The time of another adaptation of The Odyssey is upon us, which means that it’s time for the underemployed to crack their knuckles and start making Letterboxd lists of films that are spiritually similar. One that’s been popping up more often recently is the Martin Scorsese film After Hours, one of the director’s more underdiscussed pictures. The 1985 dark comedy, set in the wee hours of the morning in New York City, follows word processor Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) on, well, an odyssey across the city as he faces various challenges in trying to get back home from Soho. In a diner one night, he’s reading a Henry Miller novel when the lovely Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) strikes up a conversation with him. They flirt, and she tells him that she’s staying with a sculptress friend, Kiki (Linda Fiorentino), whose work includes making plaster bagels with cream cheese. Intrigued, he calls Kiki’s loft later that night and Marcy invites him over, but he ends up losing the only cash he has on him, a $20 bill, when it’s blown out of a cab window. 

This is only the beginning of Paul’s troubles for the night. As it turns out, not only is Marcy already married (albeit separated from her husband, whose fetishization of The Wizard of Oz has made him incapable of orgasming without screaming “Surrender Dorothy”), she’s also already got a boyfriend, with whom she quarreled earlier in the night, prompting her flirtation with Paul in the first place. She behaves erratically, tells harrowing stories about her past that may or may not be true, has a book of images of horrific burns, and is constantly leaving the room to giggle and whisper conspiratorially with Kiki; she is, in short, a manic pixie nightmare woman. Paul sneaks out of the apartment but is unable to make his way home as he’s short the fare for the subway, as there was a price change that went into effect at midnight, and he makes his way to a late night bar, where he befriends bartender Tom (John Heard) and finds himself the object of desire for dissatisfied, forty-something cocktail waitress Julie (Teri Garr). Tom takes pity on Paul and offers to give him the dollar that he needs to get home but is unable to open the register. Paul leaves his own apartment keys as collateral in order to take Tom’s keyring and collect the spare register key from Tom’s place. On his way out, he’s spotted by some of Tom’s neighbors, who accuse him of being the neighborhood burglar who has been hard at work in the area in recent weeks, but he manages to convince them otherwise. 

Returning to the bar, he comes upon the real prowlers (Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong) loading Kiki’s life size papier-mâché sculpture of a screaming man into their van, and he scares them off. Returning the sculpture to Kiki’s apartment, he finds her in the middle of a BDSM session with a hulking man named Horst, who scolds him for running off on Marcy. Paul attempts to apologize to Marcy but finds that she has overdosed on barbiturates. When he goes to Kiki and Horst for help, he finds that they’ve left a note saying they’ve gone to a club. Paul calls the police to report Marcy’s death and returns to the bar to return Tom’s keys. Tom has closed the bar for half an hour, but Julie, who lives across the street, invites him in from the rain. Her apartment matches her beehive hairdo, which shows that she’s stuck in the 1960s; it’s pink, decorated with the occasional rainbow, and stocked with an entire shelf of Aqua Net. After a few more contrived coincidences and turns of the vice that’s gripping Paul, he ultimately finds himself at the mercy of a mob that’s out for the blood of the neighborhood burglar, led by an irate ice cream truck driver named Gail (Catherine O’Hara). Will this be the end of Rico? 

After Hours is a very funny movie, and it’s a shame that it’s not considered one of the essentials in the director’s oeuvre. Paul’s initial situation is a familiar one, in which one finds themself in the home of someone that they barely know but slowly comes to the realization that instability can present as cute quirkiness on first impression, and has to extricate oneself with as much finesse as possible. From there, the continuous downward tumble and increasingly hostile interactions with the bizarre characters who haunt Soho’s streets during the darkest hours of the night make for a hilarious, anxiety-inducing social nightmare. It reads like an early version of Beau is Afraid, in which an ill-equipped everyman must grapple with an increasingly bizarre reality. Here, it’s because everyone involved is connected (Tom is, of course, the boyfriend with whom Marcy had a fight earlier in the night) and are caricatures of normal people with their neuroses turned all the way up. This makes for some very funny characters who are still well-observed. One of the bits that I enjoyed the most was when Julie invites Paul up to her apartment out of the rain while he waits for Tom to reopen the bar, and she puts on a Monkees record. When she realizes that Paul is in a somber state after finding a dead body, she soundtracks the new mood by playing Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning,” seamlessly changing the records. From the punks who try to forcibly shave Paul’s hair into a Mohawk at Club Berlin to the woman who lives beneath the club in a cluttered museum of antiques to a neighborhood that’s as trigger-happy for mob justice as Springfield, everyone is a portrait of a weirdo, and I loved After Hours for that. 

Three years after After Hours, screenwriter Joseph Minion would pen Vampire’s Kiss, known to the general public as the image source of an infamous Nicolas Cage meme, but which has a similar sense of humor to this one. This came right on the heels of another Scorsese comedy, The King of Comedy, which found a balance between being a funny comedy and a genuine thriller, and King continued the Scorsese tradition from Taxi Driver of having the source of danger be the character that we spend the film with. This one not only breaks that tradition by making Paul more of a Hitchcockian falsely-accused-man-on-the-run archetype who’s mostly the victim of circumstance (and a few poorly considered lies), but also in tone from King, having more of Minion’s fingerprints on it than Scorsese’s. There are no long tracking shots that are a hallmark of the director’s filmography, no fancy camera movement, just workmanlike competency, but this allows more room for the comedy to breathe, to the film’s benefit.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond