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.
© James Travers 2012
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Next Martin Scorsese film:
Raging Bull (1980)
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...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.