Scorsese’s first two student films are surprisingly revealing of many themes which would figure prominently in his oeuvre: the mob boss as authority figure; contrasting critiques of straight working stiffs versus ‘outlaw’ fools; and the artist as obsessive. Perhaps unexpectedly, his first two films are both quite funny. Who’d a thunk it - Marty Scorsese: king of comedy?!

WHAT’S A NICE GIRL LIKE YOU DOING IN A PLACE LIKE THIS?

(1963)

dir: Martin Scorsese

His New York University debut showcases a deft timing and comic touch (strangely absent in his 1985 feature comedy After Hours). Career-wise, the obsessive artist theme appears early – from the very beginning. There’s a cute recurring device, a figure identified only as ‘My Friend’, an odd fusion of relaxed TV talk show host and Mafia don who echoes the narrator’s own thoughts (literally, through repeating them straight back) on successive scenes. This may be as revealing a glimpse of the young filmmaker’s alter-ego as we’re ever likely to see.

IT’S NOT JUST YOU, MURRAY!

(1964)

Starring Ira Rubin; dir: Martin Scorsese

This is brisk, brittle and funny – a sardonic putdown both of ‘the life’ (ie gangsterism) but also of straight, workaday society – a revealing insight into much of future Scorsese (Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, etc). Unlike Woody Allen’s similar Take The Money and Run (1968), here the filmmaker’s perspective is omniscient and distanced – viewers are placed outside and superior to the protagonist, not inside and sympathetic as in Woody’s corresponding comedy of a criminal’s self-delusion. There’s a nice sendup of the Kefauver Senate hearings into Organised Crime, a landmark motif of the crime genre film and though Scorsese identifies Raoul Walsh’s elegy for the gangsters, The Roaring Twenties (1939), as its inspiration, It’s Not Just You, Murray! is also the project where he first drew on the stories of his neighbourhood, a font to which he would continually return.