‘After Hours’ Turns 30: Why Walkin’ Through The Streets Of Soho In The Rain Ain’t What It Used To Be

The lower Manhattan neighborhood of Soho—for you out-of-towners, that’s short for South of Houston Street—is now a tourist AND native attraction clotted with high-end retail shops and snooty bistros. But a mere thirty years ago it was a comparatively desolate pioneer district filled with arty loft dwellers who were really into Philip Glass, or who maybe even WERE Philip Glass. That’s not quite the Soho depicted in Martin Scorsese’s frantic, absurd 1985 black comedy After Hours, now streaming on Amazon Instant Video after being theatrically released 30 years ago this week.

Director Scorsese had made a name for himself for, among other things, his unsparing and accurate depictions of his hometown New York, New York. When budget restrictions confined him to Los Angeles for the shootings of certain scenes in his breakthrough ‘70s feature Mean Streets, the director was sufficiently obsessive that he measure curb lengths in the California locations that were meant to stand in for Little Italy, where the movie is set (and where he did get to do a week or so of location shooting). The depictions of the fleshpot hellscapes of ‘70s Times Square were captured almost documentary style in Taxi Driver. But for After Hours, Scorsese took a more stylized approach to Soho.

The movie depicts Paul Hackett, a bored cipher-yuppie played by Griffin Dunne, who leaves his anonymous-looking Uptown comfort zone in pursuit of comely Marcie, the comely Rosanna Arquette, whom he meets semi-cute in a diner, discussing the fine points of literary dirty-book-writer Henry Miller. Impulsively cabbing it down to Soho on the pretext of buying a papier-mâché bagel from Marcie’s kinky sculptor pal Kiki (Linda Fiorentino, in a breakout role), things get crazy for Paul as his cab navigates avenues in fast motion, and he loses the twenty with whom he had meant to pay the driver. That his fare from the East ‘90s to the edge of Chinatown only came to $6.50 is one of the movie’s many delightful anachronisms. (Another occurs at the beginning of the movie, at Paul’s office, where his trainee, played by a then-unknown Bronson Pinchot, says that this office job is, for him, only temporary, and that his true New York ambition is to “create a magazine…my own magazine…that would be a forum for writers…” Dunne’s eyes glaze over, and mine did too, when I first saw the movie, and again on rewatching this week, for entirely different reasons.)

This is only the beginning of the troubles for Paul, but because this is a Scorsese movie, the viewer’s sympathies for the protagonist are necessarily conflicted. Almost all the women Paul encounters are some kind of weird. When Paul offers a shoulder massage to Kiki, who’s been toiling on a sculpture of a kneeling, screaming man, he tries to play Mr. Cool, saying, “You have a great body,” and she lazily replies, “Yes. Not a lot of scars.” Which theme gets a very sinister working out, to be sure. But as much as we’re meant to share Paul’s sense of alienation, there are moments when he’s just relentlessly hostile in a sense that, we see, never doesn’t summon a sort of karmic boomerang. Late in the movie, he goes on a rant, and concludes, “I just wanted to leave, you know, my apartment, maybe meet a nice girl, and now I’ve gotta die for it?” The answer the movie gives is: Well, maybe you do.

In the process Paul is soaked to the skin, mistaken for a roaming burglar by a group of vigilantes, and nearly forced-Mohawked in a punk club. Said joint, Club Berlin, was concocted by the filmmakers and meant to convey some cross between the Bowery’s punk mecca CBGB and the much more underground (by the 1980s) Mudd Club, which wasn’t quite in Soho by dint of it being a tad south of Canal. Both joints are long gone from the city, of course, and the empty streets depicted in the movie, the real deal of the time, are very lively indeed these days.

When I saw the movie for the first time, in a theater with my Very Cool New York Girlfriend, we certainly dug it, but we thought that it didn’t really get Soho. Even though we were only five or so years younger than Dunne, who was 29 at the time the film was made, we were still the kids moshing around in the likes of Club Berlin. After Hours is a Kafkaesque look at Soho from a stranger-in-a-strange-land perspective. (And we don’t use “Kafkaesque” lightly; Paul’s exchange with the Club Berlin doorman is loosely but definitely adapted from a passage in Kafka’s great novel The Trial.) As my ‘80s went on, and I was propelled back into the single life, I did find more of an affinity with the movie—finding yourself at some stranger’s apartment at 1:30 in the morning and having the phone ring at their place was not an uncommon occurrence in my experience. But, as they say, I was young, I got over it. The nightmare vision of After Hours is still bracingly tough, some might even say problematic. But it depicts a milieu that, it has to be said, WAS New York.

LOST LOCATIONS

28 Howard Street: Kiki and Marcie’s address is still intact, although the façade has been spiffed up and the ground floor is now, yes, a high-end retail shop, a jewelry and curios store called De Vera.

Terminal Bar: Here’s an example of how the movie’s stylization won over verisimilitude. The original Terminal Bar, an infamous dive, was for years a fixture of Eighth Avenue, across the street from, yes, the Port Authority Bus Terminal. The “Terminal Bar” a penniless Paul stumbles into in search of solace and maybe a loan is so-called in the movie for more existential reasons. The actual building was on Spring Street, and was a bar, called the Emerald Pub. It’s been closed for some time and the building is now all apartments.

The River Diner: Scorsese often speaks of how when he was a youngster watching movies on TV, if the characters were in New York walking down one street, and they turned a corner and were suddenly in an entirely different section of town, he would notice it and it would drive him crazy. As a result his movies show an unusual amount of geographic consistency when depicting characters in location. But sometimes you have to bend the rules a bit. The bright, old-style River Diner, where Paul and Marcie go after meeting up at Howard Street, and where Paul tries to hide or regroup several subsequent times in the movie, was not in Soho at all but was located 11th Avenue and 34th street. It was demolished about a decade ago.

[You can rent or purchase After Hours on Amazon Video]

Veteran (that is, old-ish) critic Glenn Kenny has written for oodles of publications and these days reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com. He blogs at Some Came Running and tweets (mostly in jest) at @glenn__kenny.

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