Who is Martin Scorsese? The Martin Scorsese Collection, a DVD boxed set released last year by MGM, helps to answer this question. Consisting of five of the acclaimed director's films-Who's That Knocking at my Door?, Mean Streets, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, After Hours and Goodfellas-the compilation works wonderfully as a retrospective; its insightful commentary tracks find Scorsese reflecting on his historic career.The films range from Scorsese's first Hollywood film, 1967's Who's That Knocking? to Goodfellas, one of his most successful recent films. Interestingly, the set leaves out two of Scorsese's most famous films, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, which were both separately released on DVD. In a way, the set represents Scorsese's reflections on his "other" films: those that did not generate the sort of critical acclaim and analysis that Taxi Driver and Raging Bull did.

Scorsese, the son of Italian immigrants, began his career on the streets of Little Italy where he was surrounded by the intense, violent Italian-American underworld of the 1950s and '60s that would eventually fascinate him. Hoping to enter the priesthood but lacking the grades to attend a respectable seminary, Scorsese found himself at New York University. There, he studied film history under the renowned producer Haig P. Manoogian, and the rest is history.

Who's That Knocking at my Door? was originally Scorsese's thesis project at NYU. Over the course of half a decade, the semi-autobiographical film set in Little Italy was meticulously expanded, until it eventually ended up at the Chicago International Film Festival and was noticed by Roger Ebert and other critics. After this early success, Scorsese would soon ascend the ranks of Hollywood to become one of its most highly-regarded filmmakers.

The collection continues tracking Scorsese's career with Mean Streets, a 1973 mobster film also set in Little Italy. Scorsese's first collaboration with Robert De Niro, Mean Streets follows several first-generation Italian-Americans involved with the local mob. For Scorsese, Mean Streets was also somewhat autobiographical-its characters were composites of the criminals and gangsters of his childhood.

When actress Ellen Burstyn saw Mean Streets a year after its release, she immediately asked Scorsese to direct her in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, a story of a young widow discovering her own independence. Not only is it the only film in The Martin Scorsese Collection not set around the New York area, it is the only one starring a woman in a central role. In a behind-the-scenes documentary on the DVD, Burstyn recalls asking Scorsese about his ability to tell a story from a woman's point of view: She asked him if he understood women well enough to do it. His reply, honest and blunt, was, "No, but I'd like to learn."

The DVD set concludes with Goodfellas-perhaps the strongest of his mob films-which, like Mean Streets, follows the rise and fall of a mobster. Unlike The Godfather, Goodfellas explores the life of an average Italian-American fellow who, like Scorsese, grows up surrounded by the mob. Scorsese himself might have shared the fate of the film's protagonist Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) had childhood asthma not deterred him from the thuggish lifestyle of his friends and neighbors.

Unlike the rest of the set, Goodfellas includes an entire bonus disc filled with documentaries and additional features about the film. In addition to the director's insights, the DVD includes a commentary on the actual mafia by the mobster-turned-informant Henry Hill and former FBI agent Edward McDonald. Both of these features, as well as the commentaries on all of the other DVDs, are selected commentaries rather than full, running tracks-the speakers only talk about certain sections of each film, and the scenes not discussed are skipped when the commentary track is activated. In a way, this feature avoids the all-too-common trap of anecdotal banality-the tracks are consistently interesting.

This DVD set is one of the most impressive that I have ever seen. It effectively explores the scope of a Scorsese's career in a way that the films could not individually do.

Although Scorsese did not win an Oscar last month for The Aviator, this DVD set helps to clarify why Scorsese is considered not only one of the important directors of the '70s, but one of the most significant American filmmakers in the history of the medium.