Martin Scorsese’s 1985 screwball noir is now on rerelease. It felt at the time – and feels now – like an atypical Scorsese movie, a more generic and less auteurist project he accepted from its producer-star Griffin Dunne while progress on his Last Temptation of Christ had temporarily stalled. Maybe he thought of it as “road work”, but time has lent interest to After Hours; the obviously comic and farcical aspect has receded and its strangeness and anxiety loom larger, in a string of unsexy encounters and chilling coincidences culminating in a desolate close-dance scene to the accompaniment of Peggy Lee’s Is That All There Is? It’s a shaggy dog story leading to a punchline, of sorts, but one that feels woozy and illusory; it is not like a nightmare exactly, but a strange dream that’s difficult to shake on waking.
It is certainly a very 1980s piece of work, and at the time was regarded as part of the “yuppie disaster” genre, about well-off and conceited white-collar New Yorkers in the Reagan bull market years being punished for their smugness by winding up catastrophically in the wrong part of town. After Hours was bracketed with Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild from 1986, and Tom Wolfe’s 1987 page-turner The Bonfire of the Vanities which was dismally filmed by Brian De Palma in 1990.
