New York, New York (1977)
Directed by Martin Scorsese

Film Review

Martin Scorsese's full-blown tribute to the classic Hollywood musical is easily one of the director's most ambitious films, but despite its stunning production values and superb, show-stopping musical numbers, the film was a critical and commercial flop.  When the film lost money on its initial release, its distributors insisted its runtime be cut from 153 minutes to 137 minutes, thereby accentuating the film's uneven pacing and making it an even less attractive viewing proposition.  Fortunately, the film was restored to its original length in 1981 and we can now appreciate the film for what it is - a bold experiment with the musical format which combines Scorsese's penchant for gritty urban realism with the sugary artifice of the Hollywood musical.  The result is far from perfect, but the film's very distinctive character, which owes something to the highly improbable pairing of Liza Minnelli and Robert De Niro, makes it well-worth watching.

Scorsese made New York, New York on the back of the worldwide success of Taxi Driver (1976), and this could account for the film's distinctly sombre mood and its occasional moments of shocking brutality.  Robert De Niro's Jimmy Doyle is every bit as complex a character as Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle, and you could easily believe they were close cousins.  One of the reasons why the film was so unsuccessful is because De Niro's character is such a relentlessly nasty piece of work.  Doyle is egoistical, violent, insensitive and incapable of engaging with other people at anything more than a superficial level.  Yet, as unprepossessing as he is, De Niro compels us to sympathise with him. The actor's genius for subtly revealing the troubled, desperately lonely soul beneath the rough macho exterior is what prevents his character from being merely a sadistic brute, and is what makes the film's downbeat ending so devastatingly moving.

After her first major screen triumph with Cabaret (1972), Liza Minnelli badly needed another big screen success to convince producers and audiences that she wasn't a one-hit wonder.  New York, New York should have been that film.  Minnelli's casting opposite De Niro, an actor who could not provide a greater contrast to her fragile, almost child-like persona, was daring but brilliant, and the singer-actress turns in one of her most compelling, most nuanced screen performances, in a role that challenges her like no other.  Minnelli is a capable actress but her real talent is as a singer, and she is of course at her best in the glitzy musical numbers, in particular the great closing title number (Theme From New York, New York), which De Niro had rewritten for the film and which Frank Sinatra later turned into a hit single.

For a film which is essentially about two people who, despite being deeply in love, find it impossible to communicate with one another, Scorsese could not have chosen a better combination than Minnelli and De Niro, two actors who look as if they were born and raised on two totally different planets.  That one or two of their scenes fail to convince can be put down to Scorsese's keenness to allow his lead actors to improvise.  The technique works well in a few places, allowing some genuine emotion to percolate up, but in others it looks sloppy and you can't helping wishing that more of De Niro's incoherent ramblings had ended up on the cutting room floor.  Fortunately, Scorsese's direction is as sharp and effective as ever, and so his stars' embarrassing attacks of verbal diarrhea become unbearable in only a few scenes.  Needless to say, De Niro did not actually play the saxophone in the film; he was in fact dubbed by the legendary jazz musician Georgie Auld.  The actor does however get to sing a refrain in one of the less distinguished musical numbers; you can see why he decided to stick with the day job.

The biggest casualty of the wholesale cuts that were made to the film shortly after its first release was the elaborate song-and-dance number 'Happy Endings', which reputedly cost around 300,000 dollars and was clearly intended as a homage to the spectacular finales of the great Hollywood musicals.  The sequence (now thankfully reinstated) seems incongruous, an exuberant flight of fancy away from the film's unrelenting aura of circa 1940s gloom, but it is superbly choreographed and brilliantly wrong-foots the audience as to what then ensues, making the ending far more bitter and poignant than it would have been.  The most likely reason why New York, New York failed at the box office was because, by the mid 1970s, the film musical had become an out-dated genre, an irrelevance at a time when cinema audiences preferred the gritty realism offered by increasingly violent thrillers and cutting-edge dramas.  Martin Scorsese had the right idea, but he made the film a few years too late for it to have any real impact.  Instead of breathing new life into the Hollywood musical, he only succeeded in hammering a few more nails into its coffin.

Film Synopsis

V-J Day, 1945.  At a wild party in New York City to celebrate the end of the war, saxophone player Jimmy Doyle tries and fails to talk Francine Evans, a small-time singer, into spending the night with him.  The next day, Francine accompanies Jimmy to an audition; he gets the gig when she agrees to be his singing partner.   Not long after, Jimmy receives a letter from Francine telling him that she has left town, having found a better job with a popular dance band.  Realising he is in love with Francine, Jimmy goes after her and, in his characteristically brusque manner, persuades her to marry him.  The marriage proves to be a disaster.  When Francine announces she is pregnant and wants to stay in New York instead of travelling the country with Jimmy's new band, the couple's relationship soon hits the rocks.  As Francine pursues a successful solo singing career in New York, Jimmy's fortunes take a turn for the worse...