It reminded me of another, supremely wrong-headed character, the young Sicilian in Pietro Germi's "Seduced and Abandoned" who adamantly refused to marry the girl he had made pregnant because she wasn't a virgin. The performances by Keitel, Zina Bethune (as his girl) and Lennard Kuras and Michael Scala (as his companions) are good and in the same scale as the film.The experience of watching "Who's That Knocking at My Door?" was not entirely drab, however. The result is a movie that is as precise-and as small-as a contact print. However, the director, who also wrote the original story and screenplay, hasn't succeeded in making a drama that is really much more aware than the characters themselves. is made vaguely uncomfortable by all the fresh air and nature. accepts as concomitants to life - a drunken beer party that almost turns into a gang bang, and a curious visit to the country during which J. I must say that I like Scorsese's enthusiasm even while wincing at some of the results, as in a love scene in which the camera swoops around a nude couple as if the photographer were a vertiginous Peeping Tom.Scorsese is effective in isolating the moments of "Marty"-like boredom that J. There are lots of panning shots across gray, squalid cityscapes and around interiors made easily grotesque with objects of religious adoration. Working on what must have been a minuscule budget, he has composed a fluid, technically proficient movie, more intense and sincere than most commercial releases.It is apparent that the Italian-American milieu is a first-hand experience, but the vision Scorsese has made from it is detailed in the kind of self-limiting drama and dialogue that Paddy Cheyefsky abandoned some time ago, and in images that look very much like film school poetry. Scorsese, who is 25 years old and won a number of festival prizes for shorts made while he was a student at New York University, is obviously a competent young filmmaker. Puritan Roman Catholicism, the kind that bedeviled Stephen Dedalus and Studs Lonigan, is alive and ill and in the movies.J.R.'s dense wrong-headedness is real and commonplace but not especially affecting in the film that opened yesterday at the Carnegie Hall Cinema. R., the troubled hero of Martin Scorsese's first feature film, "Who's That Knocking at My Door?", is the sort of young man who, in a total confusion of values, can one minute offer to "forgive" the girl he loves for having been forcibly raped, and the next minute accuse her of being a whore. He drinks beer with the boys at the neighborhood friendship club and occasionally he sleeps with "broads," as distinguished from "girls," who are the virgins one is supposed to marry.J. goes to the movies-he cherishes the memory of "Rio Bravo" and "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance"-and he walks under marquees announcing "Ulysses." Although out of a job, he doesn't lack funds. (HARVEY KEITEL), a young, essentially decent Italian-American, has grown up in a comfortable New York City apartment that is protected by his mother, lit by holy candles and sanctified by china figurines of Virgin Marys who wear the wan, distant smiles of tired airline hostesses.
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