American Boy: A Profile of: Steven Prince (Martin Scorsese, 1978)
Like Italianamerican, American Boy (1978)—subtitled A Profile of Steven Prince—casually defies verité by including the filmmaker in the frame: Its first shot finds Scorsese sharing a Jacuzzi with his subject, a rail-thin, red-eyed ex-junkie whose near-orgasmic moans of pleasure compel the auteur to request a little space. That need for privacy appears an inherited trait for Marty as much as it was for Howard Hughes: The earlier film shows his father, Charles—in the face of Mrs. Scorsese’s playful protestations—favoring the far side of the sofa.
But as much as these docs reveal about the director’s psychology (and rhyme indelibly with one another), they also illuminate his fiction. The attraction-repulsion dynamic of Taxi Driver—wherein Prince’s gun salesman character makes even Travis Bickle look human—is mirrored in Boy’s pained progression from stand-up comedy to horror and tragedy. As the first act of Prince’s routine features vivid recollections of doped-up run-ins with draft enforcers and silverback gorillas, Scorsese’s wide-angle shots of the “show” in actor George Memmoli’s Hollywood bachelor pad include the chuckling crew as an approving audience. But as the topics turn to heroin abuse and homicide in the second half, the laughs diminish and the camera zooms tighter, sealing the subject’s fate as God’s lonely man. (It’s not just in the hot tub that Scorsese wishes to separate himself from this guy.)
American Boy was made at a time when the director, like other movie brats, was battling some rather unhealthy addictions of his own. But while he seems to share with Prince the sort of creative tension that stems from having temperamentally opposite parents (both dads in the docs are characterized as hard realists, both moms as firm believers in the happy ending), Marty never lost his mother’s classy sense of familial duty and taste. Italianamerican famously concludes with Catherine Scorsese’s recipe for spaghetti and meatballs; Boy includes the well-fed filmmaker’s editorial comment on his subject’s claim that Mrs. Prince’s cuisine was “bland.” What kind of man, Scorsese suggests, leaning into the frame, doesn’t appreciate his mother’s cooking?
Source: villagevoice.com
5 Notes/ Hide
-
skepperson likes this
-
mykindofimages likes this
-
saturdayboy likes this
-
antonyhare likes this
-
pixnflixnwrites likes this
-
cinephilearchive posted this
