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Mark Nicholls Scorcese's Men. Melancholia and the Mob Pluto Press, 2004

Mark Nicholls' interesting analysis of some of the major works of Martin Scorsese, Scorsese's Men: Melancholia and the Mob, links not just the Scorsese films that focus on the troubled relationship between the outsider and his social milieu, as represented by the codes and 'brotherhood' of the mob. By including the classic Taxi Driver and the less critically successful The Age of Innocence in his detailed discussion of five of Scorsese's major works, Nicholls broadens the theme and the genre to what he characterises as Scorsese's exploration of the male melancholic of urban modernity.

Five of Scorsese's films provide the basis for Nicholls' detailed analysis of male melancholia: The Age of Innocence, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and Cape Fear. It is not only organised crime and gangsterism, with its attendant extremes of violence, that create a setting in which Scorsese can explore male melancholia. The strait-laced, opulent upper-middle-class world of Edith Wharton's late nineteenth-century New York and...

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