Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967, Martin Scorsese) (Patreon)

60/100

Second viewing, last seen in early 1996 at the Museum of the Moving Image, double-billed with Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore; "I liked both of them a lot" was my only evaluative comment to a friend via email. (Though I added "Certainly a lot more than Casino"—that was still in theaters at the time and I really hated it back then. Am more mixed now.) And it remains an impressive debut, hampered mostly by the fact that everything involving J.R.'s unnamed girlfriend has very obviously been imposed upon unrelated male-bonding footage. This eventually becomes somewhat incoherent—early on, the editing scheme clearly suggests that J.R. is unhappily remembering a relationship that's since ended, but then later The Girl refers to his mountain-climbing expedition, as if we're seeing everything chronologically, as opposed to present-tense distraction with the gang regularly interrupted by memories. Otherwise love Schoonmaker's associative work here, which at one point uses a barely audible crack about "fairies" (the more common 'f' word in the '60s, I suspect) to trigger a Staten Island Ferry flashback. And Scorsese apparently developed some new tricks between '65 and '67, as the buddy scenes are shot fairly straightforwardly (albeit with uncommon dynamism in  performances and camera movement) while the romantic scenes—not even including that added sex montage*—are replete with striking oddities, from repeatedly crossing the 180° axis via mirrors (that scene has a truly dizzying number of different angles) to the moment that cuts overhead and zooms out when J.R. abruptly stands up to emphasize an anecdote he's relaying. (I so wanted to show you the latter that I just made my first tweet since July 1st.)

Lotta spot-the-lifelong-preoccupation fun to be had here, too, of course. There's Scorsese's mom cooking; there's a bunch of religious iconography tossed in for no as-yet-apparent reason (J.R.'s madonna-whore complex takes a while to surface; that's another aspect of the film that keeps me from embracing it more wholeheartedly, though I have to bear in mind that it was still reasonably fresh dramatic material back then); OMG there's a lengthy discussion of The Searchers during which Keitel basically does a Scorsese impression ("I'll tell you, you missed a good picture"); there's fully half of Mean Streets in embryonic form; so on and so forth. Keitel was an amazing find—just imagine, by the way, having played the lead, or arguably the closest thing to it, in both Scorsese's debut and Tarantino's debut—who nearly manages to paper over the film's irregular joins by maintaining the same lightly pugnacious energy over both halves of the protracted shoot. Zina Bethune emits no corresponding star-is-born radiance but holds the screen decently well, while the unknowns who play J.R.'s posse tend to look ideal when they're being drowned out by the Searchers or the Bell Notes. Really, this is as Future Legend's First Fledgling Effort as a movie gets, facilitating enough auteurist analysis for countless cinema-studies papers while being engaging for its own sake. (I'm particularly impressed that Scorsese had the self-awareness, at his tender age, to have J.R. "forgive" The Girl for having been raped and then not understand why she boots him out in response.) Ending does nothing whatsoever for me, but then I'm no longer Catholic.

* I was kind of stunned that Scorsese had used "The End" in the same calendar year that it was released—The Doors came out in January '67, Who's That Knocking premiered in November. Turns out that scene wasn't in the original I Call First cut, was shot sometime in '68 after the distributor demanded nudity. Still pretty damn quick on the draw needle-dropping a classic, though.