R, 90m, 1967

Starring Harvey Keitel (J.R.), Zina Bethune (The Girl), Lennard Kuras (Joey), Ann Collette (Girl in Dream), Harry Northup (Harry), and Michael Scala (Sally). Directed by Martin Scorsese. Produced by Joseph Weill, Retzi Manoogian, and Haig Manoogian. Screenplay by Martin Scorsese.

            Who’s That Knocking at My Door started as a student film, originally titled Bring on the Dancing Girls, while Scorsese was still a student at New York University. Scorsese, dissatisfied with much of the original footage, decided to reshoot the entire film, except for several scenes with Harvey Keitel. One of Scorsese’s professors, Haig Manoogian, saw promise in the young filmmaker. So, he helped finance the new production, now entitled I Call First, later to be entitled Who’s That Knocking at My Door.

            The film centers around J.R. (Harvey Keitel), a young aimless Italian American, who enjoys goofing off with his friends while living in New York City. One day, while riding the Staten Island ferry, J.R. spies a girl (Zina Bethune) reading a French magazine. J.R. walks up to her and clumsy starts a conversation. They immediately hit it off, engaging in conversations, ranging from John Wayne to reading French, as well as their ambitions for the future. Despite being from two very different backgrounds, the two begin dating. However, the young couple’s drastically different lifestyles soon put their romance into question, and J.R. is forced to look inward, to try and save his relationship.

            Who’s That Knocking at My Door was released during a period in film history known as the American New Wave or the New Hollywood movement. The movement roughly began in the late 1960s with the release of films such as The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, and The Night of the Living Dead. This movement sparked new interests in American films and gave rise to new young filmmakers such as John Millus, Francis Ford Coppola, and of course Martin Scorsese. As a lifelong student of film, Scorsese was exposed to a wide variety of films, and the influence of these films, as well as Scorsese’s love for cinema, is clear in all his films. In Who’s That Knocking at My Door, some of the clearest influences are the cinematic styles and aesthetics of the French New Wave and the Italian Neorealism film movements. Italian Neorealism began towards the end of World War II. The movement is characterized by stories set amongst the poor and working class. They primarily address the economic turmoil and moral conditions of post-World War II Italy, representing changes in the Italian psyche and conditions of everyday life, including poverty, oppression, injustice, and desperation. Martin Scorsese has described Who’s That Knocking at My Door as the “first film to show what Italian-Americans were really like and that was what is good about it”. In that sense, Who’s That  Knocking at My Door is more of an Italian-American Neorealism film, than the Italian Neorealism films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Roberto Rossellini, or Luchino Visconti.

            The cinematography takes inspiration from the French New Wave, Italian Neorealism, and the Direct Cinema movement. The film was shot on location in an everyday setting, with natural lighting, and with a handheld camera. For the look of the film, Scorsese wanted to capture the everyday look of the neighborhood and portray the life he was living at the time. To some this style of cinematography may appear amateurish or rough, but I find the film’s stylistic influences complement the film’s story and tone, as well as continuing the tradition of incorporating documentary techniques for fictional narratives, that became prevalent in independent directors of the 1950s and 60s. Examples include Shirley Clarke, Morris Engel, Lionel Rogosin, and John Cassavetes, who is Scorsese’s primary influence on this style of filmmaking. The look of the film was also heavily inspired by Italian Neorealism cinematographers such as Gianni Di Venanzo and Giuseppe Rotunno. When filming Who’s That Knocking at My Door, Scorsese wanted to capture the pure beauty of bright southern Italy in black and white, and I feel that Scorsese and cinematographer Michael Wadleigh did an excellent job in capturing the stylings of Italian Neorealism.

The influence of the French New Wave is also notable throughout the film. As many of the directors of the French New Wave such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, were relatively young when they made their first films, the early films of the French New Wave are often marked with a sense of a youthful, playful, exuberant or audacious feeling. The films of the French New Wave also frequently feature young characters in topical settings. The directors of the French New Wave largely wanted to show their generation’s ways of living and thinking and tackle issues that were not previously addressed in French Cinema. This is why so many films of this era have a naturalistic or documentary feeling about them. This style of filmmaking was encouraged at NYU during the 1960s, especially by Haig Manoogian, who was Martin Scorsese’s film professor. According to Manoogian, “Filmmaking should be personal, and one must film what one knows”. This is a lesson that Scorsese took to heart; one can see that in all his films. Scorsese was in his early 20s when he began production on Who’s That Knocking at My Door. Like the directors of the French New Wave, Scorsese’s primary goal in making Who’s That Knocking at My Door was to show life as he saw it in growing up in New York. Modern viewers of the film might find this film to be unremarkable, but at the time this film was unlike most of the other films that Hollywood was producing at the time.

While I respect and appreciate the stylistic influences the film takes from other film movements, these stylistic influences do lead to some moments that feel jarring or out of place. The film does overuse the freeze frame technique, to the point where it takes the audience out of the film. The film’s incessant cross-cutting to enclosures, such as doors slamming, windows closing, and locks sliding shut, is meant to visually represent J.R.’s closed-off mentality. Used sparingly, I think this could have worked. Unfortunately, the film overuses the technique to the point where it becomes routine and distracting. The film’s use of seemingly improvisational dialogue gives the film a documentary-esque feel to it, however, this also leads to the problem of overstating the dialogue, making it feel at times forced or overdrawn. While I liked the natural chemistry between J.R. and the Girl, I feel like some of the dialogue is trying to force the narrative along, as well as throwing out character exposition, instead of letting things play out organically. Scenes with J.R. and his friends tend to run too long, and what results is a series of repetitious dialogue that ultimately doesn’t lead to anything of consequence.

            The character of J.R. is largely based on Scorsese’s own experience with Catholicism. In the film, J.R. is infatuated with his girlfriend, whom he wishes to marry someday. He rejects her offers of sex, believing that she is still a virgin, and he doesn’t want to be the one to “spoil her” before her wedding night. He becomes enraged when she confesses that she was raped a few years prior. He goes off on her and calls her a whore, before storming off. After a night of drinking and soul-searching, J.R. returns to her apartment where he claims that he forgives her and that he will still marry her anyway. The girl rejects him and tells him to go home. Instead, J.R. heads to the Catholic Church where he hopes to find some form of solace. The themes of Catholic guilt and its relation to sex permeates throughout the film. Catholic men of Scorsese’s generation were generally taught that sex was a mortal sin, as such a good Catholic boy should marry a virgin Catholic girl. In the film, J.R. has no qualms with sleeping with other girls, or broads as J.R. calls them, but not the girl he is dating. This stems from an old Catholic belief that women were either madonnas or whores. The madonna-whore dichotomy only complicates matters further by encouraging fear and distrust of women in impressionable young men. This results in a culture in which women don’t seem like real human beings. This is represented in the film as J.R. having spent the entirety of his life in a culture that preached outdated and problematic ideas and is left feeling completely lost when he meets a girl who has everything he desires in a woman.

            One of the most misplaced scenes is not Scorsese’s fault. To get his film distributed, Scorsese had to shoot and inject some form of nude scene. This was to give the film an excuse to be marketed as a sexploitation film. To get around this demand, Scorsese added a fantasy sequence involving J.R. and some prostitutes. The scene adds nothing to the overall plot and could be cut without losing anything vital. That being said the scenes are well shot and well-acted.

Harvey Keitel as J.R. and Zini Bethrune as the girl, work splendidly together in this film. At first, they seem like your typical mismatched couple: a tough guy from the streets meets a college-educated, well-read girl and is instantly smitten with her. In lesser films, the girl would have served as J.R.’s salvation, bringing him out of the streets, and away from his tough guy friends to a world of tranquil suburban normality. Instead, we get a realistic portrayal of two different personalities colliding and trying to make it work. The chemistry between the two characters feels very natural and organic. They have real conversations about things that they are passionate about. J.R. talks at length about movies he’s passionate about and the way he describes The Searchers, one can see the self-autobiographical relation to Scorsese. Despite only being known as the girl, there’s a deeply touching and passionate aspect to the relationship between J.R. and the girl. Their relationship is one of closeness and tenderness, often shown in extreme close-ups, it’s anything but explicit. In a scene where the lovers are passionately caught in one another’s tender embrace. J.R. stops short of making love, saying “Not now”. The girl gently presses for an explanation, and he brushes her off with an explanation that he’s just old fashioned, and if she truly loved him, then she’d understand.

The sequence in which the girl recounts her rape by her ex-boyfriend showcases Scorsese’s filmmaking ability to portray violent and despicable acts in a way that feels authentic, and not exploitative. As the girl recounts her story. The scene dissolves to show the act play out. The scene begins in an almost cliched manner. A young couple is alone on a date when the Dubs’ “Don’t Ask Me to Be Lonely”, plays on the radio. This is where things go from sweet to horrific. The boyfriend goes beyond what the girl is comfortable with, and he begins to get aggressive. As this assault is taking place, the normally sweet do-op beat begins to take a sinister tone. Mirroring the tense situation that is happening in the car, the song begins to distort, as the song slows and slurs, making what is already an uncomfortable scene, almost unbearable to watch. When J.R. dismisses her traumatic experience, the audience can’t help but feel a great swell of sympathy for this poor girl, who just told the person she thought she could trust a great personal and painful moment from her past, only to get rejected and insulted.

            While Scorsese’s first picture is a bit rough, his potential as a budding filmmaker is undeniable. Some may pass this film off as a typical student film, marred with mediocrity. I find this to be an unfair assessment. While I don’t consider this film to be great, it’s still better than a lot of other films I’ve seen. Even though it’s his feature-length theatrical directorial debut, the film showcases many of the techniques and themes that would be further explored and improved in his later work. At worst, this film can be seen as a blueprint for future Scorsese pictures, most notably Mean Streets, Goodfellas, and Taxi Driver.