The Endurance of Martin Scorsese's Critical Reputation: A Few Thoughts

Looking back at New Hollywood it is common for film historians to remark how those filmmakers whose stars shined mostly brightly during those years saw their output decline sharply in quantity and quality afterward, such that they seem epilogues to stories that ran their course in the '70s, and often before its end. The comparative newcomers so identified with that moment are the most obvious--Bogdanovich, Altman, Friedkin, Coppola, Cimino, Ashby--though the careers of older filmmakers who had been part of the tendency, like Penn and Lumet, went the same way, with much the same sayable in varying degrees of figures like Pakula, or May, or Beatty, or Schrader. Where there was commercial success it did not go with great artistic accolades--with a Nichols never again enjoying the cachet he did when he made his splash with The Graduate, and Lucas remembered mainly as the creator and overseer of the Star Wars universe, rather than someone who had been involved in movies like The Conversation and Apocalypse Now.

In the end the only New Hollywood superstar I can think of who really retained their standing as an Important Filmmaker after the close of the era is Martin Scorsese. It would be nice to say that here was someone who defied the odds, but it may be that his career endured not because of the ways in which he was really just not all that much of a rebel. If politically sophisticated film critics like Peter Biskind and David Walsh are attentive to the limits of New Hollywood's filmmakers' critical gaze at the world and capacity to translate it into art (having only "rudimentary alternative ideologies," Biskind wrote, they ended up mainly offering "deconstruction" of existing genres), they still recognize the "oppositional" stance and what it meant for their work and for society, that the tolerance for it was fading fast in the press and the studio executive suites and other places which matter, and that they paid the price for it (Kris Kristofferson, for instance, very clear about how they all had it in for Cimino after Heaven's Gate). However, as one sees when they compare the films of Scorsese with those of Coppola, Scorsese's fascination with criminals was less radical than "petty bourgeois," and it was easy enough for him to shift from tales of small-time gangsters to films like The Aviator, a right-wing paean to the high-tech "innovator" and "entrepreneur" so celebrated in the immediately preceding years, the makers of which were quite prepared to do considerable violence to the facts to get the Message across (from their transforming Katherine Hepburn's family into the stuff of radical chic cliché, to presenting rich and powerful oligarchs as if they were beleaguered "little guys" fighting to hold their own against "government"). Doubtless this contributed to Scorsese's being able to go on working as he did, and enjoying the praises that he did--certainly to go by how eight of his films become Best Picture Academy Award nominees after the close of the New Hollywood period (in the years 1990-2023), a record with which not one of his contemporaries really compares, and which seems only underlined by how, in David Walsh's estimate, Scorsese's repute as "the 'greatest living American filmmaker'" seem an accolade he won "to a certain extent by default."