Martin Scorsese is one of the biggest names in Hollywood. The American film director has been working in the industry since he turned 20 in 1962. In that time, he’s married five wives (and divorced four), received 17 major awards after being nominated for 76, and worked both in front of and behind the camera.

RFor the release of Martin Scorseses short film Audition, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, Macau hosts a press conference where the A-listers. R r r rHollywood heavyweights Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio have both starred in several Martin Scorsese films. Now the veteran director has pitted his two. R rHollywood heavyweights Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. Beyond the sound and fury of unions and politics, or this or that historic crime wave or law enforcement crackdown, Scorsese is shooting, a bit shakily, for a universal tenor and truth inside the story of The Irishman, in a mode to which he did not aspire at the time of either Mean Streets (1973) or Casino. Casino is a 1995 American epic crime film directed by Martin Scorsese, produced by Barbara De Fina and distributed by Universal Pictures.The film is based on the nonfiction book Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas by Nicholas Pileggi, who also co-wrote the screenplay for the film with Scorsese. Martin Scorsese was born on November 17, 1942 in New York City. From a young age he wanted to be a priest, but during college he made a switch to pursue a career in film. He attended New York University’s School of the Arts for his masters degree in film, and during that time he worked on several short films.

At 78 years old, Scorsese is the most-nominated living person for the Academy Award for Best Director. Having been put forward for the award nine times, he’s second in the all-time list, behind only William Wyler who received an astonishing 12 nominations.

He’s also one of just a few people who have received top categories awards for film, music, and television, thanks to his Academy Award, Grammy Award, and three Primetime Emmy Awards. It’s no surprise then, these have been picked up from many of his best pieces of work, including these five.

Casino (1995)

Casino hit movie theatres in 1995, telling a story of greed, power, and money. It follows Sam Rothstein, or as he’s more commonly known, Sam the Ace. Sam is a Jewish American from Chicago who gets asked to move to Las Vegas by a Mafia syndicate to run one of their casinos.

Casino is based on the true story depicted in the Nicholas Pileggi book Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas. Its cast includes several big names like Robert De Niro, James Woods, Sharon Stone, and Kevin Pollak. They helped to make the film a commercial success, grossing $116.1 million at the box office from an initial budget of around $40 million.

Casino is available on a number of streaming platforms, including Amazon Prime Video and can be bought from iTunes and the Google Play Store. If you’d like to learn more to decide if you’ll like it, you can find a more in-depth Casino movie review here.

Goodfellas (1990)

Perhaps one of Scorsese’s most famous movies, Goodfellas is another gritty crime film that follows the mob. Working alongside Nicholas Pileggi and Robert De Niro again, as well as Ray Liotta and Joe Pesci, Scorsese adapted the script during rehearsals. He found that the actors could make the lines more gripping by allowing them to ad-lib and would write down the lines he liked, adapting the script accordingly.

Like Casino, the book is based on a Pileggi book, this time titled Wiseguy. Originally, Goodfellas was intended to share the same name, but it was later changed by Scorsese. Goodfellas follows the story of Henry Hill, a member of the mob, as he rises through the ranks of the Mafia and eventually falls from grace.

From a budget of $25 million, Goodfellas was a commercial success, generating more than $46 million at the box office. It also won Best Film at the British Academy Film Awards, as well as Best Costume Design, Best Editing, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Director. In addition to these, Goodfellas received 25 other awards, and has been included in the United States Library of Congress due to it being considered “culturally significant”.

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

The Wolf of Wall Street is another gritty movie taken from a book that’s based on real-world events. Featuring Leonardo DiCaprio as the lead, the film shows the rise and fall of a stockbroker named Jordan Belfort.

DiCaprio stars alongside Jonah Hill and Margot Robbie, depicting the deception and shady tactics used by Stratton Oakmont, the investment brokerage run by Belfort.

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As well as being a huge commercial success, making $392 million from a $100 million budget, The Wolf of Wall Street set a Guinness World Record for the most swearing in a movie, using one particular profanity 569 times throughout, equating to an average of 2.81 times per minute.

Gangs of New York (2002)

Gangs of New York was the first time Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese worked together, forming a relationship that remains today.

The film is another crime film based on true events, using Herbert Asbury’s 1927 book that shares the same name as its foundation. It depicts the battle between two rival gangs of mid 19th century New York. The film was praised for the “electrifying” performance of Daniel Day-Lewis and the great production design.

Taxi Driver (1976)

Scorsese’s success isn’t limited to the 1990s and 21st century, the 1976 psychological thriller Taxi Driver is one of his best pieces of work.

Starring Robert De Niro, Albert Brooks, Jodie Foster, Cybil Shepherd, and several other big names, they tell the story of a New York cab driver called Travis Bickle. This loner plots to kill a presidential candidate and a pimp while he struggles to find a purpose in life.

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While one of his plots fails, the other turns out to be an accidental success, winning him the praise of the public.

The year 1967 is rightly lauded as a landmark in American cinema. The likes of Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, and The Dirty Dozen ushered in a new era of mainstream film-making which unashamedly dealt in graphic themes of violence, sexuality, and race. Yet amid the sound and fury of these provocative films, the arrival of another pioneering film-maker is often overlooked. It was in November that year that a young graduate of the New York University premiered his directorial debut. Fifty years ago, at the Chicago International Film Festival, the world was introduced to Martin Scorsese.

Originally screened under the title I Call First but now commonly known as Who’s That Knocking at My Door, Scorsese’s debut may not be as well regarded as his later work, but it’s influence is every bit as pervasive. Shot on a minuscule budget and cobbled together over several years, the film would provide a touchstone for the rest of the young director’s pioneering career. Drawing upon his own experiences, Scorsese’s first film is an uneven but complex meditation on Italian-American identity, faith, and masculinity – all themes which have continued to preoccupy his work for the last half century.

The film started life as a student project in 1965, curiously titled Bring on the Dancing Girls. Harvey Keitel, then working as a court stenographer, was enlisted for his acting debut in the lead role of “JR”. The resulting first cut was a largely plotless, 65-minute effort which followed JR and his friends as they goofed, got drunk, and pursued women across Little Italy. In Scorsese’s own words, the initial screening was “a disaster” and his work was “universally hated”.

The following year, Scorsese procured the finance necessary to extend the scope of the film and introduced a romantic side-plot. Keitel was reluctantly brought back for reshoots and Zina Bethune cast as his girlfriend. These scenes were shot on lower-quality film stock and spliced with the existing footage, the only giveaway being the fluctuating length of Keitel’s hair. It was this version of the film, now titled I Call First, which screened at Chicago in 1967.

Despite the film’s stilted production, Scorsese’s talent was quickly recognised. Roger Ebert instantly described the film as “a great moment in American movies”, and later reflected that it had announced “the arrival of an important new director”. Nevertheless, the film did not receive a wide distribution for over a year, when it was picked up by exploitation distributor Joseph Brenner and a graphic sex scene was hastily added in order to court the exploitation market. The new title was taken from the song by The Genies which plays over the end credits.

Like many of his contemporaries, Scorsese’s early films owes a great debt to the French New Wave. His erratic editing style and monochrome photography echoes Jean-Luc Goddard, but Scorsese’s subjects are distinctly American. With this debut film, the director chose to cast a light upon the environment and culture in which he’d grown up, and in doing so gives a profoundly authentic impression of the Italian-American experience.

Keitel’s JR is a thinly veiled substitute for Scorsese himself. In one charming scene, JR meets a girl on the Staten Island Ferry and proceeds to clumsily deliver a spiel on the brilliance of John Ford’s The Searchers. In this way, JR and his friends are totally detached from the mafioso stereotypes which often define Italian-Americans on-screen. Gangsters are peripheral figures, and the closest thing to a shoot-out is a slow-motion play-fight over a pocket-sized revolver. The director would later proudly state that Who’s That Knocking At My Door “was the first film to show what Italian-Americans were really like”.

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Central to the world in which Scorsese’s characters live is the contradictory role of religion, perhaps unsurprising considering that the director once flirted with joining the priesthood. Catholic guilt is a predominant theme throughout Who’s That Knocking at My Door, specifically the relationship between JR’s conservative upbringing and the sinful reality of his existence. This is a contradiction he projects onto the women in his life, whom he divides into two, distinct groups; “nice girls and broads”. The pure, virginal image he creates of his “nice girl” girlfriend is disrupted when she confides that she was once raped by a past boyfriend. Unable to accept that it was not her fault, he dismisses her as a “whore” and shuns her.

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JR’s warped understanding of female sexuality ultimately leads him to sacrifice his potential happiness, but this is rooted in the toxicity and confusion of his own desires. He fantasises about casual, uninhibited sex with experienced women, but refuses intimacy with his own girlfriend because he believes her to represent an idealised image of celibate romance and Christian marriage. His expectation that women conform to the artificial standards of a “nice girl” or a “broad” merely act as a justification for his paradoxical yearnings.

This confused duality between “improper” desire and “proper” romance crops up in many of Scorsese’s male protagonists. In Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle is thwarted in his attempts at romance because he is unable to distinguish between the two, choosing a pornography cinema as the venue for a second date. For Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, sexuality and violence go hand in hand. He represses his physical desire in order to save energy for boxing matches, but later his impotency causes him to lash out violently against his loved ones. And in The Age of Innocence, Newland Archer is torn between his love for his chaste fiancé May Welland and the rebellious divorcee Ellen Olenska. Clearly, the self-destructive nature of masculine sexuality is a topic which has continued to fascinate the Manhattanite director.

All this, of course, would come later. What Who’s that Knocking at My Door does illustrate, however, is that Scorsese never saw the world as one of heroes and villains or clear-cut morality. Despite its humble origins, this film offers a uniquely ambiguous perspective on mid-’60s American life and the conflicting human impulses which drove it. As Roger Ebert predicted in 1969, Scorsese would go on to explore these ideas with greater depth and polish in later films – in many ways, 1971’s Mean Streets feels like a high-gloss remake of this initial effort. Like so many other young directors, Martin Scorsese was knocking on the door of Hollywood, and it wasn’t long before he was answered.

Published 15 Nov 2017