While low budget often means poor special effects and second rate acting, the truly low budget also means bad sound. Martin Scorsese's Who's That Knocking at My Door? (ca. 1968) suffers greatly from dialogue that's muffled and often difficult to make out. Scorsese works around this by sometimes avoiding having the mouths of his actors visible or by having entire scenes set only to music.
But any criticism of the technological aspects of this film is moot, since it's best approached as a curiosity piece. Starting out as a student film that took a couple of years to complete, Who's That Knocking eventually became Scorsese's first feature length film, and is now available alone or as part of the recently-released Scorsese Collection.
Naturally, the inclination is to look for Scorsese's trademarks, and even this early in his career, some of the things we associate with him are there: the cinematic flourishes, the eclectic soundtrack, the misguided male aggression, the New York/Italian setting, the Catholic imagery. Even Scorsese's penchant for unsympathetic characters is present; Harvey Keitel's J.R. is aggressively opinionated when first meeting "the Girl" (Zina Bethune) in what is a far cry from Hollywood's usually cute meeting scenes. And his attitudes towards women — which includes making distinctions between "girls" and "broads" — are both hypocritical and painfully unenlightened.
Like Kubrick's Killer's Kiss, Who's That Knocking is really just a chance to check out a great director’s work before they made it big. It actually comes across as a trial run for Mean Streets, the film it most resembles. Fortunately, Who's That Knocking at My Door? comes with a commentary track by Scorsese, which predictably is more entertaining than the film itself.
ASIDE: Interestingly, the sex scenes that were added later to help sell the movie are accompanied by The Door's "The End", ten years before its signature use in Coppola's Apocalypse Now.
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