The first scene in Martin Scorsese's debut feature, Who's That Knocking At My Door, shows Scorsese's real-life mother baking a meal for her children, revealing each step in the process with unusual specificity. With its simple evocation of a lower-class Italian family in New York City, the sequence sets the tone for an astonishing career to come, one that puts a premium on getting the details right and using cinema as a means of personal expression. From these embryonic beginnings, Scorsese set off on a journey that has led him to such far-flung places as 19th-century high society in The Age Of Innocence and the mountains of Tibet in Kundun. But no matter where he goes, his films always circle back home. He remains one of the few directors whose work would be easy to identify even if his name were removed from the opening titles.
On the commentary track for Knocking, Scorsese recalls (and agrees with) the film's New York Film Festival rejection letter, which suggested he was "living aesthetically beyond [his] means." But before long, his abilities caught up with his ambitions. Though Scorsese can hardly stand to watch his NYU thesis project today ("It's like opening up your high-school yearbook"), his signature hallmarks are already in place: the street-level depiction of criminality, the restless camerawork and stylistic experimentation, the ironic overlay of pop songs, and the tortured, primitive heroes who grapple with guilt, faith, and inscrutable women. The raw, unformed story—refined to greater effect in his 1973 breakthrough Mean Streets—concerns the sexual hang-ups of Scorsese alter ego Harvey Keitel, as he learns that his girlfriend was once raped. Shot in several stages over weekends and later distributed with a nude scene inserted for the exploitation crowd, the film never jells, but it's the Rosetta Stone for Scorsese's later work.