I love this movie! Haven’t seen it in really quite a while, but now I own the Criterion 4K Blu-ray, and I will now watch it through and do up notes concurrently!
I first saw this when it came out on video. Not sure if I had any opinions about Martin Scorsese yet at that point but I was well familiar with Griffin Dunne because of my transformative appreciation for An American Werewolf in London. (“transformative” see what I did there…) And I knew Teri Garr, and Cheech and Chong, sure, but I feel like this movie made me a convert to dark comedies. I have a feeling that when I watch it now I’ll see it in a different light and it might not hold up quite as well. But still just fine!
After the modest opening credits there’s a really attention-getting fast dolly shot in an office that ends on Griffin Dunne doing 80s computer tasks with Bronson Pinchot, who may already have been recognizable to me by then from Beverly Hills Cop. I may even have been like “wow, that’s his real accent?” Griffin Dunne looks very young and it’s actually kind of a vivid atmosphere of urban office culture.
Then we’re in a diner and there is classical music and the colors kind of pop and GD is reading and Rosanna Arquette hits on him and it’s another cool shot and we somehow don’t see the camera in the reflection and it’s some real chemistry. It ends a little abruptly and GD told her he was interested in his roommate’s art-paperweights just to be polite or because he is awkward.
Later he calls her and decides to meet up with her again even though it’s 11:32pm, city life amirite? He gets a cab and the driver drives recklessly in such a way as to make his money fly out the window. The bad cab driver looks mad. There are fleeting closeups of his face just to be kind of claustrophobic or something. It works.
RA isn’t at the loft but Linda Fiorentino, the artsy roommate, is, and she’s sexy and only has a bra on above the waist, not counting art-slime from her sculpture in progress. She asks him to chip in with her sculpture while she takes a break. He reacts like we would. She takes a phone call, clearly from RA and there’s an audible “I’m not gonna tell him”.
Then he makes kind of a dick move and offers to massage LF’s shoulders and says she has a great body. He’s getting flirty but she falls asleep, but not before bringing up scars from burns. Then when RA comes home she is a very intriguing combination of alluring and overexcited before taking a shower. During the shower LF makes a gratuitously fully-topless appearance to GD and he snoops in RA’s purse to see that she has medicine for 2nd degree burns. It’s like 1:30am now. Someone calls and he answers awkwardly.
She comes back from the shower and seems a little paranoid and indecisive, and he spots scars on her thigh and she confides in him that someone sexually assaulted her in that room for six hours once. Then the phone rings and she just lets it ring. There is much awkwardness but it’s fleeting because she just suggests they go get coffee. On their way out he notices a twenty dollar bill pasted into the sculpture. Are they suggesting it’s the bill that flew out of the cab? That would be weird.
At the coffee shop she tells him that she got married when she was very young and her husband had the creepy habit of shouting “surrender Dorothy” during orgasms so she left him after three days but they’re still married. There are many weird things from this movie that I have always remembered, and that is high on the list. “Surrender Dorothy”. They then leave but she has a flirtatious exchange with the coffee shop guy, who says “after hours” about how late it is. Rosanna Arquette is really being interesting this whole time.
They go back to her place and he kisses her but she is conflicted. She’s out of the room for a bit and he sees she has a medical book about burns with graphic pictures. This prompts him to make a big decision and be an asshole deliberately to scare her off. He leaves as she’s crying to her roommate.
It’s raining now. He tries to use the Subway but doesn’t have enough money because the fares went up at midnight. So he goes into a bar nearby where John Heard is the bartender and Teri Garr is a waitress with a retro beehive hairdo. She slips him a note that says “Help I hate this job” and gives a look which supports that sentiment. He goes to the bathroom and when he comes back she is sitting at his table looking a bit longingly at him.
0:38:02 — He ignores her and chats with the bartender and soon a new subplot spins up about a string of burglaries which is now concerning to the bartender, and GD needs subway fare, so they make a deal that GD will go to the bartender’s apartment, get the key to the broken cash register, and bring it back in exchange for subway fare. Even though they just met.
He goes there… okay this plot is developing way faster than I can type but he goes there, uses the restroom, accidentally floods the toilet with that blue stuff, gets confronted by neighbors who think he might be the burglar-at-large, talks his way out of that, runs into freaking Cheech and Chong who seem to actually be stealing LF’s sculpture, do you SEE what I am DEALING WITH HERE YOU GUYS
0:45:30 — He’s gone back to that apartment with LF and RA because he has their sculpture and gets guilted into apologizing to RA, who is in her bedroom. He does a monologue that actually sounds like the normal kind of rational, mature apology… but she appears to have overdosed on pills and is dead! And LF locked him in thinking that would be sexy maybe! He breaks the door down and finds a note from her that’s like, hey guys come to Club Berlin later but she is dead you guys.
He calls 911 normally, decides to look at her body to see the deal with the burns and we see that there simply are no burns, then he realizes he still has the bartender’s keys and not his own so he leaves notes for the police and goes to the bar. He runs into TG who says she just quit working at that bar. The bar is closed with a “back in 5 minutes” sign probably because he had to leave to follow up on his missing keys and TG wants to hang out and it is all just very frustrating! Also her bed is surrounded by very deliberately lit mousetraps.
TG loses it because she says she works at a Xerox shop and is sensitive about his reaction to that, that’s some good Teri Gar stuff, especially when she pivots to asking for a compliment about her beehive hairdo. And she wants him to touch it. But bartender returns across the street, but she’s trying to seduce him. He promises to return. He goes back to the bar, where a stereotypical 70s gay couple is making out… but uh oh. Bartender gets a phone call with the very bad news that his girlfriend just killed herself, and sure enough we figure out quickly that it’s RA, that’s Bartender’s girlfriend. Eep, right?
GD hightails it out of there, maybe without his keys (?), and goes back to TG’s apartment, and she rewards him with one of LF’s little art-paperweights. New York is just a small town, amirite?
He leaves there quickly and she tries to give him the paperweight, which by the way isn’t even painted it’s just plaster-color, and it’s very funny when he says GET THAT AWAY FROM ME!
Bartender has, once again, understandably once again, closed up, and GD definitely still needs his keys and subway fare. He goes back to Bartender’s apartment and he’s not there but the neighbors are still suspicious of him. Oh also just before that we saw that Cheech and Chong have been busy burglarizing.
He remembers that LF and her boyfriend went to Club Berlin so he goes there and has a funny exchange with the bouncer before getting in. It is loud and chaotic and kind of 80s-punk-rock in there. It’s mohawk night and some punkers try to mohawk him and it’s too crazy so he runs away, and oddly decides to go back to the loft, not sure why, he saw LF at the club and RA is dead so he knew no one would be there… but he remembered that there was 20 dollars on the sculpture and he takes it, then leaves and flags a cab down and it’s the same cab and he says, hey look same-driver here is that money I didn’t have before, and the cab driver drives away with the 20 dollars all vengefully.
Catherine O’Hara is who had gotten out of the cab and is now a character in the story. She offers to help out and they are up in her apartment where he is using her phone calling 411, hey you guys it’s an actual 411 call, I remember those! CO is pranking him and making him forget the number he was calling 411 for. She offers him a ride home in her ice cream truck… but the suspicious neighbors have been posting wanted signs in the neighborhood and CO sees it and now thinks he’s the burglar and she whistles and now he’s being chased, it’s a whole foot chase with a vigilante mob!
He climbs up a fire escape and looks to one side and witnesses a shooting in someone’s kitchen and says “I’ll probably get blamed for that”. Boy did I love that when I first saw it.
A man appears on the street. He is watching GD curiously. The man seems to have quickly decided that this is the moment for his first anonymous gay tryst. But GD just wants to use the phone. Using the phone doesn’t get him anywhere so he just starts unloading his whole story to the man. This rant helps us know we’re feeling the same frustration as GD. Some movies with stories like this would alienate us by making this character be weird like everyone else, but this performance and character are carrying us through this silly story.
He leaves and sees Bartender in the diner he’d been in earlier… and the diner owner gives him the order he’d pretend-ordered, it’s funny! Lots is funny here.
Very strangely, someone enters the diner and hands him a flyer for Club Berlin, they already have a new event even though it was just Mohawk Night like an hour ago. The vigilante mob shows up to chase him so he goes back to Club Berlin which is now quiet and mostly empty. He puts his last remaining quarter in the jukebox and plays “Is That All” which is a song that I have had lasting affection for because of this movie, and asks the only person in there to dance with him. Her name is June and that’s a good move because she hides him from the vigilante mob in her downstairs art studio.
The mob tries to get in and he does some stupid move that gets him all covered in plaster because apparently June does that same kind of sculpture as LF. June covers him in plaster and newspaper strips to hide him from the mob. That works but she leaves him encased in that and he is frozen stuck. As soon as she leaves, Cheech and Chong show up to burglarize June’s studio and they mistake frozen GD for the sculpture they thought they’d stolen from LF. They load him in their van and drive away, and take a sharp turn in front of GD’s workplace in the beginning of the movie, and he falls out of the back of the van and the plaster shatters and they open the gates for the beginning of the work day. So he goes and sits at his desk and there is one final shot which is another surprisingly deft, choreographed tracking shot around the office set to classical orchestral music like in the beginning.
Well first of all, good job on reading that! This is a one-plot-point-after-another movie that is extra hard to watch while typing notes about it, plus also it’s so mile-a-minute that I’m not sure a human being reading these notes has gotten any insight. There are things I couldn’t get to in these notes. Whatever, I just do this because I feel like it. But after rewatching After Hours I am really reminded of why I love this movie and this kind of movie, this comedy of lots of terrible shit happening to a normal guy. Really fun collection of quirky characters. And it’s just so fun to sit there wondering what will happen next. It’s Scorsese’s only comedy (no, I absolutely don’t consider The King of Comedy to be a comedy), but it absolutely feels like a Scorsese movie. Maybe it’s the nighttime New York darkness of it, but also the slick shots and editing scattered throughout. Totally great great movie.
