A Life Framed By the Movies

The climax of the 1946 Gregory Peck, Jennifer Jones film, produced by David Selznick, a psychosexual melodrama involving a "half-breed" as well as large quantities of male arrogance, is suffused in orange movie-glow, a replication of setting sun. Scorsese used just such a device in a scene in 1974's "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore." The revelation: "I began to realize there were so many other kinds of movies, not just the westerns they'd been taking me to."

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

"I began noting the different styles. Orson Welles, for example. I began noting what was possible with different lenses and camera placement. Jean Renoir was very important: My father took me to see 'The River.' "

Here the movie database tendency in Scorsese comes out. He can't stop himself pointing out a fact that can't be known to seven people on Earth: "Satyajit Ray was an associate director on that film." * * *

But the boy had to do something. He wasn't allowed to play ball or run in a gang (too fragile), there was nothing to read, TV was mostly fuzz and baloney.

"I started drawing pictures. I thought they were cartoons but they were movies. I ended up designing shots, even in different aspect ratios. I became obsessed with that. Once I started that and came up with stories, I discovered [that] drawing what should go in front of the camera is pleasurable. But once you do it, you have to do it again. It's ceaseless!"

Even as he was re-creating the movie process on paper, he noticed that the movies he was watching seemed to come from some strange world that had nothing to do with his own.

"I had a need to tell a story in pictures -- literature was not in the house. I had a need to tell stories that came from my world, stories that were very different than what was on screen, but just as dramatic. These stories moved me so much, I felt desperate. I saw a whole universe right there, very vivid. It took only a short while before I realized that such a universe could be expressed in film."

He was 13 when he saw "The Searchers," the great John Ford western of 1956, where Wayne plays the obsessive Ethan Edwards, hunting for a girl kidnapped by Indians. To save her? No, to kill her.

"It had the extraordinary ability to convey the darker side of character. I was already aware of such constructions as 'good-bad' as opposed to the more common, simple 'good-good' hero. I preferred the complexity."

And even then, at 13, he got what some critics even today don't: that movies, even the westerns reviled by snooty mainstreamers then as infantile, were frequently propelled by ideas.

"That movie illustrated the turmoil of postwar America. Wayne's Ethan Edwards is a key character -- we accept his contradictions and love him for his inability to fit in. When he walks off, just before the door closes, that's our country walking off, never coming back. Something's changed."

Other picks from his favorite period in film, 1945 to 1960: