He reinvented the gangster movie, gave De Niro a career and turned violence into high art. As the director turns 80, what is his legacy?
As the director, film historian and all-round guru Martin Scorsese celebrates his 80th birthday, it’s easy to think of him as a fixture in cinema. From his 1967 debut Who’s That Knocking At My Door to his most recent picture, 2019’s The Irishman, he has been one of the most respected and influential filmmakers of the past half-century.
Actors queue up to work with him, and are often nominated for or receive major awards for doing so; countless contemporary directors, from Edgar Wright to Luca Guadagnino, cite him as an influence on their own work. Even his much-reported remarks likening Marvel films to theme park experiences saw his partisan defenders take his side against outraged comic-book fans: but then they were hardly the obvious audience for Scorsese’s elegant, rich pictures in the first place.
Yet Scorsese’s legacy is not that of a provocateur, but that of a visionary. He has changed cinema, and our expectations of what filmmaking can be, in countless fashions. Here are 10 of the things that Martin Scorsese’s brilliant pictures have given us, for which we should be forever grateful.
For better or for worse, the genre that Martin Scorsese is most closely associated with is that of the gangster film. From 1973’s Mean Streets right up to The Irishman, he has specialised in exploring men immersed in the criminal underworld, living existences bound by a certain set of rules, and with horrible punishments awaiting anyone who transgresses against the codes that they are expected to follow. Some of Scorsese’s most phenomenally successful pictures fall into this category, from Goodfellas – which may still be his single greatest achievement, 30 years on – to The Departed and Casino, to say nothing of his odd, flawed but underrated passion project Gangs of New York.