After Hours (film)
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After Hours is a 1985 American black comedy film 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 New York City's SoHo district during the night. Hackett initially plans to visit a recent acquaintance at her shared apartment but is soon disturbed by her strange behavior. After the acquaintance commits suicide, Hackett is the first person to discover the body. He tries to inform the woman's missing housemate, but he has hostile encounters with local punks and a lynch mob, which blames him for a series of burglaries.
After Hours was critically acclaimed for its black humor, and is considered to be a cult film.
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, Paul Hackett, a computer data entry worker, meets Marcy Franklin in a local cafe in New York City. Marcy tells him that she is living with a sculptor named Kiki Bridges, who makes and sells plaster-of-Paris paperweights resembling cream cheese bagels, and leaves him her number.
Later in the night, after calling the number under the pretense of buying a paperweight, Paul takes a cab to the apartment. On the way, his $20 bill is blown out the window of the cab, leaving him with only some change, much to the incredulity of the cab driver. At the apartment, Paul meets Kiki, who is working on a sculpture of a cowering screaming man reminiscent of Edvard Munch's "The Scream". Paul comes across several pieces of evidence throughout the visit that imply Marcy is disfigured from burns which, along with Marcy's increasingly strange behavior, lead him to slip out of the apartment abruptly.
Paul attempts to go home by subway, but the fare has increased at the stroke of midnight. He goes to a bar where Julie, a waitress, immediately becomes enamored with him. At the bar, Paul learns that there has been a string of burglaries in the neighborhood. The bartender, Tom Schorr, offers to give Paul money for a subway token, but he cannot open the cash register. They exchange keys so Paul can go to Tom's place to fetch the cash register key. Afterward, Paul spots two burglars, Neil and Pepe, with Kiki's man sculpture. After he confronts them, they flee, dropping the sculpture in the process. When Paul returns the sculpture to Kiki and Marcy's apartment, Kiki encourages him to apologize to Marcy. However, when he attempts to do so, he discovers Marcy has committed suicide; Kiki and a man named Horst have already left to go to a place called Club Berlin. Paul reports Marcy's death before remembering he was supposed to return Tom's keys.
Paul attempts to return to Tom's bar, but it is locked with a sign indicating that Tom will be back in half an hour. Paul meets Julie again on the street, and she invites him up to her apartment to wait for Tom, where Paul is unnerved by her own strange behavior. He then returns to Tom's bar only for Tom to get a call informing him of the death of Marcy, who was his girlfriend. Paul returns to Julie's apartment, where she begins sketching his portrait while they talk. Ultimately, Paul rejects Julie's advances and leaves. In search of Kiki and Horst to inform them of Marcy's suicide, he goes to Club Berlin, where a group of punks attempt to shave his head into a mohawk. Narrowly escaping, Paul meets an ice cream truck driver named Gail, who eventually mistakes him for the burglar plaguing the neighborhood, and she and a mob of local residents relentlessly pursue him.
When Paul meets a man and asks for help, the man assumes that he is looking for a gay hookup. Paul finds Tom again, but the mob (with the assistance of Julie, Gail, and Gail's Mister Softee truck) pursues Paul. Paul discovers that as payback for rejecting her, Julie used his image in a wanted poster that names him as the burglar. He ultimately seeks refuge back at Club Berlin just as it is about to close for the night. Paul uses his last quarter to play "Is That All There Is?" by Peggy Lee and asks a woman named June to dance.
Paul explains he is being pursued and June, a sculptor living in the club's basement, offers to help him. When Paul is inadvertently doused in plaster stored in her studio, June protects him by applying swaths of papier-mâché all over his head and body in order to disguise him as a sculpture while the mob searches the club for him. After the mob leaves, however, June refuses his request to take off the plaster out of concern they might return, and it soon hardens, trapping Paul in a position that resembles Kiki's sculpture. Neil and Pepe then break into Club Berlin 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. As the van speeds uptown and takes a sharp turn which swings open the van's back door, Paul falls to the pavement, crashed free of the plaster, directly outside the front gate of his office building, just as the sun is rising. Paul brushes himself off and goes to his desk, where his computer screen greets him good morning, bringing the film full circle.
Wikipedia article: After Hours (film) ↗
External links
- Review After Hours at the Internet Movie Database
- Hours Review After Hours (film) at the Turner Classic Movie Database
- Rotten Tomatoes review
- After Hours at All Movie Guide
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