“There was a magic quality”: the movie that made Martin Scorsese aware of the power of film
Given his encyclopaedic knowledge of the medium, Martin Scorsese has probably forgotten more about cinema than most people will ever learn, but even that can be called into question when the legendary filmmaker seems to recall almost everything he’s ever seen.
A student of the game long before it became his livelihood, Scorsese grew up under the thrall of the moving image, which he parlayed into one of the greatest careers of anyone to pick up the megaphone. There’s a moment in the formative years of many future filmmakers where they realise the distinction between watching movies and appreciating how they’re made, though, but for a young Marty, that came very early on.
Similar to Clint Eastwood’s recollections of paying increased attention to not only what was unfolding on screen but how they unfolded that way and who was responsible for making it happen, Scorsese revealed that he had his lightbulb moment in the late 1940s.
The first time he saw King Vidor’s epic 1946 western, Scorsese didn’t pay much heed to what directors were or what they did, but he had another awakening that was equally instrumental. “That’s different from becoming aware of the power of film,” he said to the Directors Guild of America when talking about drawing the distinction between cinema and its creators, “Which I think began for me when I saw Duel in the Sun when I was five or six years old.”
Coincidentally, it was the very same genre that allowed one hand to feed the other in Scorsese’s impressionable mind. “But my awareness of directors probably started with John Ford,” he said. “When I was a kid, in the late 1940s, I had severe asthma, and I wasn’t able to go outdoors that much, so the films that appealed to me most were the westerns. For me, there was a magic quality to them because of all that open space.”
The combination of Duel in the Sun and the work of Ford “opened up my mind [and] took me to another world,” and he was suddenly more invested in the power of cinema than ever before. There can’t be many five or six-year-olds who take a trip to the local cinema and leave deciding they’re going to dedicate their entire existence to the art form, but Scorsese has always been in a class of his own.
Duel in the Sun was one of the most popular and successful westerns of its era. Ford would become synonymous with the genre alongside his most famous collaborator, John Wayne. Scorsese’s memories of both ultimately informed every aspect of his life. There’s a reason so many iconic auteurs celebrate the inimitable power of cinema: It can quite literally serve as the eureka moment for a future great.
