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By JAMES MARCUS

Martin Scorsese has taken an awful lot of abuse, given his level of accomplishment. His films have been denounced as bloodthirsty, blasphemous, or (God forbid) merely slick, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences shows no sign of abandoning its favorite sport -- that is, bypassing Scorsese's work in favor of some flyweight entertainment. By now, however, even Scorsese's detractors concede that he's one of the most opulent filmmakers in the history of the medium, squeezing the maximum pictorial beauty out of every shot. This sort of gift has sunk lesser careers; it tends to elevate shallow image-mongering above narrative coherence. Yet Scorsese's films, whatever their individual merits, have always worked as stories. Their emotional impact eliminates any hint of directorial finger-painting. Why?

Some of the answers are obvious: gritty scripts, superlative actors. But I'd like to suggest another key additive, which is the director's relationship -- or more accurately, romance -- with popular music. As Scorsese made clear in a 1992 interview, this infatuation began early.

"When I was growing up," he said, "in my neighborhood, there was music everywhere. In the summer especially you could hear the record players and juke boxes. They were always outside on the street. One was playing swing and another had ballads. Then somewhere else, say on the second floor, there was opera. It was like a series of mini-concerts."

Scorsese's movies, too, have been like a series of mini-concerts, into which he has mixed pop music of every stripe. "Mean Streets," which represented his break into the big time in 1973, placed the Rolling Stones cheek-by-jowl with Ray Baretto, not to mention Johnny Ace, Jimmy Roselli, and "Please Mr. Postman." The next year, Scorsese combined Mott the Hoople and Gershwin for "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore." Of course, the director has occasionally gone for a less catholic approach, commissioning Bernard Herrmann's superb score for "Taxi Driver" or the neo-Brahmsian upholstery of "The Age of Innocence." But several of his recent films have sent Scorsese back to his mix-and-matching, and the resulting soundtracks give a good idea of how he uses popular music to enhance and complicate the story onscreen.

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