese does not discourage a theological analysis of his work: "My whole life has been movies and religion...
...But the venture was really an artistic misfire, a distraction from his more important work...
...That's it, nothing else...
...Is it Fritz Lang, or Carl Reiner, or Max Reinhardt...
...Fritz Reiner, a tyrannical director of "great movies," is mentioned on page 257, but no such person appears in any of the standard reference books...
...In addition, by offering quotations solely from his enthusiastic friends and collaborators, Kelly's book has little critical distance from the films...
...Martin Scorsese is a work in progress...
...Kelly has provided a fine beginning to that work...
...While Woody Allen has documented the torments of affluence and Steven Spielberg has explored the imagination of childhood, Scorsese has peeled back the eyelids of his audiences and forced them to watch the sordid, cruel realities of urban life that most of us would rather not see...
...The Latin words of institution of the Eucharist (page 9) are garbled, and the film Years of Lightning, Day of Drums is said to be an account of the assassination of Robert rather than John Kennedy...
...q 26: 28 February 1992 Commonweal...
...those trying to understand the mind of the man behind them will be delighted...
...Unfortunately, several inaccuracies survived the editing process...
...The religious concerns of the author and her subject lead to a disproportionate preoccupation with The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), one of Scorsese's least successful ventures...
...Richard Blake rom Mean Streets (1973) through the brilliant Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980) to Godfelas (1990) and Cape Fear (1991), Martin Scorsese holds a solid claim to the title of America's premier filmmaker...
...The method is more reportorial than reflective...
...I have no reason to doubt that Scorsese, who spent one year in the minor seminary in New York before transferring to Cardinal Hayes High School, might have been fascinated with Nikos Kazantzakis's inflated novel and to this day he may regard the film as his most important work...
...His treatment of grace at work in a world crippled by sin is far more profound in The Color of Money (1986) or "Life Lessons" (his segment in the trilogy New York Stories, 1989...
...He is a major American artist, deserving serious critical attention...
...The author has clearly chosen to write about the man and his artistic processes rather than his films...
...Rather than discussing the finished works and the life in a way that is mutually illuminating, she has provided snippets of interviews to explain how he selected a property, edited a script, or composed a shot...
...This anecdotal style sets well-defined limits on this study...
...She has previously written Martin Scorsese: The First Decade...
...Patrick's in Manhattan's Little Italy to major figures like Robert DeNiro, Paul Newman, and Liza Minnelli...
...Mary Pat Kelly, television producer, screen writer, documentarian, and teacher, has been following the development of Martin Scorsese for more than twenty years...
...Through this mosaic technique, the image of the artist emerges in photographic detail...
...Although the religion comes _up at various points in the book, the anecdotal method prevents the author from pursuing a systematic exploration of the topic...
...They began a correspondence while she was studying as a Sister of Providence in Indiana and he had just begun his career as a filmmaker and teacher at New York University...
...It receives two full chapters, while Taxi Driver, an early masterpiece, is treated in eleven pages with illustrations...
...The complete filmography of Scorsese's directing, writing, and acting credits is an invaluable reference tool...
...Again, quotations offer a unique insight into the enthusiasm of Scorsese and his friends for the project, but it forces uncritical acceptance of everything they say, and provides no space for the author or reader to ask whether such enthusiasm was justified...
...Descriptive material on Scorsese's early works, including his student films and first projects in Hollywood, is informative, and the forty photographs, mostly informal shots from the sets, offer a sense of intimacy with the filmmaker and his work...
...Scarcely fifty years old, he holds the promise of great films yet to come...
Vol. 119 • February 1992 • No. 4
