'Martin Scorsese All the Films: The Story Behind Every Movie, Episode, and Short' by Olivier Bousquet, Arnaud Devillard and Nicolas Schaller
The greatest living director? Martin Scorsese is surely a leading candidate. In a career that spans the 1960s through the 2020s, Scorsese has directed crime films, historical epics, romantic comedies, mythic dramas, music and movie documentaries, even a children’s picture. Looking for a talking head to talk about film? Many documentarians have chosen Scorsese as the black suited, gray eminence of his profession.
Martin Scorsese All the Films is true to its subtitle, The Story Behind Every Movie, Episode and Short. Too heavy to stuff into a carry-on for airport reading, the profusely illustrated volume is large enough to dominate any coffee table. Oliver Bousquet, Arnaud Devillard and Nicolas Schaller, the French film critics who authored the book, arrange their narrative chronologically and construct the chapters intelligently. They lay out cast and crew alongside budget and box office take (comparing dollar values then and now); their synopses are followed by enough context to place the reader into the time and location of filming. They summarize how Scorsese’s films were critically received upon release and how they are remembered today. They add witty sidebars, such as “Where’s Marty” to point out the director’s many appearances in cameos or in background.
Scorsese came of age in the “New Hollywood” dominated by a loose association of Baby Boomer auteurs educated in classrooms, not sound stages, and exposed in college to French new wave, Italian neo-noir and other foreign films along with the Hollywood pictures with which they grew up. For a while, from the late ‘60s through the mid-‘70s, they dominated cinema until floundering commercially after their initial success. Witness Michael Cimeno (Heaven’s Gate) and Peter Bogdanovich (At Long Last Love). Even the Godfather himself, Francis Ford Coppola, lost his way in a marketplace whose changes were sometimes blamed on the rise of two from the New Hollywood cohort, Steven Spielberg (Jaws) and George Lucas (Star Wars).
However, as All the Films authors point out, the changing direction had more to do with the audience than the filmmakers. Moviegoers were tired of the cynicism that set in as the ‘60s revolution faded. Surviving through box office ups and downs, Spielberg and Scorsese remain vital in their second century, yet the contrast couldn’t be clearer between Spielberg’s Midwest, midcentury optimism and Scorsese’s darker, New York insights into human nature.
Scorsese’s biography is woven through All the Films, refracted as it is through many of the director’s productions. He grew up poor in New York’s Little Italy, a world where most smart boys saw only two choices, the priesthood or the Mob. Asthmatic and vulnerable, fascinated by motion pictures on television and the local bijous, Scorsese found a third way in filmmaking. His mentor at New York University, Haig Manoogian, “instructed him to free himself from the Hollywood format and to allow personal experience to express itself.” Elements of Scorsese’s mature style and themes were already present in his student films, including a preoccupation with “excessive individuals” bent on (self) destruction, the iconography of Roman Catholicism, the possibility of redemption and the struggle for spirituality in a carnal world.
With Mean Streets (1973), Scorsese hit his stride, editing his Little Italy crime story to the rhythm of rock and roll and establishing the template (along with Coppola’s The Godfather) for future screen representations of the Mafia in particular and crime gangs in general. Mean Streets solidified the careers of Robert De Niro and Harvy Keitel, actors who continued to work with the director for years to come. However, even though Scorsese periodically returned to the Mob for material, he was determined to avoid narrow-casting and proved himself capable of directing subjects as diverse as the early life of the Dalai Lama, Kundun (1997), and the exploitation of Native Americans by oil interests, Killers of the Flower Moon (2023).
The 24 Oscar nominations or wins Scorsese has received is only a small token of the recognition he deserves. All the Films will surprise even longtime fans as it lays out the breadth of his accomplishments.
Martin Scorsese All the Films: The Story Behind Every Movie, Episode and Short is published by Black Dog & Leventhal.
