“It’s an ugly film”: The classic movie Martin Scorsese called “mean-spirited”
Throughout most of his movies, Martin Scorsese has managed to combine the ugliest and most brutal parts of human nature with the beauty of auteur filmmaking. The New Hollywood legend has carved out a legacy for himself as one of the greatest directors of his generation with a series of films that are as ugly as they are stunning to watch.
Looking back over Scorsese’s filmography, we can see countless instances of violence in Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Casino, and Gangs of New York, the kind that makes us lurch back in shock, only to sit forward on the edges of our seats, unable to look away from the horrors of the screen.
It’s that part of cinema, the one that makes us confront the ugly truths about being a human being, that makes it such a powerful medium, and Scorsese has never shied away from showing the most barbaric qualities of his characters, including Henry Hill, Travis Bickle, Bill the Butcher and Jake LaMotta.
In fact, Scorsese once spoke of an “ugly” movie that stands as a classic of American cinema, Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 epic revisionist western The Wild Bunch. Speaking with Ben Wheatley in a feature for Rolling Stone, Scorsese once noted, “That movie’s hard to watch, though. It’s so ugly. It’s an ugly film. But it’s really good.”
“I just stopped watching it over the years, though,” he added. “It’s so mean-spirited.”
Starring William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, and Edmond O’Brien, The Wild Bunch focuses on a gang of ageing outlaws on the Mexico-US border who try to come to terms with the rapidly changing world of the early 20th century. The film was considered to be controversial upon its release because of its graphic violence and drew the disapproval of John Wayne, who was known for an older style of western cinema.
According to Scorsese, the film’s screenwriter, Waylon Green, had told the director that Peckinpah wanted to make his character “real mean sons of bitches” like they would have been in real life, which explains why their actions are so violent and cruel. Even so, Scorsese admitted that “the beauty of the film is extraordinary.”
Scorsese himself is no stranger to detailing the cruel nature of his characters on screen and he once admitted that he was inspired by Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, when it came to making Goodfellas and Casino, both of which star Joe Pesci as a violent mobster who shows great delight in dishing out brutal punishment whenever he can.
“I wanted Goodfellas and Casino to blast out of the screen and come right at you, just like in Peckinpah’s picture,” Scorsese had explained. “We’re in the outlaw universe: swaggering, lawless, steal and steal more, kill or be killed. The guys in The Wild Bunch have a code of honour: at the end, they know it’ll be a bloodbath.”
Scorsese noted how the mob characters in Casino have their “own code of honour”, one that goes way back to their Sicilian roots. “But unlike the outlaws in Peckinpah’s picture, the mob bosses aren’t glorified by their sense of honour – it’s something that’s just between them,” he added. So even though Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch was an ugly film to gaze upon, it still had “beauty” in the eyes of Scorsese, the likes of which inspired one of his most praised movies.
