The “immaculate creation” Martin Scorsese called “a picture in a class of its own”
This may come as a shock, but Martin Scorsese is a deeply religious man. Obviously, it’s impossible to glean that from watching any of his movies, but it’s true, surprisingly enough: the man is devout.
As hard as it is to believe that an Italian-American filmmaker who met at least two Popes, directed The Last Temptation of Christ and Silence, and has made elements of faith and spirituality the cornerstones of many works and the bedrock of the characters who populate them, it’s a fact.
With that in mind, it seems almost blasphemous for such a religiously connected auteur to compare something as trivial as a motion picture to being akin to several screenwriters and a director devising an idea so spectacular that it’s the filmic version of an immaculate conception, but he did.
Not very Scorsese-like, you may think, and rightly so. He’d never be one to speak ill of or trivialise the man upstairs, but when it came to a genuine masterpiece helmed by someone who was a close friend for decades, he’s allowed to invoke that imagery, even if the movie he was worshipping wasn’t an obvious candidate.
The Academy Award-winning icon and Rob Reiner first met in the early 1970s, and they immediately hit it off as a pair of native New Yorkers trying to make a name for themselves in Los Angeles. They remained close from that moment on, but their only major professional collaboration came when Reiner made a scene-stealing cameo in The Wolf of Wall Street.
Following the Princess Bride, Stand by Me, and When Harry Met Sally… director’s shocking murder, Scorsese penned a tribute to his long-time friend in The New York Times, where he revealed not only his two favourite Reiner films, but the one that stood head and shoulders above the rest.
“My own favourite among his pictures is Misery, a very special film, beautifully acted by Kathy Bates and James Caan,” he wrote. “But then, of course, there’s Spinal Tap. Somehow, that picture is in a class of its own. It’s a kind of immaculate creation. And a big part of the greatness of that film is Rob himself, as director and actor.”
Stand by Me may have been Reiner’s choice pick from his own back catalogue, but as far as Scorsese is concerned, nothing beats the riotous flick that ushered the mockumentary into the mainstream. 40 years later, and it’s still the benchmark by which all others are mentioned, and few have ever come close to breathing the same rarefied air as This Is Spinal Tap.
Scorsese likes an awful lot of movies, but there aren’t many that compelled him to invoke quasi-religious terminology, which merely underlines and adds an exclamation point to how much he loved it.
