• Kartina Richardson in New York City
There exist in this sometimes sad world, moments that remind you that you are alive.
You know these moments well. Blood rushes from your toes to your cheeks. Or from your cheeks to your toes. Either way you are made aware of its movement.
A great energy is felt in your jaw and in the ends of each strand of hair. Your fingers curl. Your hands turn into fists or claws. Everything is hot. You shudder violently (the energy must be flung off or you will be eaten alive).
This all happens in two seconds. It is stunning.
There is a scene in Martin Scorsese's "Who's That Knocking At My Door" that gives me this delicious sensation every-single-time-I-see-it. For four minutes and thirty seconds I am paralyzed with pleasure. A curious kind of paralysis. A mixture of sexual desire, odd violent inclinations, jealousy and tenderness.
Scorsese films populate the favorite movie section of the bro dude's Facebook page, the man remains a genius. One of the few commercially successful directors whose films always have a true visual dynamism. Maybe you have forgotten. It's easy to forget the actual artistry of popular directors (Spielberg uses the background TV like nobody's business), but return to their early works especially and you'll be reminded.
1967′s "Who's That Knocking At My Door" is a movie about young aimless men, very much in the tradition of "I Vitelloni." One of these men is J.R. (Harey Keitel). J.R. wants to marry a girl (Zina Bethune). He discovers shehas been raped. This causes J.R. much grief. After struggling with intense Catholic guilt, he decides he's man enough to marry her. Unfortunately she is unimpressed with his attitude and turns him down.
In this video my review includes footage of the full scene:
The film isn't the most polished movie and as Scorsese's first feature it shouldn't be. It has the episodic feel and sound issues of a student film. At times it's more concerned with style and showcasing good music and witty lines than with actual characters or story, but this is exactly why I like it. Sometimes I want to see shots that thrill me in a simple, but powerful way through more of a pop lens. Scorsese or Tarantino over Tarkovsky or Dreyer. Sometimes I need to see three men arranged in a triangle in dark suits and skinny ties in a cloud of smoke and know immediately "this is supposed to be really cool." And it is.
I love raw masculinity. I love Doo Wop, and I love Coolness. Who understands the intricate fabric of all three better than Scorsese?
If you are a "mature" person, you have grown to appreciate responsibility over recklessness. Intellect over muscles. Sensitivity over nice hairdos. Stability over all.
If you have not yet reached the ballyhooed shores of maturity, you remain susceptible to the lure of The Cool. You know who the good ones are, but if we're talking pure undiluted sex appeal, you know that Steve McQueen is a little sexier than Danny Thomas.
You are a person most charmed by those dismissive of your attentions. The ones too busy drinking, smoking, or breaking things made out of glass to think about anything else. This is the whole point of coolness. Those who are cool cannot care, not even about life and living. So you are in love with the dangerous ones with no direction and no regard. You are in love with the bastards.
This sequence is full of them.
The scene itself is fairly simple and without dialogue. J.R and his friends have a boy's night. They drink, they laugh, they smoke, they play with a gun. The camera work is beautiful, as it it always is. The sequence consists of long slow motion tracking shots from left to right that dissolve into one another. The speed of each subsequent shot is increased so the scene almost imperceptibly works it's way from slow motion back into normal motion.
Accompanying this throbbing camera work is the equally pulsating "El Watusi" by Ray Barretto.
Scorsese understands music. He can find a song's secret darkness or brightness and apply it magically to a scene. The Ronettes "Be My Baby", for example, has a sound and rhythm for starting things, just like Junior Walker's "Shotgun" which breaks the spell of the slow motion sequence.
"El Watusi" on the other hand, is not a song for beginnings. It is a song for slow somethings.
Why does this song fit so perfectly with this sequence? As I watch the scene now I am doing a dance. It is a rather strange one involving the hips swinging side to side. It is languid but steady. This has something to do with it. Both the song and the scene have energy, but a languid energy. A steady sleepiness that undercuts the excitement. One that mirrors the true emptiness of the mens' lives. Maybe this is one reason the scene creates such an intense reaction.I want to bolt forward.
To be part of the excitement.
To reach out and grab Harvey Keitel by the hair.
To go crazy with them behind the heavy slow motion curtain,
But the scene will never let me. I'm in a constant state of wanting.
Once the slow motion is done and I can reach for Harvey's head, the song and sequence are abruptly over. I am cast out of the warm, sleepy, pungent apartment into the decidedly not languid arms of Junior Walker. I am exhausted.
Worn out by extreme desire. Slayed by fantasy ravishing.
P.S.
You may be a little sick of my duende references by now, but Scorsese has an inherent understanding of duende in music. He can sniff it out in the most unexpected places.
From Federico Garcia Lorca's "Theory and Play of the Duende:"
"All through Andalusia, from the rock of Jaén to the snail's-shell of Cadiz, people constantly talk about the duende and recognise it wherever it appears with a fine instinct 'All that has dark sounds has ...duende.' And there's no deeper truth than that.
Those dark sounds are the mystery, the roots that cling to the mire that we all know, that we all ignore, but from which comes the very substance of art. 'Dark sounds' said the man of the Spanish people, agreeing with Goethe, who in speaking of Paganini hit on a definition of the duende: 'A mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained.'
So, then, the duende is a force not a labour, a struggle not a thought. I heard an old maestro of the guitar say: 'The duende is not in the throat: the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.' Meaning, it's not a question of skill, but of a style that's truly alive: meaning, it's in the veins: meaning, it's of the most ancient culture of immediate creation."
Kartina Richardson is a writer and filmmaker. She is of Asian & African American descent. She mentions this because everyone asks, so now you know. Her film commentary site is Mirror, and her blog is ThisMoi.She tweets at @ThisMoiThisMoi. She is particularly fond of Visconti and William Powell. She loves her Cocteau tattoo enormously, but when anyone asks who it is boy does she feel like an asshole.
☑ Click to expand. Comments are open.
Wow, this is some of the best writing I've experienced in a while. You've taken the writing and review itself to an artform here that has the equivalent "aesthetic arrest" experience for me that the scene from the movie does.
Also, I've never experienced such great writing combined with such a great video/oral expression. Usually people are great at expressing in only one form or the other.
This was great! You really summed up why I have always loved scorsese.
Yes, very good writing! And a great scene: it certainly shows Scorsese's talent as a film director, even if it hadn't been fully formed by that stage.
I look forward to reading more of your reviews on the Far-Flung Correspondents page.
Also, with all of your hand gestures, are you sure you're not part-Italian, too? ;-)
hey! this is great stuff
@Stephen/Dave Wow. Thank you so very much for your kind words!
@litdreamer re being Italian: Only in my better dreams.
I love the video of you with the scene!! After your explanation and enthusiasm, the scene came alive for me even more vividly, and I've seen Who's That Knocking at My Door three times before.
It's great writing, but this is is not what I know to be doo wap music at all. I don't quite get the appeal of the scene - I can't say that I now particularly feel like running around the block, baking five chocolate cakes or having sex ten times. But thanks for sharing the clip and your take on it.
Ebert: Maybe it's just me, but you can forget about running around the block or baking the cakes.
It was Raging Bull and Goodfellas that propelled me to go to film school!
This was great fun to read. I guess Scorsese's films have always had incredible use of music! I am inspired to seek out this early film now, I was not familiar with it at all.
I get similarly worked up over Paul Thomas Anderson and sometimes Wes Anderson. The perfect unison of sumptuous visuals and wonderful music, it can be very...................... satisfying. Add in a complicated tracking shot and I am over the moon. I just want to call out to people on the sidewalk and say Look at this! Look at that shot! Lookatit! mMMmmm. Now I need to find that Goodfellas club entrance scene. Obvious maybe, but it's my favorite.
Ah, here it is. With commentary, even. Incredible. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBMKyNJvNV8
Great article! I don't find many critics who give such a passionate review as you did. It was actually quite fun to watch. I'm glad that it was less intellectual and more about how art evokes a feeling. Very interesting approach.
Just wanted to compliment Kartina! I'm thankful to Ebert for tipping me onto your work! You have such a unique style of reviewing; I love that you refer to it as "commentary" and not "critique", because it truly is such a subjective process to watch a film. The passion in your writing is infectious and so very refreshing! I love the "Race in Film" series you're doing as well. Thankyou for the insight and inspiration!
Check out 'Life Lessons,' Scorsese's short from NEW YORK STORIES. Fantastic!
Intriguing, visceral take on a most worthy directorial first film. I was equally taken by your comment on the iconoclastic Terrence Malick's superior initial effort.
You write,"In every way, shape and form, BADLANDS is the perfect dream."
Liked that. Leads me to think even more on the concept of "the duende," of which I was totally unfamiliar.
The scene is great. The article is awful. The mention of duende was intriguing, but inarticulate. An article about duende in film has potential, although my guess it's been covered.
Other than that, I don't know why this is on the Sun-Times website or why it was on IMDB's hit list. This reminds of something an obnoxiously pretentious college student would put together for a film studies class. A soft-hearted professor might give you a B-, tops.
I find the video particularly off-putting. You know you could edit your testimonial and do multiple takes so you don't come off like you're giving your thoughts to a friend in a coffee shop.
You're not as cute as you think you are. I hope this blog does not show up on IMDB again, as I'd like you to kindly stay off my internet.
Ebert: This is not a paper for a film class. We're over that. It's a personal response to a scene that hopes to evoke one. One of the strengths of the video is that it's first take and spontaneous. Someone at IMDb must have liked it; those links are not automatic.
When Siskel and I were learning how to do our show, we would do take after take striving for an elusive perfection. Finally we said the hell with it: Better to let the viewer feel they were hearing a genuine discussion, wrong words, stumbles and all.
What are you trying to do? Pound her down into a tame college student behaving according to your constricted standards? She has the gift of talking naturally on camera. I hope she never changes. She isn't paid for this, I ran it because I admired it, and the whole Far-Flung Correspondents project is a celebration of online film bloggers who are not part of the establishment
Tell you what, Bruce. Before I stay off your internet, why don't you set a good example by staying off my blog?
Kartina: Well done!
I'm a self-proclaimed Scorsese fanatic, and love WHO'S THAT KNOCKING AT MY DOOR for all the same reasons as you. J.R. and his friends are trapped in a sort of adolescent limbo: too old to be acting the way they do, yet not quite old enough to realize it, and nobody is better than Scorsese at bringing "child-like men" to life (as he would prove again in MEAN STREETS a few years later).
I VITELLONI is, indeed, an excellent companion film to WHO'S THAT KNOCKING AT MY DOOR. Another I would recommend is Barry Levinson's DINER
Thanks so much for the article, and the video. I'll be watching!
Well, I can't say I had quite the same reaction....mostly I kept it in my pants....but for years I've been wondering if anybody else besides me had even noticed that "El Watusi" sequence, so it was nice to find this page. No question it was the first of what would come to be many, many Scorsese high points. By the way, a span of 25 or 30 years will dramatically affect your reaction to that scene; where once it throbbed with threat and seduction, now it's as wistful to me as a yellowing picture-postcard. (But then, the movie isn't the only thing that's 25 or 30 years older.)
@bruce, your criticism of richardson is way off mark. Its like berating a cat for not being a dog. I think the whole point is that its NOT like the kind of reviews you seem like you want to read. And tthat the conversational tone is deliberate not a mistake by a naive film student. You seem to be assuming a lack of knowledge and experience on her part. Your language suggests that this is primarily because she is a woman . Plain and simple. I too hope she never loses that style just because people like you want something with a little less personality and a little more like everything else.
Boo!!! THIS VIDEO SUCKED! Where's the violence. I want to see people shootig each other and Joe Pesci gettin his brains batted to mush with a baseball bat. Not a bunch of dudes dressed up like a bunch of fairies having a sausage fest. Boo!!!
Bruce -
Considering that I'm someone with a bit of experience both in writing these pieces, recording these videos *and* grading college papers, I can tell you that Kartina's piece was full of life and color and I am thrilled that she is part of our little group of FFC's.
If you're looking for something pompous and dull, check out that nerdy review of Inception down below somewhere.
Kartina: waiting for your next review. :)
Omer M
You tell 'im, Roger. I even found it thrilling to live down the road from a little town called "Duende," who could have founded the place?? It's what I strove for on the guitar and still do the rare times I play. For Kartina to bring it up -- and showing it in her prose -- makes me hopeful. Keep at it, girl, the world needs this approach.
wow, a cute articulate girl who loves film, not only that but RAW MASCULINITY. a rare species these days. really interesting article and wonderful spontenaity on the video.
btw, thank you for putting that dunderpate in his place roger. that just wasn't called for at all.
Mr Ebert,
Thanks for telling off that punk, "Bruce." I greatly admired the article and videos by Katrina. She had the courage, just as you always have, to say something real. Too bad Bruce is threatened by this. (And she is very cute, by the way!) Bruce sounds like someone with a score to settle. Go back to your pathetic life, pal!
By the way....dammit, it needs to be said. JOEY GA-GAH!
There. I feel a lot better now.