![]() The scene has no structural function in the film - but it is admittedly well directed and photographed. So he shot a fantasy scene from the boy's mind, showing him imagining encounters with prostitutes. In order to get distribution for his film, he was asked to shoot and insert some sort of nude scene to give the film sex exploitation angles (in fact, the ads are heavily, and misleadingly, sex-oriented). A scene at the end of the film, when the boy visits a church and cuts his lip on a nail in a crucifix, is awkwardly contrived.įor another misplaced scene, however, Scorsese does not deserve full blame. The girl claims she was raped, and a scene (real? imagined?) illustrating her story is done with a melodramatic hand. Scorsese is gifted at handling subtle moments, but he has some trouble with the more obvious ones. And then, eventually, when she tells him she isn't a virgin, he is unable to cope with this and he breaks it off. We see him still inhabiting this world even though he falls in love with the girl from outside. We see him at two parties (both directed by Scorsese with great improvisatory skill.) We see him sitting at the end of a bar with his friends, throwing nuts and looking the other way. She is a college student, she reads books, she lives in her own apartment, she doesn't even have a TV! He is very much still a part of the neighborhood gang. We gradually understand that they come from different backgrounds. The boy asks the girl for a date, and she accepts. It is a marvelously acted scene, much of it shot in one take to retain continuity as the two people get over their embarrassment. They get into a conversation about John Wayne, and reading French, and what their ambitions are. She's taking the ride for fun something the young man cannot comprehend. One day on the Staten Island ferry, he meets a nice girl, a blond, who is reading a French magazine. The hero of "Who's That Knocking" comes from this world but is not entirely of it. You try to make the broads and you place the nice girls on an inaccessible, idealized pedestal. ![]() In this world, still strongly under a repressive moral code, there are two kinds of girls: nice girls and broads. Occasionally on Saturday night they get together at somebody's apartment to drink beer, watch Charlie Chan in a stupefied daze and listen to some guy who says he knows two girls whom he might be able to call up. Instead, we enter a world of young Italian-Americans in New York City who sit around and kill time and look at Playboy and cruise around in a buddy's car listening to the Top 40 and speculating aimlessly about where the action is, or might be, or ever was. Here are no swingers making it with Yvette Mimieux, no graduates seduced by Anne Bancroft. In "Who's That Knocking," Scorsese deals with young manhood on a much more truthful level. If we like these films, it is because we identify with them-not because they understand us. The movies, in their compulsion to be contemporary, too often give us an unreal picture of "swinging youth." We get discotheques, anti-establishment cliches, New London fashions and Christopher Jones being cooler at 21 than we hope to be by 50.
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