What was Martin Scorsese's first feature film?

Martin Scorsese’s first feature film was Who’s That Knocking at My Door. The 1967 independent drama, originally titled I Call First, marked his feature-film directorial debut and introduced themes that would recur throughout his career, including Catholic guilt, New York neighborhoods, masculinity, and moral conflict.

The film stars Harvey Keitel as J.R., a young Italian American man whose assumptions about his girlfriend’s past destabilize their relationship. Keitel’s performance was also his first major film role, making the project an important debut for both actor and director. Scorsese filmed the movie in New York over roughly two years, expanding an earlier student short into a feature.

The title and release history can cause confusion. It premiered at the 1967 Chicago International Film Festival, received a theatrical release under the title Who’s That Knocking at My Door in 1968, and was later reissued in 1970 as J.R. Despite those variations, it is conventionally identified as Scorsese’s first feature.

Mean Streets was his breakthrough film and first collaboration with Robert De Niro, but it was his third feature, not his debut.