So my wife says: “Martin Scorsese made a comedy?” Yes, well, but it’s a dark comedy.

It’s called After Hours (1985), and Scorsese directed it after studio bosses canceled his long-dreamed-of project to film The Last Temptation of Christ. He received that devastating news just as he was setting up shop near Jerusalem, and, in the making-of feature that comes with the DVD of After Hours that we watched this week, he speaks of that period in his life as an ordeal on par with Christ’s descent into hell. The opportunity to churn out a low-budget movie about one man’s bad night in the Big Apple was, for Scorsese, a step toward spiritual as well as professional deliverance. (Later in the 1980s, of course, he found the backing that he needed to make and release Last Temptation.) After Hours isn’t “light,” by any means. But it is funny.

Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), a mild-tempered computer geek, descends from his home base in the East 90s to the netherworld of SoHo. Drawing him there is Marcy Franklin (Patricia Arquette), a groovy chick who spots him in a coffee shop and chats him up about the book that he’s reading, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. The promise of a good time with a women of apparently easy virtue compels him to take a long cab ride to the downtown loft where she is staying. What follows is an endless, dreadful night in which Paul gets lied to, stood up, messed with, jerked around, mistaken for a thief, and almost killed—yet he never gets laid, despite meeting a succession of enticing and alarmingly accessible women. Another title for his adventure could well be “Sexless in the City.”

Viewing the film now, I noted a streak of misogyny in it that I hadn’t spotted before. Paul meets five women on his nocturnal jaunt—along with the Arquette character, there are temptresses played by Linda Fiorentino, Teri Garr, Catherine O’Hara, and Verna Bloom—and each one is a variation of the same psychobitch from hell. They turn him on, and then they turn weird. They come on to him, all desperate and clingy, and then they snap at him in hysterical, out-of-nowhere anger. One of them sets a lynch mob on him. Another encases him in a papier-maché prison that serves as a metaphor for his entire night of tribulation. The screenplay for the movie, I learned from the making-of feature, was a graduate thesis written by a Columbia University film student named Joseph Minion. Which explains things just a little. I was once a lonely, put-upon grad student, and that experience doesn’t promote largeness of spirit. Likewise, the muse of resentment hardly promotes a rounded view of the opposite sex.

That strain of bitterness—along with the one-note characterization that stems from it—rankled somewhat. But it didn’t keep me from enjoying those aspects of the film that captivated me when I viewed it on the big screen more than two decades ago. I saw After Hours on the first day of my first trip to New York, soon after the movie opened in September 1985. After studying the city’s anatomy through the close reading of maps and guidebooks, the chance to feel its pulse and to touch its flesh (so to speak) left me rapt and dizzy with enthusiasm, but also a trifle scared of the place. So I was receptive to Scorsese’s and Minion’s mythic rendering of New York as a region of Kafkan nightmare, as a dank grotto ruled by a spirit of fatal hipness. That myth still resonates for me, and the way it plays out here still makes me laugh. I particularly like the scene in which Paul pleads with a mammoth bouncer for permission to enter a goth lair called Club Berlin. The scene nods toward Kafka’s parable “Before the Law,” the tale of a “man from the country” who dies while waiting for an inscrutable gatekeeper to allow him entrance to some obscure sanctum of power. Paul does get past the Club Berlin rope line, and he survives this trial and others that follow. But the notion that Manhattan is a field of mystery, by turns dark and opaque, carries real plausibility—and a real satiric edge.

Although some very grim things happen to Paul, his fate is finally a comic one. The city chews him up, but then it spits him out again.

A little more than halfway through the classic Hollywood musical 42nd Street (1933), Mohandas K. Gandhi makes a quick cameo appearance. That is, I think it’s Gandhi, or rather an actor playing him. I don’t know who else a middle-aged white man, made swarthy by make-up, wearing big round eyeglasses on his nose and only a wee loincloth on his person, could be trying to portray. The Gandhi figure springs up—suddenly, incongruously, inexplicably—at the tail end of a song-and-dance number in which stage star Dorothy Brook (Bebe Daniels) vamps a quartet of college boys, goading them on and then batting them away, all to the tune of “You’re Getting to Be a Habit with Me.” The Gandhi fellow passes across the screen for probably less than a minute, but that’s long enough for the wily coot to steal the girl from four strapping, bright-eyed lads. “You’re getting to be a habit with me,” he croons to Dorothy in a comical, quasi-British voice as the two of them, arm in arm, exit stage-right.

Maybe, I fancied for a short while, this bit of business exists in the film to make an oblique pun on the word “habit”—that being another term for garment, as with a “nun’s habit.” The old Mahatma ambles forth in his meager dhoti, an iconic habit if ever there was one, and it strikes a jarring contrast to the star’s lavish gown and especially to ensemble worn by her suitors: Each boy sports a shirt with big collar points that spread out over a tight sweater, which he has tucked into a pair of baggy, bellowing trousers that rise well above his navel. It’s what the well-dressed freshman was wearing in 1933, and yet our heroine chooses the underdressed man instead. Funny stuff! But no, that theory is too clever by half. The appearance of the little brown freedom fighter at that moment of that scene, in a movie otherwise devoted to the romance and frivolity of old Broadway, is just as weirdly random as it seems.

I treasure such oddities. They are the stray shards left by another civilization, lying in wait for a cultural archeologist to brush the dust off of them and to reveal their secrets.

My wife and I watched 42nd Street a few nights ago. I’d placed the film on our Netflix queue because my wife recently saw a production of the 1980 theatrical version of the story (which, like Mel Brooks’s The Producers, inverted the usual process of traveling from stage to screen) and because I remember being charmed by the original Busby Berkeley extravaganza when I saw it at a revival-house showing back in my college years. Seeing it again, I registered some disappointment. Ruby Keeler as Peggy, the archetypal ingénue who gets a break and becomes a star, certainly shines—all too briefly—and the “42nd Street” showstopper retains its hummable, haunting lilt and its cynical bite. (“Come and meet those dancing feet … Where the underworld can meet the elite … Naughty, bawdy, gaudy, sporty, Forty-Second Street!” Never did Broadway more purely distill the roguish myth that it has long crafted for itself.) But the musical numbers are too few in number, and most of them come in a poorly paced rush at the end of the movie, which concerns itself far too much with an incoherent backstage melodrama that revolves around Dorothy, her goggle-eyed sugar-daddy, and her mealy-mouthed boyfriend. Dorothy’s blink-and-you-miss-it turn with Gandhi, however, sticks in my mind as a peculiar grace note.

What is he doing there? I don’t have time to play cultural archeologist (and in any case I’m a little out of practice with my brushwork), but I’ll dash off a couple of thoughts.

First, at a fairly mundane level, this glimpse of Gandhi reflects the cultural function that Broadway musicals served back in their early heyday—a function different from the one that they serve now. “Pretty Lady,” the play-within-a-movie wherein Gandhi makes his appearance, has the look of a topical variety show, a common format in the first third of the 20th century. In an age before television, audiences went to the theater to see comedy and musical comment inspired by the figures who graced yesterday’s newspaper or last week’s newsreel. Musicals, in many cases, were closer in spirit and purpose to Saturday Night Live or The Daily Show than to Cats, Les Misérables, and other bloated soap operas that set up long-term housekeeping on 42nd Street in our own day. And Gandhi, at least since his amply filmed trip to London in 1931, had become a fixture in Western popular imagery, right up there with Charles Lindbergh, Thomas Edison, and Mickey Mouse.

Second, Gandhi loomed as a provocation to the Western popular mind, and particularly to the segment of it that Broadway aimed to colonize. Broadway served as a vanguard force in the routing of a Victorian-era “producer” culture, with its emphasis on self-restraint and puritan morality, by a modern “consumer” culture that embraced fun, parties, dancing, singing, women smoking cigarettes, men driving fast cars, personal satisfaction, more singing and dancing, and “following your dream.” Musicals were pageants of desire—gorgeous displays of wine (well, of spirit, anyway), women, and song. Counterpose all of that to the literally threadbare quality of Gandhi, to his rejection of European “progress” in favor of Indian asceticism, to his campaign to hunger-strike the mighty British Lion into submission. (Gandhi was the ultimate passive-aggressive genius; he shrank from violence but not from power.) Not the sort of thing that “Sexy ladies from the Eighties/Who are indiscreet” would want to make a habit of. Better to make a joke of it.

The joking, it seems, was contagious. An actual Broadway show from 1933, As Thousands Cheer (play by Moss Hart, music and lyrics by Irving Berlin), included a number called “Gandhi Goes on a Hunger Strike.” Again, topical humor—although I guess you really had to be there. A whole book could be written about how American culture “received” and represented Gandhi over the years, from the nervous jesting of the 1930s to his adoption by the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s to the rendition of him as a homespun imp of goodwill in the 1982 biopic that won an Oscar and also a wide, welcoming audience.

The book (which may already exist, for all I know) would of course focus centrally on the matter of race. Aside from a big black maid who hovers more or less helpfully around the Dorothy Brook character, and assorted minstrel figures in the “42nd Street” spectacular, Gandhi possesses the only supposedly nonwhite face in 42nd Street. He also possesses a strange force of attraction—witness his very presence in the movie; witness his triumph in romantic combat. This wasn’t an attraction that white audiences of the 1930s could admit to, so the filmmakers were keen to assure everyone that this “Gandhi” was white underneath and that he was a figure of comedy. That way, and only that way, audiences could begin to absorb this perversely compelling brown man into their consciousness.

For years now, I’ve been playing Scrabble with my wife, and usually losing to her, often because of her ability (which I lack) to deploy all seven of her letters in one move—a feat that carries a 50-point bonus and leaves lesser players (me, anyway) fumbling with their little wooden tiles and joking lamely about their need to “buy a vowel.” I had no idea that a term existed for this masterstroke of the game. Now I do, after viewing Word Wars, a documentary that came out in 2004 and arrived yesterday in a Netflix envelope. It was relatively mindless fare, not unlike a Scrabble match, and watching it was a suitable distraction from the chore of packing for a trip that we take today. But I did learn a few things from it.

• A seven-letter play is called a “bingo.”
• A tournament Scrabble player operates at a level well above even my wife. He plays an entirely different game from the likes of her and me—a bingo-centric game in which words sprawl across the whole board as if they owned the place. When my wife and I play, words crowd in a corner like nervous junior-high kids at a school dance.
• The tournament player is, in fact, almost always a “he.” One interview subject in the film, a woman, notes that at any one time fewer than 10 of the 50 top-ranked Scrabble players are female. She and others suggest various reasons for the disparity: Men have more time on their hands than women for such nonsense. They possess, on average, a higher need than women to achieve competitive dominance. They are by nature the more obsessional sex. The latter comes closest to the probable truth, which is that men outstrip women in their capacity to be just plain weird.
• Scrabble, if this movie serves as an accurate guide to the sociology of the game, draws its enthusiasts from a population that’s quite different from those who obsess over crossword puzzles. Cruciverbalism was the subject of another recent documentary, Wordplay (2006), and these two films form a study in contrast between two ostensibly similar activities. Word Wars highlights the otherworldly dysfunctionality of people who rise to the top of the Scrabble-playing heap: These are folks who read word-memorization flash cards while driving a car, or who launch into Tourette’s-like displays of profanity when talk turns to certain fellow players. Wordplay features plenty of eccentricity, but the overriding message is that all kinds of people, even very successful types—Bill Clinton and Yankees pitcher Mike Mussina appear in the film—find stimulus as well as relaxation in poking their way around the New York Times crossword.
• An obviously related point that had never occurred to me: You don’t need to know what a word means in order to play it in Scrabble. Indeed, one Scrabble phenom in Word Wars says that knowing definitions can hinder the mind’s capacity to see words as mere strings of letters—which, for the purpose of this game, is all that they are.

High school, as everyone knows, is a sterile-fecund, thrilling-deadening, freedom-graced prison house, a place that we can’t wait to escape, right up to the point when we do escape it and then can’t wait to return. We struggle there to carve a path to adulthood, and then spend our adult lives pining for the warm, bulky coat of emotional intensity that we must shed along the way. The phrase “high-school reunion,” which evokes the complete arc of an attraction-repulsion cycle, says it all. One way that some of us reunite with that fool’s-golden time in our lives, especially if we are film-makers, is by telling stories that shift classic tales of adult experience into a high-school setting.

Brick (2005), a film by first-time writer-director Rian Johnson, draws scenes and situations and even chunks of dialogue from the works of Dashiell Hammett, and adapts them to the barren stage on which of 21st-century adolescence unfolds. The upshot is a highly stylized, completely fanciful, but strangely recognizeable world: hardboiled high school. The school, unnamed but clearly located in the wastelands of southern California, has a post-apocalyptic look to it, an effect reinforced by the near absence of adults from its drab, bleached-out confines. (Maybe the “Peanuts” TV specials should share credit with Hammett for exerting some influence on the young auteur.) Down these mean hallways a man must go who is not himself mean. He is Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a scrawny, bespectacled kid who turns shamus after a note slipped in his locker sends him on a chase for “Em,” an old flame. Neither geek nor jock nor stoner nor one of the popular set, Brendan closely mirrors the classic fictional private eye—the outsider who knows how to play an inside game. He’s also a guy who can land a punch and, more important, take one. Enduring punishment has always been a distinguishing mark of this type, whose heroism has less to do with crime and detection than with his commitment to some doomed ideal, be it love or honor. As played with the straightest of faces by Gordon-Levitt, Brendan evinces a cool, convincing monomia; it’s a trait that arguably wears better on a 17-year-old than on an adult in the Sam Spade mode.

The plot that swirls around Brendan is of the self-immolating kind that typifies noir storytelling, in which moves and countermoves accumulate so fast and with such density of intrigue that finally you don’t care what happens. Action, though abundant, serves mainly as a coarse string on which to gather pearls of dialogue. That note in his locker directs Brendan to an isolated phone booth on an isolated highway. A confused cry for help from Em crackles from the receiver. (In Veronica Mars, a TV series about a girl sleuth that invites comparison to Brick, cell phones are a ubiquitous and much-used accessory. Here, they are peculiarly rare, as if their presence would violate some noir theme about the impossibility of communication.) Lately, Em has fallen in with a bad crowd, one whose hobbies include dealing drugs as well as doing them. To rescue her, Brendan descends into a campus underworld peopled by the likes of Dode, a druggie whose home base is the Dumpster behind a coffee shop; a crippled kingpin who calls himself The Pin (played with weary aplomb by Lukas Haas); Tugger, a muscle-bound lout in a muscle shirt who serves as “muscle” to The Pin; and Laura, a sultry rich girl who has a thing for guys lower on the food chain from her, including Brendan. Brendan’s investigation, aided by a nerdy friend whose moniker is simply Brain—Johnson names his characters with all the subtlety of a Dick Tracy comic strip—has its lighter side: The hero launches his quest by pumping suspects on whom Em “was eating with” during lunch period. But the case turns deadly serious, with news that an invaluable “brick” of heroin has gone missing along with Em, and then it turns just deadly.

I liked and admired Brick, but I didn’t warm to it, which I take to be part of the point. Reading the original stories of Hammett and his literary progeny, or (even more so) watching the classic films adapted from their novels, I do warm up to the material, but that’s because the dour vision at the core of such work comes rakishly packaged in layers of period style. The style wasn’t “period” at its creation, of course. In the 1920s and 1930s, lots of guys—not just knight-errant private eyes—wore fedoras. And if a guy in a fedora went looking for a clue, or a dame, or a bit of trouble, he could do worse than barge into a swank big-city nightclub, since swank big-city nightclubs existed back then. In Brick, Johnson dispenses with the smoky glamour that ingratiates us to films from the noir era, even as he takes up the clipped vocal tics and stark plot turns of vintage noir fiction. In transporting those qualities (the ones that actually mattered to Hammett, Chandler, and other “boys in the back room,” as Edmund Wilson called the tough-guy writers of depression California) to a prefab high-school campus in exurban LA, he reclaims some of the genre’s original dark grit.