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.
Late one evening, mild-mannered New York computer clerk Paul Hackett strikes up a conversation with Marcy Franklin at a café. Paul is intrigued by the quirky stranger – whose roommate, sculptor Kiki Bridges, makes and sells plaster-of-Paris paperweights resembling bagels – and accepts her phone number. Later, Paul takes a taxi to her SoHo apartment, but his only $20 bill flies out the taxi window, leaving him virtually penniless and earning the driver's wrath.
At the apartment, Kiki is working on a large sculpture of a screaming man while Marcy is out. When Marcy returns, her erratic behavior and Paul's discovery of burn cream and ominous photos convince him that she is severely disfigured and unstable. Unnerved, he abandons the date. Attempting to take the subway home, he learns the fare has jumped at midnight, and he cannot afford to pay. Paul goes to a bar tended by Tom, who lends Paul his apartment key to retrieve the key for the bar's cash register, but Paul floods the bathroom and is nearly lynched by suspicious residents. On the street, Paul confronts two thieves hauling away Kiki's sculpture and chases them off. Returning the sculpture to the apartment, he discovers that Marcy has committed suicide by overdosing on Seconal. Her body shows no burns, disproving Paul's misconceptions about her.
On the way out, Paul grabs a note from Kiki inviting him and Marcy to Club Berlin. On his way there, Paul runs into the bar's waitress Julie, who brings him up to her apartment and flirts aggressively. After Paul scorns her, she brands him the neighborhood burglar via handmade wanted posters. Paul is denied entry into Club Berlin for lacking a mohawk, and punks chase him with clippers. After retrieving his $20 bill from Kiki's sculpture, he encounters the original taxi driver, who robs him. Paul meets a Mister Softee ice cream truck driver named Gaill, who initially offers aid but later joins the mob hunting him after seeing Julie's posters. Paul approaches a man for help, but his plea is mistaken for a sexual proposition. He then calls the police, but is ignored.
Paul ducks into the now-empty Club Berlin. Exhausted, bedraggled, and ranting, Paul drops his last coin into the jukebox for Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is?", and dances with June, an older sculptress living beneath the club. June hides him from the mob by covering him in papier-mâché, disguising him as a sculpture resembling Kiki's screaming man, but the plaster hardens. The two thieves break in, mistake the rigid Paul for the sculpture they dropped earlier, and haul him away in their van. During a sharp turn uptown, the rear doors swing open; Paul tumbles out, smashing onto the pavement directly in front of his Midtown office building just before dawn. The impact shatters the plaster. Dazed, he staggers inside, sits at his desk, and stares at his computer terminal as it boots up to greet him for another day of work.
This film belongs in a grouping that revolves around a young working professional who is placed under threat, named the "yuppie nightmare cycle",[6] 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,[3] 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,[6] 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.[7] 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.[6] 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".[8]
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.[9]
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.[10] 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".[11]
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,[12] 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?"[13] Minion was 26 years old at the time the film was produced.[14] The script finally became After Hours after Scorsese made his final amendments.[15]
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.[16][17] As Scorsese explained to Paul Attanasio, the short story reflected his frustration toward the production of The Last Temptation of Christ.[18]
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.[19]
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.[9]
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.[20] In addition to the score, other music credited at the end of the film is:
After Hours grossed only $10.1 million in the United States,[4] but was given positive reviews and has since been considered an "underrated" entry in the director's filmography.[21][22][23][24] 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.[25]
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."[26] He later added it to his "Great Movies" list.[27] 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."[28] 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."[14]
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."[29] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 89 out of 100 based on reviews from nine critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[30]
123Grist, Leighton (2013). The films of Martin Scorsese, 1978–99: authorship and context II (1. publ.ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN9781403920355.
↑Sangster, Jim (2002). Scorsese: Virgin Film. London: Virgin Books. pp.132–133. ISBN0753506424.
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