All of the scenes that constitute the plot of Martin Scorsese's directorial debut Who's That Knocking At My Door look washed-out and indistinct in comparison to the rest of the feature. This is because the project began life as Bring on the Dancing Girls, a 35mm, hour-long thesis short so poorly received that Scorsese went back to the drawing board, but with only enough money to shoot fresh material in 16mm. And yet the disconnect seems oddly premeditated, especially since almost every 16mm passage is a veritable non sequitur. An extended riff on the mores of youth raised in Little Italy, Who's That Knocking At My Door charts a parallel course for Scorsese avatar J.R. (Harvey Keitel), a practising Catholic who, when not clowning around with punks from the neighbourhood, spends lazy afternoons in the company of a secular, middle-class blonde (soap star Zina Bethune, her character billed only as "the girl") he meets on the Staten Island ferry by striking up a conversation about a Scorsese touchstone, John Ford's The Searchers.

John Cassavetes would of course have a more overt influence on Scorsese in the career dry spell following the release of this picture (during which time one of his odd jobs was holding Cassavetes still while somebody punched him to create sound effects for a fistfight!), but that doesn't stop Who's That Knocking At My Door from feeling like Son of Shadows, with the quagmire at the heart of Shadows--a seemingly liberal-minded young man's sense of betrayal over his girlfriend's biracial heritage--transposed as a psychosexual impasse reached between the seemingly liberal-minded J.R. and The Girl once her impurity is out in the open. Even before then, he refuses to sleep with her on the basis that he loves her, and a montage added at the behest of independent distributor Joseph Brenner showing J.R. bedding a succession of women to the strains of The Doors' Freudian "The End" only clarifies that his issues are of the Madonna/whore variety. If this one-man orgy is clearly intended as a fantasy, there's no reason to think otherwise of any sequence related, no matter how peripherally, to The Girl: their disjunctive nature suggests that the love story unfolding in Who's That Knocking At My Door is the mental projection of a cinephile--one whose reality of ritual and sameness not only compels him to fabricate conflict, but also makes him too complacent and/or stubborn to be an effective romantic. By George, I think Marty was trying to tell us something.

Warner skips out on a chance to do something definitive with their DVD release of Who's That Knocking At My Door in excerpting from Bring on the Dancing Girls within a supplemental featurette instead of including it in full as a separate viewing option. (Somehow I doubt Scorsese sought to repress it, preservationist that he is.) Nevertheless, the disc's 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer breathes more lustre into the film's black-and-white images than ever before and significantly reduces the amount of print debris that has plagued Who's That Knocking At My Door on other video formats. The Dolby centre-channel mono mix is strikingly clear, and the frequent musical accompaniment (Cassavetes' wall of jazz becomes Scorsese's wall of pop) doesn't sound crushed in the least.

A rarely-screen-specific partial commentary running 48 minutes intercuts recent observations from Scorsese and "director's assistant" Mardik Martin, the former lamenting the finished product's dissimilarity to his production sketches ("You're living aesthetically beyond your means," he says, quoting an old rejection letter from the New York Film Festival) as well as his failure to get the songs he wanted while spreading his typically infectious enthusiasm for other people's movies, in particular Bernardo Bertolucci's Before the Revolution. It's a great track I wish he had all to himself, as Mardik Martin's solo flight in Automat Pictures' "From the Classroom to the Streets: The Making of Who's That Knocking At My Door" (13 mins.) is sufficient contribution from the man who would go on to co-write Mean Streets, New York, New York, and Raging Bull. Therein, Martin touches on autobiographical aspects of J.R. and recites valuable maxims like "Paper is cheaper than film" in defense of storyboarding. No further extras adorn the platter.-Bill Chambers

1.78:1 (16x9); English Mono; English CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; 90 minutes; Warner

Although a Martin Scorsese retrospective could easily survive the absence of Boxcar Bertha, the film is a cornerstone of the director's filmography: without it, there is conceivably no The Last Temptation of Christ--Bertha herself, Barbara Hershey, introduced Scorsese to the Nikos Kazantzakis source novel during production--and no Mean Streets. Because he'd been toiling away on the Hollywood fringe after getting fired from his would-be sophomore effort, 1970's The Honeymoon Killers, for shooting everything in master (an experiment he would repeat to great acclaim with The King of Comedy), Scorsese agreed to helm AIP's umpteenth Bonnie and Clyde wannabe, an in-name-only sequel to the drive-in sensation Bloody Mama (which incidentally starred his future muse, Robert De Niro). "You just spent a year of your life making a piece of shit," went John Cassavetes' immortal response to the results, a critique not so much of the work itself as of Scorsese's decision to play the hired gun. Thus aborted his mission to position himself as one of the California film brats conquering the industry, as Cassavetes' tough-love approach spurred him to return to New York and resurrect the idea for Season of the Witch, a thematic follow-up to Who's That Knocking At My Door that eventually became Mean Streets.

Granted an extraordinary amount of latitude so long as every reel started off with some nudity, Scorsese clearly regarded Boxcar Bertha as a goof, renaming a couple of bit parts Powell & Pressburger, indulging both the grindhouse and serial-oater sensibilities between which the movie vacillates in two distinct sets of opening titles, and deploying dolly tracks like a kid in a candy store--which, of course, he was. A prologue featuring a biplane crash reveals a precedent for those visceral flying sequences in The Aviator, while a montage in which Bertha's lover Bill (David Carradine, ironically) is nailed to the side of a boxcar is shot-for-shot the crucifixion of Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ. (I don't think Scorsese was harking back to Boxcar Bertha there so much as a version of the passion play had long ago crystallized in his mind--right around the time that film overtook religion as his central preoccupation.) And then you have the provincialist updating of a key character to give Scorsese a point of identification, although most of the cast exudes such worldliness that it scarcely means anything to have somebody (Barry Primus) formally essaying a Yankee interloper.

Boxcar Bertha is not just a fun Easter egg hunt, either--it's salvaged by movie-love. Even if Boxcar Bertha adds weight to his argument, I can't abide Jonathan Rosenbaum's recent contention that Scorsese is at the mercy of the screenplay, for while Rosenbaum writes that the same holds true of Clint Eastwood, Scorsese's aesthetic at least cushions the blow of a bad script where Eastwood's austerity leaves the nerve endings of lousy material dangerously exposed. (You can't tell me that Scorsese has ever been responsible for something as dreadful as Blood Work, whose screenplay is arguably better than Boxcar Bertha's.) With Boxcar Bertha, Scorsese is more accurately at the mercy of his inexperience, though he is indeed saddled with a shoddy adaptation of Sisters of the Road--fabulist Ben Reitman's autobiography of the titular hobo/agitator, which fooled generations of readers until its most recent publisher tacked on an afterword confessing to the hoax--by the perpetrators of The Omega Man, who never met a deus ex machina they didn't like. Lucky for Scorsese, however, they're obsessed with martyr imagery, and their penchant for the arbitrary, means-to-an-end alliance allows him to rehearse for the unlikely pairings that will become a hallmark of his work.

MGM reissues Boxcar Bertha on DVD with tie-in cover art commemorating its rightful place in "The Martin Scorsese Film Collection." Presented in mildly windowboxed 1.82:1 anamorphic widescreen, the picture has new vibrancy unearthed by the format; Hershey simply did not look this fetching in previous transfers, nor has the source print ever come this close to mint condition. The accompanying Dolby 2.0 mono audio isn't nearly as impressive as the video until you watch the dilapidated theatrical trailer with sound quality reminiscent of a drive-thru operator taking your order.-Bill Chambers

1.82:1 (16x9); English Mono; English CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-5; 88 minutes; MGM

I had my suspicion that there is no archetypal Martin Scorsese fan perhaps confirmed for me after giving a speech on him for my "American Cinema" class: a football jock taking the course as an elective sauntered up behind me asking to borrow Mean Streets. He couldn't believe there existed anything like the scene I had just shown--the one where Harvey Keitel takes Robert De Niro into the back room of their hangout to get to the bottom of De Niro's unpaid dues--despite the strong scent of Abbott & Costello in its staccato rhythm. (For what it's worth, this is also the passage that convinced Warner execs to acquire the film.) I immediately recognized the look in his eye, the Scorsese itch, and began to long for that first high, as they say; and I'm probably writing these reviews to become a mass enabler. Fitting that Mean Streets should be the catalyst for such nostalgia, marinated as it is in a mnemonic broth that makes the picture more explicitly autobiographical, if less modest, than Who's That Knocking At My Door.

What's interesting is that while Scorsese scales back the film-geek rhetoric for Mean Streets, he prefaces the Super8 sequence beneath the main titles with an insert of a movie projector--a shot that deliberately succeeds a mini-montage of Keitel's head hitting the pillow. It might be the most ambiguous image in the Scorsese canon, inviting as it does all manner of interpretation, from the film-as-waking-dream reading to a pithy, if complicated, apologia for stylizing his memories. (The characters even have a West Side Story quality to their names that's only amplified by the theatricality of the film's carnival backdrop, whose obvious purpose--whatever verisimilitude Little Italy's Feast of San Gennaro lends the production--is to expedite the resolutions to the tensions introduced.) In any case, it single-handedly transforms Mean Streets into a valentine to motion pictures.

That being said, the common misperception of the cinephilic Scorsese is that the only thing he knows is movies, to paraphrase André S. Labarthe's sometimes-contentious profile The Scorsese Machine, but what separates Scorsese from the losers populating the documentary Cinemania (none of whom could direct traffic) is akin to the narrow cleft distinguishing catharsis from escapism. In fact, a moviehouse (playing Roger Corman's The Tomb of Ligeia, a tip of the hat to the Boxcar Bertha producer) offers our heroes pointedly fleeting shelter from debt collectors at the climax of Mean Streets, as if to caution us against using film to hide from the world; when Keitel's Charlie leaves the theatre to call his girlfriend, Teresa (Amy Robinson, in a performance that grows richer with repeat viewings), he's none-too-subtly standing next to a poster for Point Blank.

Aptly, then, Mean Streets is about the danger of making yourself fate's bitch. The first, most influential--but not the best--manifestation of the Scorsese-De Niro alchemy (De Niro seems more inspired in the Brian DePalma political satires that came before this), Mean Streets opens with mobster's nephew Charlie swearing off confession ("I mean if I do somethin' wrong, I just want to pay for it my way") and vouching for the dues of Teresa's cousin, Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro). Teresa is epileptic and Johnny Boy is mercurial--in other words, they're both wired to explode, and one of the recurring images of Mean Streets finds Charlie holding his finger above a flame, seeing how long it takes before he gets burned. Charlie doesn't feel comfortable going to his uncle Giovanni (Cesare Danova)--after whom Johnny Boy was christened--for assistance, not only because Johnny Boy and Teresa are the black sheep of the family (Giovanni considers them more or less equally "sick in the head"), but also because he's angling to inherit Giovanni's controlling interest in a floundering restaurant and dreads the thought of squandering goodwill on potentially transient residents of his life. Consequently, Charlie is left with absolutely no reason to move in any direction, like the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s Mother Night. He's a self-made cipher.

Save for a nude scene he deemed gratuitous, Mean Streets pleased John Cassavetes to no end--his affection for it giving the lie to the notion that the documentary pretense of Cassavetes' own work reflected an animosity towards flashier filmmaking. But while Cassavetes was in fact an advocate of personal cinema and may have seen Mean Streets, with its flawed humanity and culturally-specific trappings, as a movie of primarily sociological and anthropological merit (many critics at the time saw it as an urban antidote to The Godfather), the technique of the piece is not to be underestimated. Perfected here are Scorsese's patented slow-motion cutaways, combination pan/tracking shots, musical tangents, and impromptu bloodbaths, all of which merge to produce what Pauline Kael called in her Mean Streets rave "Expressionism without the use of distortion," still the most compendious description of Scorsese's aesthetic I've ever encountered.

Warner reissues Mean Streets on DVD in a Special Edition with beefed-up extras and a fresh transfer. Though the 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation retains a certain low-budget grit, it looks stunning compared to the VHS and LaserDisc incarnations (I never did get around to picking up the original DVD): the sinful reds of Tony's bar are stable at last, while areas of black register as black as opposed to a dark blue ant colony. The Dolby centre-channel mono audio is poised to disappoint, as it faithfully reproduces the Vitaphone-quality recording; the mix itself remains a thing of ingenuity, however (and kudos to Warner for renewing the license for every last expensive soundtrack cue once Mean Streets hit video), and the narration on this release is easier to discern than usual.

One of the joys of this disc is listening to Scorsese recapitulate a recent epiphany near the end of the film's non-screen-specific partial commentary (82 mins.), during which he is periodically interrupted by the separately-recorded Robinson, now a producer. A perennial explorer of his mental landscape, the 62-year-old auteur suggests that Mean Streets is possibly less reflective of his turbulent youth than of the many feuds his father's side of the family nurtured over the years; for a track that begins with Scorsese warning us that Mean Streets is a difficult subject for him, there's a surplus of high-calibre introspection on display, some of which, such as his feelings on constructive vs. destructive criticism, will not be familiar even to readers of Scorsese on Scorsese. Robinson, meanwhile, initially threatens to touch on some interesting stories from the set of DePalma's Sisters but quickly changes gears, and though her anecdotes are by no means irrelevant (especially since she was the lone girl in a boy's club), the unfulfilled curiosity she piques at the outset casts a pall over her contribution. Scorsese and two childhood chums (Sally Gaga, the basis for Johnny Boy, is not one of them) take to the streets of Little Italy like dork Reservoir Dogs in Elliot Geisinger's vintage featurette "Back on the Block" (7 mins.), which rounds out the platter along with Mean Streets' mafia-centric theatrical trailer.-Bill Chambers

1.78:1 (16x9); English Mono; English CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; 112 minutes; Warner

The zeitgeist made Martin Scorsese and his mentor John Cassavetes artistically simpatico in 1974, when the two each helmed "women's pictures" independent of one another's counsel. (Scorsese apparently deduced that the Cassavetes aesthetic was the only aesthetic that suited relationship-driven material.) It was the beginning of women's lib, and Warner hoped to corner the market on chicksploitation via Ellen Burstyn and her pet project Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, while it would seem that with his brilliant A Woman Under the Influence, Cassavetes just wanted to say something hopeful about marriage to counter the prevailing propaganda. Both pictures were demonized in certain feminist circles for yoking their heroines to knights in tarnished armour, but in the case of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, they were preaching to the compromised.

Hindsight is 20/20, but it's hard to see from a retro perspective why John Calley, the head of the studio, thought Scorsese so right for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore that he resorted to courting him with reverse psychology ("They're saying you can't direct women"), though it may have been less prescience than an assumption on Calley's part that "from the director of Mean Streets" would destigmatize the picture. I also have a hunch that Mean Streets' hypermasculinity, in combination with Scorsese's relative inexperience, led Calley to presume he was getting a mole out of the bargain, an ally in his ongoing clashes with Burstyn over how far to carry the film's illustration of the American woman's newfound entitlement to bachelorhood: Calley's narrow concept of a "happy ending" was the leading man and leading lady puckering up for a fade-out smooch. I guess he never saw the numbers for Gone with the Wind, whose grosses, once adjusted for inflation, have yet to be surpassed by any movie in history.

Scorsese invokes Gone with the Wind (and Sirk, and Duel in the Sun--anything from the cinema of painted sunsets) in an expressionistic prologue that lobbies, in its facetious way, for the integrity of the melodramas of yore. (He even uses the old-fashioned Warner shield and frames the sequence at 1.33:1.) Against a lushly artificial farm backdrop designated Monterey, CA, "Alice: a young girl" (Mia Bendixsen) prances along a dirt trail, ignoring her mother's threats to come inside; "I can sing better than Alice Faye," Alice tells herself. "And if anybody doesn't like it, they can blow it out their ass." If you ever want to know what a Scorsese movie is about, look to the opening scene--he's a master of the thesis in a brushstroke, and here Scorsese treats the past as literally gauzy, allowing the truth to seep through a romanticization. Exposing the human tendency to rose-tint the younger self, he also preconditions us to empathize with the grown-up Alice, irrespective of gender.

Recently-widowed Alice Hyatt (Burstyn) tells her 11-year-old son, Tommy (Alfred Lutter, bravely encouraged to act his age), that they're relocating to her hometown of Monterey, which she describes in such Shangri-la terms that it's obvious they'll never get there. Docking in Phoenix, Alice talks her way into a gig as a nightclub singer--thus resuming premarital aspirations of fame and fortune--and allows herself to be courted by the volatile cowpoke Ben (Harvey Keitel, cast as something other than a Scorsese proxy for a change--an indication, perhaps, of a shift in the filmmaker's identification to Robert De Niro), sending her and Tommy ricocheting to Tucson. There, Alice, feeling defeated, settles for a waitress job at Mel and Ruby's Diner; troubled Tommy befriends a tomboy enabler (Jodie Foster); and divorced rancher David (Kris Kristofferson) finds himself drawn to the gruesome twosome.

Interestingly, "Alice", the TV series based on Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, wasn't as quick to pair off Alice with a man: the show (in which the brassier Linda Lavin replaces Burstyn), created by the film's screenwriter, Robert Getchell, ditched David altogether and spent at least the first four of its nine seasons on the air acclimating Alice to widowhood, single-parenthood, and life as a struggling chanteuse. But television has the luxury of running on the spot--features do not. The moment Getchell introduced David into the script, he dared Hollywood executives to call his bluff; seventies idealism be damned, the studio picture has proven itself immutable time and again. (I'm loath to admit it, but I had difficulty accepting the ending of Disney's Under the Tuscan Sun (and the middle, and the beginning--but that's another story) because there was nobody there to kiss the heroine. It's Pavlovian.) And in their chagrined execution of Alice and David's mutual declaration of love, the filmmakers gave Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore a blemish that compels your gaze the more you try to examine a different spot on the canvas. Fortunately, Scorsese seizes an opportunity justified by narrative symmetry for a postscript that turns the sign for a cheap motel--named, a-ha, the Monterey--into a subversive symbol of diminished returns.

Warner's 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen DVD presentation of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore is definitive. For whatever reason, the film has always challenged telecine operators, and prior to this slick remaster, viewers could expect washed-out colours, soft definition, and an abundance of print debris. Best of all, as per the theatrical experience, the aforementioned prologue is now windowboxed--effectively downplaying the MOW modesty of the picture thereafter. The 1.0 Dolby mono audio is, on the other hand, a digital reincarnation of the same adequate soundtrack that has graced every previous version.

Extras include a partial, partially screen-specific commentary (53 mins.) compiled from the separately-recorded insights of Scorsese, Burstyn, Kristofferson, and an unlisted Diane Ladd (better known as Flo, Alice's obnoxious co-worker), who ironically dominates the track. Though each participant contributes a valuable anecdote or two, Ladd upstages her fellow commentators with a nakedly personal account of the death of her firstborn and the destructive impact it had on her marriage to actor Bruce Dern. (Ladd and Burstyn--fresh from a failed marriage, herself--jointly consider the movie autobiographical.) In Automat's otherwise largely-redundant "Second Chances" (21 mins.), Kristofferson digs a little deeper into how Marty shaped his process and the still-luminous Burstyn confesses to being so frightened by Keitel that she sobbed uncontrollably in the aftermath of his (staged, natch) violent outburst. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore's awful trailer rounds out the platter.-Bill Chambers

1.78:1 (16x9); English Mono; English CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; 112 minutes; Warner