With writer/director Paul Schrader currently in the news for his critically lauded new film, First Reformed, it might be a good time to discuss one of

Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters — Paul Schrader’s Generally Unseen Masterpiece

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2025-01-15 00:30:03

With writer/director Paul Schrader currently in the news for his critically lauded new film, First Reformed, it might be a good time to discuss one of his earlier efforts, one known to about five people outside of The Criterion Collection enthusiasts and a favorite of yours truly since checking it out on VHS back in the late 1980s.

Are you familiar with Mr. Schrader? For any budding cineaste he’s foundational, one of the 1970s rough and ready bad boys (Scorsese, Altman, Beatty, Coppola, Friedkin, Ashby, et al), making his name (and reputation for unsavory, violent characters and situations) by writing The Yakuza (1974), Obession (1976) and, most memorably, Taxi Driver (1976). He re-teamed with Scorsese a couple years later to bring us the family friendly Raging Bull (1980). During this time, Schrader began directing, some early efforts of note including American Gigolo (1980) and a remake of Cat People (1982).

Ironically, Schrader was raised in a very strict Calvinist Christian Reformed Church household and the story goes that he didn’t see a movie until he was 17. (It seems that, back then, the Calvinist church prohibited going to a movie theater and other “worldly amusements.”) Luckily for us, he fully split from the Calvinist doctrine by the time he headed to UCLA for his MA in film studies. But the baggage of youth has always shaded his artistic choices, his fascination with self-destructive characters and “crime, scuzz and sexual perversions” (as described by David Kamp in his indispensable and hilarious The Film Snob’s Dictionary) a response to formative years spent immersed in (and wanting to shed) a confining religion.

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