After Hours

After Hours is a 1985 American neo-noir black comedy. Martin Scorsese directed it, Joseph Minion wrote the script, and Amy Robinson, Griffin Dunne, and Robert F. Colesberry produced it. Dunne plays Paul Hackett, a Manhattan office worker whose night journey home from SoHo turns into a string of bizarre and dangerous encounters. The Geffen Company, through Warner Bros., released the film on September 13, 1985.

It earned $10.6 million at the box office against a $4.5 million budget. Critics praised its black humor, and it has since become a cult classic. The film won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Feature. Scorsese received the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Director and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Director for his work.

The plot follows Paul Hackett, a mild-mannered computer clerk. Late one evening, he talks to Marcy Franklin at a café, intrigued by her odd manner. Her roommate, Kiki Bridges, makes plaster-of-Paris paperweights shaped like bagels. Paul takes Marcy’s phone number.

Later, he takes a taxi to her SoHo apartment, but his only $20 bill flies out the window, leaving him broke and angering the driver. At the apartment, Kiki works on a large papier-mâché sculpture of a screaming man while Marcy is out. When Marcy returns, her erratic behavior and Paul’s discovery of burn cream and disturbing photos convince him she is severely disfigured and unstable. He abandons the date.

Trying to take the subway home, he learns the fare increased at midnight and he cannot pay. He goes to a bar tended by Tom, who lends Paul his apartment key to retrieve the bar’s cash register key. Paul floods the bathroom and faces suspicious residents. On the street, he confronts two thieves hauling away Kiki’s sculpture and chases them off.

Returning the sculpture to the apartment, he finds Marcy dead from a Seconal overdose. Her body shows no burns, disproving his earlier fears. Leaving, Paul grabs a note from Kiki inviting him and Marcy to Club Berlin. On the way, he runs into Julie, the bar’s waitress, who brings him to her apartment and aggressively flirts.

After Paul rejects her, she brands him the neighborhood burglar with handmade wanted posters. Paul is denied entry to Club Berlin for lacking a mohawk, and punks chase him with clippers. He retrieves his $20 bill from Kiki’s sculpture, then encounters the original taxi driver, who robs him. He meets Gail, a Mister Softee ice cream truck driver, who initially offers help but later joins the mob hunting him after seeing Julie’s posters.

Paul approaches a man for help, but his plea is mistaken for a sexual proposition. He calls the police but is ignored. Paul ducks into the empty Club Berlin. Exhausted and ranting, he drops his last coin into the jukebox for Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” and dances with June, an older sculptress living beneath the club.

June hides him from the mob by covering him in papier-mâché, disguising him as a sculpture like Kiki’s screaming man, but the plaster hardens. The two thieves break in, mistake the rigid Paul for the sculpture they dropped earlier, and haul him away in their van. During a sharp turn uptown, the rear doors swing open; Paul tumbles out, smashing onto the pavement directly in front of his Midtown office building just before dawn. The impact shatters the plaster.

Dazed, he staggers inside, sits at his desk, and stares at his computer terminal as it boots up for another day of work. The film belongs to a subgenre called the “yuppie nightmare cycle,” which places a young working professional under threat, blending screwball comedy and film noir. Some critics offer a psychoanalytic reading: Paul is repeatedly emasculated by women—Kiki with her sexual aggression and masochism, Marcy by rejecting his advances, Julie and Gail by turning a vigilante mob against him, and June by trapping him in plaster.

The film contains many castration references, mostly shown when women are present. In the Terminal Bar bathroom, an image is scrawled on the wall of a shark biting a man’s erect penis. Marcy uses a double entendre when saying, “I broke the whole thing off” about her sex life. One of the mouse traps surrounding her bed clamps shut when Julie tries to seduce Paul.

Michael Rabiger sees mythological symbolism as a primary theme: “The hero of Scorsese’s dark comedy, After Hours is like a rat trying to escape from a labyrinth. Indeed there is a caged rat in one scene where Paul finds himself trapped in a talkative woman’s apartment. The film could be plotted out as a labyrinthine journey, each compartment holding out the promise of a particular experience, almost all illusory and misleading.”

Originally, Tim Burton was set to direct after Dunne and Robinson were impressed by his short film Vincent, but Burton stepped aside when Scorsese expressed interest. Paramount Pictures’ abandonment of The Last Temptation of Christ deeply disappointed Scorsese and pushed him toward independent companies and smaller projects. His previous film, The King of Comedy, had also failed at the box office. He told Michael Wilson, “Marty, it’s probably time you earned a bit of money.” The opportunity to direct After Hours came through his lawyer Jay Julien, who connected him with Dunne and Robinson’s Double Play Company.