Martin Scorsese (1974)
The forty-nine-minute documentary Italianamerican was filmed in the apartment in Elizabeth Street, Manhattan where Martin Scorsese grew up and where his parents, Catherine and Charles, still lived in the mid-1970s. Scorsese gets them to talk about their early experiences in New York, as the children of recent Italian immigrants, in the first decades of the twentieth century. They need little encouragement: Catherine, who’s obviously had her hair done for the occasion, is consistently voluble; Charles talks plenty too but knows when it’s not worth competing with his wife. Both are very good company. Scorsese himself is no fly on the wall. He’s occasionally heard asking one or other of his parents to clarify or expand on what they’ve just said; he’s often seen on camera with them, particularly once they’ve sat down to eat lunch. We’ve watched Catherine preparing the meal and heard how she makes the tomato sauce for her meatballs. Scorsese leaves us in no doubt as to the importance of this: the sauce recipe scrolls down the screen at the end of the closing credits. Family photographs and news film, inserted at several points, enlarge the socio-historical meaning of the piece. At the time it was shot, Martin Scorsese had just four feature films under his belt (and the fourth of them, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, hadn’t yet been released). He clearly made Italianamerican because he wanted a substantial screen record of his much-loved parents and their past. As an insight into a major film-maker’s personal heritage, it is, in retrospect, valuable autobiographical material too.
The second part of this documentary double bill at BFI was the slightly longer and somewhat later American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince. The film-making style is similar to that of Italianamerican – the piece was shot in the Hollywood apartment of the actor George Memmoli, a mutual friend of Scorsese and Steven Prince; all three men appear on camera. American Boy is less successful, though. Prince, best known for his cameo as the gun salesman in Taxi Driver, is an arresting camera subject. What he has to say – about his childhood and youth, his years of drug addiction, working as a road manager for Neil Diamond, and so on – isn’t so compelling. There’s an odd bit near the end when Prince is asked to tell the same story three times. I wasn’t sure if we were shown these multiple takes because they were unique in the piece as a whole or if Scorsese was tipping us the wink that we shouldn’t assume all we’d seen before was the result of a single take. The film is helped by the wealth of family home-movie footage the subject has supplied but Steven Prince doesn’t seem a sufficiently typical story to justify the definitive implication of the words before the colon in the film’s title; he isn’t sufficiently extraordinary an individual to make that seem unimportant.
4 February 2017
