Martin Scorsese doesn’t have a woman problem – just look at his movies

His films are brash boys’ clubs where women are ‘broads’ and ‘whores’, say his critics. Get outta here! responds Anne Billson. From Lorraine Bracco in ‘Goodfellas’ to Lily Gladstone in his forthcoming ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’, Marty’s movie females are not just eye-candy — they have agency

Role call: Margot Robbie in ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’, Lily Gladstone in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’, Sharon Stone in ‘Casino’ and Jodie Foster in ‘Taxi Driver’ (Shutterstock)

Martin Scorsese makes nothing but gangster movies, glamourises violence, and thinks female characters are a waste of time. Or so a cabal of unthinking social media pundits keep telling us. Each time a new Scorsese film comes out – and his historical thriller Killers of the Flower Moon is released this month – the same old arguments resurface. He makes nothing but gangster movies? Oh please! Of his 26 features, only half a dozen could be described as gangster-ish. He glamourises violence and corruption? Only if you need your moral message spelt out in words of one syllable, just so you don’t imagine Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill in Goodfellas (1990) or Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) are worthy role models.

And, of course, we get the old canard that his films are a boys’ club. The Irishman, Scorsese’s 2019 crime epic, was lambasted for its scarcity of female characters, with Anna Paquin’s dialogue limited to seven words. Paquin plays the daughter of the film’s protagonist, a contract killer (Robert De Niro), and essentially represents the film’s conscience in a sea of amorality. She knows what her father does for a living, and despises him for it. All this is evident in her face, but it seems some viewers wanted her to talk us through what we already knew.

Challenged by a reporter in 2019 on a perceived lack of female characters in his work, a frustrated Scorsese replied: “If the story doesn’t call for it... it’s a waste of everybody’s time.” Which some internauts translated as Marty saying female characters were a waste of time. Scorsese “thinks that female characters could detract from a story”, declared The Mary Sue, a pop culture website so eager to be outraged they ignored the part where the filmmaker added, “If the story calls for a female character lead, why not?”