What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?

A writer, Algernon, also called Harry by his friends, moves into a new apartment. He sees a picture of a boat on a lake; though he dislikes it, he buys it because he is a sensitive person. His friends tell him that the picture is not particularly impressive to look at. After a few days, Algernon finds himself fixating on the picture and finds it difficult to write and eat. He believes that his obsession with the picture is a result of his intense sensitivity and vivid imagination and he has difficulty sleeping.

Algernon throws a party, where he meets a girl who distracts him from the picture. He finds her very attractive but does not develop any obsessive feelings around her. Algernon regains the ability to eat, write and sleep. His friends describe the girl as a "real good catch". He later decides to marry her, and they honeymoon at the 1964 New York World's Fair, which is still under construction. After the honeymoon, they live a normal married life. Algernon starts to write a book of confessions, and the girl paints pictures. However, after having a conversation with a psychoanalyst about his obsession with the picture, Algernon becomes focused on another picture, depicting an ocean. His fixation on the new picture leads him to feel trapped inside it.

Credits adapted from the British Film Institute.[1]

• Zeph Michaelis as Algernon 'Harry'
• Mimi Stark as wife
• Sarah Braveman as analyst
• Fred Sica as friend
• Robert Uricola as singer
• Martin Scorsese as a man in the picture

What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? depicts Algernon, known as Harry by his friends, searching for his identity.[2] It also uses catholic guilt evident when Algernon begins writing a book of confessions.[2] Scorsese said it was inspired by an Algernon Blackwood short story, Mel Brooks's 1963 short animated film The Critic, and French-Italian New Wave cinema.[3] He created and directed the film after watching Federico Fellini's surrealist comedy-drama 8½ (1963) for the first time, which he listed as one of his favorite films.[4][5][6] Author Ben Nyce describes it as "a light-hearted treatment" of self-destructive behavior.[7]

Thelma Schoonmaker, who helped Scorsese with negative cutting, went on to work with him on his first feature film Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967) and for Raging Bull (1980) which won her the Academy Award for Best Film Editing.

Scorsese had initially intended to become a priest but failed after a year.[8][9] He joined New York University's Washington Square College (now known as the College of Arts and Science).[10] There he met Professor Haig P. Manoogian, head of the Department of Television, Motion Pictures and Radio, who was impressed by his passion and energy.[9] Scorsese attended the professor's class on the history of film once a week.[9] He began to learn the fundamentals of filmmaking.[9] By their junior year, it was compulsory for every student to work together and make a Short film.[9]

In 1963, Scorsese wrote and directed his first film What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? as part of New York University's summer program.[3] It features music by Richard H. Coll,[11] cinematography by James Newman,[11] and editing by Robert Hunsicker.[11] It contains animation, montage, jump cuts, associative editing, and freeze-frame shots.[4] The film was backed by the Edward L. Kingsley Foundation, the Screen Producers Guild and the Brown University Film Festival, and produced by Scorsese's professor, Haig P Manoogian.[2] The professor had motivated Scorsese to write an original script rather than relying on someone else to write the story.[11] Though the film was intended initially to be in the horror genre it evolved into a comedy.[2][11]

What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? was shot using 16 mm film,[5] and the principal photography was completed in one week.[9] Its negative was cut incorrectly by a student, who failed to leave enough negative frames to allow for hot splicing. A professor asked Thelma Schoonmaker, who was also participating in the summer program, to help Scorsese.[12][13] Schoonmaker worked with him on his first feature film Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967) and in 1980, she won an Academy Award for Best Film Editing for Raging Bull (1980).[14][15]

Scorsese says of the work: "My little film had all the tricks and the fun of just putting pictures together in slow motion and fast motion and skills, and intercutting with mattes the way Truffaut would do in Jules and Jim. It had no depth at all, but it was a lot of fun. And I won me a scholarship, so my father was able to use it for the tuition for the next year ... [the film is] a tale of pure paranoia".[5][16] The film is nine minutes long,[17] but the May 2020 re-release lasts ten minutes, two seconds.[18][19]

Martin Scorsese (pictured in 2006) received generally positive feedback for his student film.

What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? was released in 1992 on the Scorsese x4 VHS compilation tape in the United Kingdom.[2] In 26 May 2020, the film was released in a 4K Blu-ray digital format by The Criterion Collection.[19][20]

Peter Sciretta of /Film said that the film shows the "early genius of [Scorsese's] visual styling and editing choices".[5] Author Annette Wernblad wrote, "like many of [Scorsese's] other films it is simultaneously absurdly humorous and deeply disturbing".[3] A writer for Little White Lies noted, "It speaks volumes that Scorsese's first-ever foray into film-making focused on perhaps his most innocent protagonist".[21] Peter Galvin of the Special Broadcasting Service wrote, "Scorsese's high-speed dolly tracks, associative editing and his talent for choreographing movement with music are all explored".[22] Author Vincent LoBrutto felt that the film's title was a "cliché".[4] Scott Meslow of Mental Floss described it as "briskly paced".[23] Author Aaron Baker described it as "a hybrid work combining elements of popular entertainment such as Hollywood and vaudeville with a playful, New Wave sensibility".[24] The staff of the Austin Film Society wrote that "you can sense the assurance and gifts of its young writer/director".[25]

This work, along with Scorsese's second student project It's Not Just You, Murray! (1964), were honored at the 1965 National Student Film Festival.[26] Author Jim Sangster said that it has a connection to most of Scorsese's later films.[2] Scorsese reexamined a man being trapped inside a picture in the 1990 Japanese-American magical realist Dreams, where he plays Vincent van Gogh who ventures into his painting Wheatfield with Crows.[2] Sangster wrote that when Algernon moves his belongings to a new apartment, it is similar to a scene in David Fincher's 1999 drama Fight Club.[2] Christopher Campbell of Business Insider said the film is Scorsese's "earliest use of a narrator telling his life story in the first person" and compared it to The Wolf of Wall Street (2013).[27] According to Slant Magazine, the painting of an old man in a boat in this film, "amusingly anticipates a painting that would be featured in Goodfellas (1990)".[28]

• What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? on IMDb