Who's That Knocking at My Door Harvey Keitel, Zina Bethune Director: Martin Scorsese
'Without Who's That Knocking there would have been no Mean Streets,' so said Martin Scorsese of his debut feature, an energetic slice-of-life piece, full of foretastes of the director's better-known work.
The story is slight. Young J.R. (Harvey Keitel) hangs around with his buddies in New York's Little Italy. They idle away their time drinking, fooling around, arguing, sometimes getting into fights. J.R. starts a relationship with a girl (Zina Bethune) from the other side of the tracks and feels pulled in two different directions. He and the unnamed girl split when J.R.'s old-country sexual mores prove an insurmountable hurdle.
Scorsese does not prioritise linear narrative here, preferring to build a sense of character and place through unconnected scenes, moments and images. He utilises a battery of stylistic tricks from rapid cuts to freeze frames, extreme close-ups, dissolves, slow motion, unusual camera angles and lively camera movement.
The film, shot in black and white, started as Scorsese's graduate project at New York University and took him three years to complete. Along the way the romantic subplot was added along with a fantasy sex scene in which J.R. beds several prostitutes.
As for themes, plenty of Scorsese's preoccupations are apparent: New York Italian culture; Catholicism; sexual repression; street banter; macho posturing; direct referencing of other films (The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Rio Bravo); and regressive male attitudes to women.
