After Hours (film)

After Hours is a 1985 American neo-noir black comedy film<ref name=Variety/> directed by Martin Scorsese, written by Joseph Minion, and produced by Amy Robinson, Griffin Dunne, and Robert F. Colesberry. Dunne stars as Paul Hackett, an office worker who experiences a series of misadventures while attempting to make his way home from Manhattan's SoHo district during the night.

After Hours was critically acclaimed for its black humor, and is now considered to be a cult classic. As of 2025, it is Scorsese's most recent film that is not an adaptation or biopic.

The film won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Feature. Scorsese won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Director and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Director for the film.

Plot

After a boring day at work, computer clerk Paul Hackett strikes up conversation with a female stranger named Marcy Franklin at a café in New York City. Marcy tells him that she is living in SoHo with a sculptor named Kiki Bridges, who makes and sells plaster-of-Paris paperweights resembling cream cheese bagels, and leaves him her number. After calling her, Paul takes a taxi to her apartment later that night. On the way, his $20 bill is blown out the window of the cab, leaving him with only some change, much to the anger of the cab driver. At the apartment, Paul meets Kiki, who explains that Marcy went to the drugstore and should be back shortly. Kiki is working on a sculpture of a screaming man which he compares to Munch's The Scream. When Marcy returns, she confesses that the apartment belongs to her estranged husband who now lives in Turkey and that she has a boyfriend with whom she had a fight earlier that same night. Paul rifles through Marcy's belongings and discovers several items suggesting that Marcy is disfigured from burns; this, along with her increasingly strange behaviour, leads him to abandon the date.

Paul attempts to go home by subway, but the fare has increased at the stroke of midnight, and he can no longer afford it. When he tries to jump the turnstile, a cop stops him. He goes to a bar where Julie, a waitress, writes him a note saying she hates her job. At the bar, Paul learns that there has been a string of burglaries in the neighborhood. Tom, the barman, offers to give Paul money for a subway token, but he is unable to open the bar's cash register. They exchange keys so that Paul can go to Tom's apartment to fetch the cash register key and turn on his alarm in case the burglar attempts to break in. Paul accidentally floods Tom's bathroom. As he is leaving the building, he is stopped by two neighbors who suspect him of being the burglar, but they let him go when he shows them Tom's keys.

Paul spots two men, Neil and Pepe, with Kiki's sculpture and a TV. After he confronts them, they flee, dropping the sculpture and shattering the TV in the process. When Paul returns the sculpture to Kiki and Marcy's apartment, Kiki explains that Neil and Pepe are her friends to whom she had sold her TV. She encourages Paul to apologize to Marcy. However, when Paul enters Marcy's room, he discovers that she has committed suicide by overdosing on Seconal. Paul reports Marcy's death to the police. He uncovers her body and finds she has no burns. On the way out, he grabs a note from Kiki inviting him and Marcy to Club Berlin.

The bar is locked when Paul arrives, with a sign stating that Tom will be back shortly. Paul runs into Julie on the street who says she has quit her job and invites him up to her apartment to wait for Tom. Paul is unnerved by her strange behavior, including sketching him while they talk. When Tom returns to the bar, Julie makes Paul promise that he will return to her apartment after he exchanges keys with Tom. Tom is relieved to see Paul, admitting he had left because he'd thought Paul had robbed him after taking too long to return. Tom receives a phone call that his girlfriend (Marcy) has killed herself. Paul returns to Julie's apartment and she gifts him one of Kiki's paperweights, which Paul refuses. Paul leaves and a scorned Julie makes posters showing her sketch of him as the burglar. When he returns to the bar, Tom is gone.

Paul leaves to find Kiki and let her know about Marcy's death. The bouncer at Club Berlin refuses him entry because his hairstyle does not fit the mohawk dress code. Paul insists until he's let in and then narrowly escapes several punks who attempt to forcibly give him a haircut.

Paul goes back to Kiki and Marcy's apartment, and peels what was possibly his earlier $20 bill from Kiki's sculpture. He sees a group of neighbors looking for the burglars on the street. Back outside, he runs into the cab driver who dropped him off at Marcy's at the beginning of the night. The driver takes off with his money in revenge for not having been paid earlier in the night.

Paul meets a Mister Softee ice cream truck driver named Gaill, who invites him up to her apartment to phone a friend and dress a wound. Gaill offers Paul a ride home on her truck but later mistakes him for the burglar based on Julie's posters. Gaill and a mob of locals relentlessly pursue Paul. He climbs a fire escape to seek refuge and witnesses a murder through the window. He approaches a man for help but is misunderstood, as the man believes Paul is seeking a sexual encounter. Paul calls the police for help but is ignored.

Paul runs into Tom in a diner, who says he will go get him his keys so he can go home. However, Tom alerts the mob of Paul's whereabouts instead after he sees one of Julie's posters. Paul seeks shelter at Club Berlin and finds the place is now almost empty. Sleep-deprived, bedraggled, and ranting, Paul uses his last coin to play "Is That All There Is?" by Peggy Lee on the club's jukebox and asks an older woman named June to dance. After he explains his situation, June offers to hide him in her apartment underneath the club, where she uses papier-mâché to disguise him as a sculpture while the mob raids the club. After the mob leaves, June is worried they will come back and so does not take off the plaster. The plaster hardens, trapping Paul in a position that resembles Kiki's sculpture.

Neil and Pepe break in and steal Paul, thinking him to be the sculpture they had dropped in the street earlier, and place him in the back of their van. The van speeds uptown and takes a sharp turn which swings open the van's back door. Paul falls onto the road just outside the main gate of his office building, with the force of the impact breaking the plaster open. He brushes himself off and goes to his desk, where his computer screen greets him for another day of work.

Themes and motifs

This film belongs in a grouping that revolves around a young working professional who is placed under threat, named the "yuppie nightmare cycle",<ref name=leighton>Template:Cite book</ref> a subgenre of films which combines screwball comedy and film noir. Some critics present a psychoanalytic view of the film; Paul is constantly emasculated by women in the film: by Kiki with her sexual aggressiveness and lust for masochism,<ref name="The cinema of Martin Scorsese">Template:Cite book</ref> Marcy turning down his sexual advances, Julie and Gaill turning a vigilante mob on him, and June trapping him in plaster. There are many references to castration within the film,<ref name=leighton /> most of which are shown when women are present. In the bathroom in Terminal Bar where Julie first encounters Paul, there is an image scrawled on the wall of a shark biting a man's erect penis.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Marcy makes a reference to her husband using a double entendre when saying, "I broke the whole thing off" when talking about their sex life.<ref name=leighton /> One of the mouse traps that surrounds her bed clamps shut when Julie tries to seduce Paul.

Michael Rabiger sees mythological symbolism as a primary theme of the film, stating: "The hero of Scorsese's dark comedy After Hours is like a rat trying to escape from a labyrinth. Indeed there is a caged rat in one scene where Paul finds himself trapped in a talkative woman's apartment. The film could be plotted out as a labyrinthine journey, each compartment holding out the promise of a particular experience, almost all illusory and misleading".<ref>Michael Rabiger. Directing. 448 pages. Publisher: Focal Press; 5 edition (December 15, 2012). Template:ISBN.</ref>

Production

After Hours was originally to be directed by Tim Burton after Dunne and Robinson were impressed with his short film Vincent, but Burton willingly stepped aside when Scorsese expressed interest.<ref name="FilmingForYourLife">Template:Cite AV media notes</ref>

Paramount Pictures' abandonment of The Last Temptation of Christ was a huge disappointment to Scorsese, and spurred him to focus on independent companies and smaller projects.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Scorsese's most recent film, The King of Comedy, also failed at the box office. He stated in an interview with Michael Wilson that "Marty, it's probably time you earned a bit of money".Template:Sfn

The opportunity to direct After Hours was offered to Scorsese by his lawyer Jay Julien, who put him through Griffin Dunne and Amy Robinson's Double Play Company. The project was called One Night in Soho and it was based on a script by Joseph Minion. The screenplay, originally titled Lies after a 1982 Joe Frank monologue that inspired it,<ref name="Panopticist">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> was written as part of an assignment for his film course at Columbia University. According to Frank, he was not asked for rights to the story, asking "what must the screenwriter have been thinking to place himself in such jeopardy?"<ref name="JoeFrank">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Minion was 26 years old at the time the film was produced.<ref name="nyt85">Template:Cite news</ref> The script finally became After Hours after Scorsese made his final amendments.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

One of Scorsese's contributions involved the dialogue between Paul and the doorman at Club Berlin, which was inspired by Franz Kafka's "Before the Law", one of the short stories included in his novel The Trial.<ref>Kafka, Franz. Before the Law Template:Webarchive. Retrieved 2009-12-10.</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> As Scorsese explained to Paul Attanasio, the short story reflected his frustration toward the production of The Last Temptation of Christ.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Steven Spielberg suggested that the film end with the statue falling off the truck and breaking into thousands of pieces. Paul is not inside the statue and is instead on the expressway yelling "They're coming to get you! The invaders are coming!". However, Terry Gilliam told him to cut that scene.Template:Sfn

After Hours was the first fictional film directed by Scorsese since Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore in 1974 not to feature Robert De Niro.<ref name="Variety">Template:Cite magazine</ref>

British director Michael Powell took part in the production of the film, and he and editor Thelma Schoonmaker married soon afterward. Nobody was sure how the film should end. Powell said that Paul must finish up back at work, but this was initially dismissed as too unlikely and difficult. They tried many other endings, and a few were even filmed, but the only one that everyone felt really worked was to have Paul finish up back at work just as the new day was starting.<ref name="FilmingForYourLife" />

Music

The score for After Hours was composed by Howard Shore. Although an official soundtrack album was not released, many of Shore's cues appear on the 2009 album Howard Shore: Collector's Edition Vol. 1.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> In addition to the score, other music credited at the end of the film is:

1. Symphony in D Major, K. 95 (K. 73n), first movement: attributed to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
2. "Air on the G String (Air From Suite No. 3)" Composed by Johann Sebastian Bach
3. "En la Cueva" Performed by Cuadro Flamenco
4. "Sevillanas" Composed and performed by Manitas de Plata
5. "Night and Day" Written by Cole Porter
6. "Body and Soul" Composed by Johnny Green
7. "Quando quando quando" Music by Tony Renis, Lyrics by Pat Boone
8. "Someone to Watch Over Me" Lyrics by Ira Gershwin, Music by George Gershwin, performed by Robert & Johnny
9. "You're Mine" Written by Robert Carr and Johnny Mitchell, performed by Robert & Johnny
10. "We Belong Together" Performed by Robert & Johnny
11. "Angel Baby" Written by Rosie Hamlin, performed by Rosie and the Originals
12. "Last Train to Clarksville" Written by Boyce and Hart, performed by the Monkees
13. "Chelsea Morning" Composed and performed by Joni Mitchell
14. "I Don't Know Where I Stand" Composed and performed by Joni Mitchell
15. "Over the Mountain; Across the Sea" Composed by Rex Garvin, performed by Johnnie and Joe
16. "One Summer Night" Written by Danny Webb, Performed by the Danleers
17. "Pay to Cum" Written and performed by Bad Brains
18. "Is That All There Is?" Composed by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, performed by Peggy Lee

Reception

After Hours grossed only $10.1 million in the United States,<ref name="mojo">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> but was given positive reviews and has since been considered an "underrated" entry in the director's filmography.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref name="underrated">Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref> The film won Scorsese the Best Director award at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival and allowed him to take a hiatus from the tumultuous development of The Last Temptation of Christ.<ref name="festival-cannes.com">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Film critic Roger Ebert gave After Hours four out of four stars. He praised the film as one of the year's best and said it "continues Scorsese's attempt to combine comedy and satire with unrelenting pressure and a sense of all-pervading paranoia."<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He later added it to his "Great Movies" list.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> On At the Movies, Ebert's colleague Gene Siskel said he enjoyed the film, though lamented the late introduction of the "light comedy" characters—those played by Garr, O'Hara, and Cheech & Chong—whom he felt robbed the picture of its "hard New York edge."<ref>Template:Cite episode</ref> In The New York Times, critic Vincent Canby gave the film a mixed review, calling it an "entertaining tease, with individually arresting sequences that are well acted by Mr. Dunne and the others, but which leave you feeling somewhat conned."<ref name="nyt85"/>

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 90% based on 69 reviews, with an average rating of 7.70/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "Bursting with frantic energy and tinged with black humor, After Hours is a masterful – and often overlooked – detour in Martin Scorsese's filmography."<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 89 out of 100 based on reviews from nine critics, indicating "universal acclaim".<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Accolades

Association	Category	Recipient	Result	Template:Ref heading
BAFTA Awards	Best Actress in a Supporting Role	Rosanna Arquette	Template:Nominated	citation	CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Cannes Film Festival	Palme d'Or	Martin Scorsese	Template:Nominated	<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
	Best Director	Martin Scorsese	Template:Won
Casting Society of America Awards	Best Casting for Feature Film – Comedy	Mary Colquhoun	Template:Nominated	citation	CitationClass=web }}</ref>
César Awards	Best Foreign Film	Martin Scorsese	Template:Nominated	citation	CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Golden Globe Awards	Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical	Griffin Dunne	Template:Nominated	citation	CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Independent Spirit Awards	Best Feature	Robert F. Colesberry Griffin Dunne Amy Robinson	Template:Won	<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation	CitationClass=web }}</ref>
	Best Director	Martin Scorsese	Template:Won
	Best Screenplay	Joseph Minion	Template:Nominated
	Best Female Lead	Rosanna Arquette	Template:Nominated
	Best Cinematography	Michael Ballhaus	Template:Nominated
National Society of Film Critics Awards	Best Cinematography	Michael Ballhaus	Template:Nominated

Home media

Warner Home Video released After Hours on VHS and Betamax in 1986, and both widescreen and pan-and-scan NTSC LaserDiscs. It has also been released on DVD.<ref name="Virgin Film Scorsese">Template:Cite book</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> On July 11, 2023, the film was released on 4K UHD and Blu-ray by The Criterion Collection.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Legacy

After Hours served as an inspiration for the 2020 album After Hours by Canadian singer the Weeknd.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> The film also inspired the 2021 Ted Lasso episode "Beard After Hours".<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

See also

• List of American films of 1985
• Desperately Seeking Susan – 1985 comedy-drama film with a similar theme
• Into the Night – 1985 black comedy action thriller with a similar theme
• Something Wild – 1986 comedy thriller film with a similar theme
• Who's That Girl – 1987 screwball comedy film with a similar theme

Works cited

• Template:Cite book

External links

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