It’s satisfying to find any connective tissue that exists between our Criterion Month selections, especially well after we’ve drafted them. So imagine my delight when a very particular line in the middle of After Hours triggered me, and I went on Wikipedia and found, against all odds, that one of the inspirations for this movie was The Trial by Franz Kafka, the film adaption of which I just posted about. You see, in After Hours there’s a scene where Paul (Griffin Dunne) is trying to get into a club and its bouncer (Clarence Felder) won’t tell him why he’s not being allowed in. Paul offers the bouncer a bribe and he takes it but claims its only because he doesn’t want Paul to feel he “left anything untried.” That is a direct reference to “Before the Law” from The Trial (and specifically the wording from Welles’ version), a reference Scorsese included because he believed Kafka’s parable reflected his own frustration with trying to get The Last Temptation of Christ made. Fuckin’ A, right?
