After Hours is a 1985 American black comedy film[5] directed by Martin Scorsese, written by Joseph Minion, and produced by Amy Robinson, Griffin Dunne, and Robert F. Colesberry.
Dunne stars as Paul Hackett, an office worker who experiences a series of misadventures while attempting to make his way home from Manhattan's SoHo district during the night.
After a boring day at work, computer data entry worker Paul Hackett strikes up conversation with a stranger named Marcy Franklin in a café in New York City.
Marcy tells him that she is living in SoHo with a sculptor named Kiki Bridges, who makes and sells plaster-of-Paris paperweights resembling cream cheese bagels, and leaves him her number.
The bartender, Tom Schorr, offers to give Paul money for a subway token, but he is unable to open the bar's cash register.
The bouncer at Club Berlin refuses him entry because his hairstyle does not fit the mohawk dress code, and Paul narrowly escapes several punks who attempt to give him a haircut.
Back on the street yet again, Paul meets a Mister Softee ice cream truck driver named Gail, who mistakes him for the burglar based on Julie's posters.
After the mob leaves, June is worried they will come back, and doesn't take off the plaster, which hardens, trapping Paul in a position that resembles Kiki's sculpture.
Michael Rabiger sees mythological symbolism as a primary theme of the film, stating: "The hero of Scorsese's dark comedy After Hours is like a rat trying to escape from a labyrinth.
[9] Paramount Pictures' abandonment of The Last Temptation of Christ was a huge disappointment to Scorsese, and spurred him to focus on independent companies and smaller projects.
[11] The opportunity to direct After Hours was offered to Scorsese by his lawyer Jay Julien, who put him through Griffin Dunne and Amy Robinson's Double Play Company.
The screenplay, originally titled Lies after a 1982 Joe Frank monologue that inspired it,[12] was written as part of an assignment for his film course at Columbia University.
[15] One of Scorsese's contributions involved the dialogue between Paul and the doorman at Club Berlin, which was inspired by Franz Kafka's "Before the Law", one of the short stories included in his novel The Trial.
[20] In addition to the score, other music credited at the end of the film is: After Hours grossed only $10.1 million in the United States,[4] but was given positive reviews and has since been considered an "underrated" entry in the director's filmography.
He praised the film as one of the year's best and said it "continues Scorsese's attempt to combine comedy and satire with unrelenting pressure and a sense of all-pervading paranoia.
[27] In The New York Times, critic Vincent Canby gave the film a mixed review, calling it an "entertaining tease, with individually arresting sequences that are well acted by Mr. Dunne and the others, but which leave you feeling somewhat conned.
The site's critical consensus reads: "Bursting with frantic energy and tinged with black humor, After Hours is a masterful – and often overlooked – detour in Martin Scorsese's filmography.