Who's That Knocking at My Door

MOVIE #1,431 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 03.11.24 𝑀𝒶𝓇𝓉𝓎: A MARTIN SCORSESE DIRECTOR FOCUS 🇮🇹🇺🇸 Today I begin my Martin Scorses Director Focus in earnest — after tackling nearly all of his short films (which you can find links for on that page). I will be going chronologically through his feature films, starting with 1967’s Who’s That Knocking at My Door and finishing with last year’s Killers of the Flower Moon and/or future projects that haven’t come out yet, as this is going to take me a LONG time. I’ll be reviewing one film every other Monday (40+ in all) and at that rate it will take all of 2024 and most if not all of 2025. So strap in. For housekeeping purposes, I want to mention that I’ve already reviewed five of his films or feature-length projects: The King of Comedy, Bringing Out the Dead, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Irishman, Pretend It’s a City and Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese.

I will only be revisiting The King of Comedy and The Wolf of Wall Street for this series, because I saw/critiqued them both a while ago and they’re each works I think deserve more attention.

OK, let’s get on with it: Who’s That Knocking at My Door, Marty’s debut film, which was filmed over the course of two years, starting as an NYU student production and then morphing into a feature-length release. This was more raw looking than I thought it would be: it still has a good deal of that ‘student film’ aesthetic, to a degree, though that's not necessarily a bad thing. I like the rawness. Shot on a mix of 35 and 16mm, it looks good.

Structurally, it’s sort of a hot mess, which isn’t surprising given its long and slow history. But it’s a strange film. I don't think this totally works but I appreciate how weird and different it is. I was worried this would just be a watered down version of what he would do later but it feels like a stepping stone he used and then left behind. While thematically there’s a lot here that would carry forward, visually and tonally it feels like an outlier (there’s a sex scene set to “The End” by The Doors, for example). Ultimately, I would think much of the appeal of this also is to see a shockingly boyish Harvey Keitel in his debut appearance.

The earliest of his pictures that I’ve seen before is 1973’s Mean Streets and we have a couple more to get to before that one, so tune in next time for a look at the 1970 documentary Street Scenes and check out the Director Focus page to see what’s on deck.

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CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,430 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,432 ⫸

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Who's That Knocking at My Door, originally titled I Call First, is a 1967 American independent drama film written and directed by Martin Scorsese, and starring Harvey Keitel and Zina Bethune. It was Scorsese's feature film directorial debut and Keitel's debut as an actor. The story follows Italian-American J.R. (Keitel) as he struggles to accept the secret hidden by his independent and free-spirited girlfriend (Bethune). It was released on November 15, 1967.