cinema could hardly be imagined. It sums up in a single image most of the primary obsessions that would pervade his work over the next thirty years: self-sacrifice (Catholicsm); insanity; violence; suicidal and compulsive behaviour; and, of course, the reflected, or projected, image of the!
             mirror which (like the mirrors in the opening shot of Mean Streets and the most popular scene in Taxi Driver) signifies vanity, voyeurism, narcissism, self-doubt, and, at a more complex, subtle level, illusions, fantasies, dreams, the quest for escape. Like those in Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, the mirror serves, at its most basic, mythical and magical level, like the cinema itself, as a doorway or portal, one that takes us through space and time, and into another world. The fact that Scorsese's characters generally only see despair, madness or horror in their mirrors says as much about ourselves, and the times and spaces we are living in, as it does about Scorsese and his personal obsessions. The movie screen is, after all, the biggest mirror of them all.
             Scorsese made his feature film debut with the raw and improvisatory black and white film, Who's That Knocking at My Door? (1969, starring Harvey Keitel as J.R) and he served his apprenticeship (along with half a dozen other major American film-makers - Coppola, Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Bognanovich, Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante etc) under Roger Corman at American International Pictures (whose most enduring works are camp horror `classics' such as Little Shop of Horrors and The Raven, and the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations starring Vincent Price). There he made the workmanlike but forgettable Boxcar Bertha (1972, with Barbra Hershey and David Carradine). Scorsese cites John Cassevetes (the actor turned director whose films were excercies in improvisatory acting and which illustrate, I think, most of its pitfalls) as a greater influence on him than Corman, however. Cassavetes, after a screening of B...