Somewhere inside Martin Scorsese's bloated New York, New York, there's a trim, taut little movie trying to claw its way out. Apparently envisaged at one point as an epic retro-musical (over four hours long!), it was sweated down to just over two for its theatrical release (Scorsese blamed its lukewarm reception on studio-imposed cuts). Later, he managed to restore at least some of his footage, which didn't much help (the clunky movie-within-a-movie extravaganza just added to the aimlessness). But the Wagnerian length Scorsese hoped for is a clue that New York, New York disappoints not because of slash-and-burn editing after the fact but of Scorsese's grandiosity and self-indulgence from the start.
Despite some swell numbers and gorgeous (if static) shots, New York, New York remains a puzzlement, never settling on a cohesive tone or style (except for sour). Scorsese claims that it stands in tribute to the 1946 Ida Lupino vehicle The Man I Love, though there's only the faintest resemblance. (The1955 James Cagney/Doris Day Love Me Or Leave Me seems more convincingly the inspiration for its storyline, the 1941 Anatole Litvak Blues In The Night the template for its style.)
It's Times Square on V-J day, when just demobbed Robert DiNiro (in two-toned shoes and Hawaiian shirt, on the prowl to get `laid') homes in on Liza Minnelli, all pert and sassy in her WAC's uniform. For a very long half-hour, they flirt and bicker in semi-improvised dialogue that's a bad match for everything else in this deliberately faux, meticulously stylized movie. (And why isn't there more end-of-war exuberance on screen? Steven Spielberg managed to catch a gung-ho, going-to-war spirit in his maligned 1941, where the jitterbugging is infectious; here, in the emotional release of victory, it's just extras going through their over-rehearsed steps and cameras swooping.)
DiNiro, wooing tiresomely, at least manages to establish his character: A controlling, self-absorbed saxophone player who's also (in a strand that fizzles out) a penny-ante impostor who blows off his lavish hotel bills. Minnelli, housed in a drab little side-street room, never manages to create a character of her own, except as doormat, so it comes as a surprise when, accompanying DiNiro to an audition, she turns out to be a sensational singer. (Who knew?) But even when her stardom begins to eclipse his, and she climbs to the top of the heap, there's little flesh and bone under the performer. But that doesn't seem to be the movie's point, either; she achieves her success passively.
On tour, they get married, their impetuous union doomed from the get-go by low-grade spats, a pregnancy he doesn't want, her fleeing from the boondocks to the Big Apple, and his cheerless adulterous flings (with Mary Kay Place, the canary substituting for Minnelli). The best part of the movie is this dreary routine, the comforting tedium of the road, with its slapdash tourist courts and ritzy roadhouses and card games on the bus. It's also the part that Scorsese photographs (and distances) so quaintly, with `outdoor' settings that are plainly - ostentatiously - filmed on sound stages under feathery Christmas-card snowfalls. They're never less than charming - pretty as pictures - even when the continuity lapses. DiNiro arrives at a mountain resort one dark winter evening, in pursuit of Minnelli, who's headlining a band. When the couple goes outside shortly thereafter to continue one of their constant tiffs, they're posed in front of a stagy stand of birches glowing in an amber sunset. Does time run backward in the Carolinas?
Unfortunately, the only story arc New York, New York chooses to follow is the ever more rancorous breakdown of Minnelli's and DiNiro's marriage. There are ugly incidents in neon-bright jazz boîtes, and in a car, where she suffers birthpangs. Then there's an abrupt jump forward to the 1950s when DiNiro has opened his own club, The Major Chord, while Minnelli drags their six-year-old son to recording sessions and signs a Hollywood contract to star in a musical (ironically, `Happy Endings') that might have been directed by her father Vincente except that it retains his flamboyance while lacking his deft and idiosyncratic touch.
And then something peculiar and perverse happens in regard to Minnelli: She's allowed - or encouraged - to do a miscalculated impersonation of her mother, Judy Garland. There's the go-for-broke belting; the fluttering, febrile hand movements; and, in a nitery atop a skyscraper, singing the Big Number the movie's been all too impatiently heading for (Kander and Ebb's `New York, New York'), she's decked out in full Judy drag - a flowing, hot-pink top, with more sashes and panels than can be anatomically accounted for, over a pair of skin-tight black toreador pants. It's her dead mother's 1953 A Star Is Born, her1961 Carnegie Hall concert and her short-lived 1963 TV variety show all over again.
This misbegotten homage is more than mere bad taste; did nobody have the decency - or common sense - to spot it and stop it? Martin Scorsese didn't, too drunk on his obvious love for old movies and their stars to remember that movie-making consists of more than reviving old genres - and more than composing eulogies. Those great movies are still out there - on cable channels and in repertory houses and on DVD and e-Bay. Maybe that wasn't the case in 1977. But even so, what's the point of trying to improve on them by leeching out all the sincerity and most of the fun?
Despite some swell numbers and gorgeous (if static) shots, New York, New York remains a puzzlement, never settling on a cohesive tone or style (except for sour). Scorsese claims that it stands in tribute to the 1946 Ida Lupino vehicle The Man I Love, though there's only the faintest resemblance. (The1955 James Cagney/Doris Day Love Me Or Leave Me seems more convincingly the inspiration for its storyline, the 1941 Anatole Litvak Blues In The Night the template for its style.)
It's Times Square on V-J day, when just demobbed Robert DiNiro (in two-toned shoes and Hawaiian shirt, on the prowl to get `laid') homes in on Liza Minnelli, all pert and sassy in her WAC's uniform. For a very long half-hour, they flirt and bicker in semi-improvised dialogue that's a bad match for everything else in this deliberately faux, meticulously stylized movie. (And why isn't there more end-of-war exuberance on screen? Steven Spielberg managed to catch a gung-ho, going-to-war spirit in his maligned 1941, where the jitterbugging is infectious; here, in the emotional release of victory, it's just extras going through their over-rehearsed steps and cameras swooping.)
DiNiro, wooing tiresomely, at least manages to establish his character: A controlling, self-absorbed saxophone player who's also (in a strand that fizzles out) a penny-ante impostor who blows off his lavish hotel bills. Minnelli, housed in a drab little side-street room, never manages to create a character of her own, except as doormat, so it comes as a surprise when, accompanying DiNiro to an audition, she turns out to be a sensational singer. (Who knew?) But even when her stardom begins to eclipse his, and she climbs to the top of the heap, there's little flesh and bone under the performer. But that doesn't seem to be the movie's point, either; she achieves her success passively.
On tour, they get married, their impetuous union doomed from the get-go by low-grade spats, a pregnancy he doesn't want, her fleeing from the boondocks to the Big Apple, and his cheerless adulterous flings (with Mary Kay Place, the canary substituting for Minnelli). The best part of the movie is this dreary routine, the comforting tedium of the road, with its slapdash tourist courts and ritzy roadhouses and card games on the bus. It's also the part that Scorsese photographs (and distances) so quaintly, with `outdoor' settings that are plainly - ostentatiously - filmed on sound stages under feathery Christmas-card snowfalls. They're never less than charming - pretty as pictures - even when the continuity lapses. DiNiro arrives at a mountain resort one dark winter evening, in pursuit of Minnelli, who's headlining a band. When the couple goes outside shortly thereafter to continue one of their constant tiffs, they're posed in front of a stagy stand of birches glowing in an amber sunset. Does time run backward in the Carolinas?
Unfortunately, the only story arc New York, New York chooses to follow is the ever more rancorous breakdown of Minnelli's and DiNiro's marriage. There are ugly incidents in neon-bright jazz boîtes, and in a car, where she suffers birthpangs. Then there's an abrupt jump forward to the 1950s when DiNiro has opened his own club, The Major Chord, while Minnelli drags their six-year-old son to recording sessions and signs a Hollywood contract to star in a musical (ironically, `Happy Endings') that might have been directed by her father Vincente except that it retains his flamboyance while lacking his deft and idiosyncratic touch.
And then something peculiar and perverse happens in regard to Minnelli: She's allowed - or encouraged - to do a miscalculated impersonation of her mother, Judy Garland. There's the go-for-broke belting; the fluttering, febrile hand movements; and, in a nitery atop a skyscraper, singing the Big Number the movie's been all too impatiently heading for (Kander and Ebb's `New York, New York'), she's decked out in full Judy drag - a flowing, hot-pink top, with more sashes and panels than can be anatomically accounted for, over a pair of skin-tight black toreador pants. It's her dead mother's 1953 A Star Is Born, her1961 Carnegie Hall concert and her short-lived 1963 TV variety show all over again.
This misbegotten homage is more than mere bad taste; did nobody have the decency - or common sense - to spot it and stop it? Martin Scorsese didn't, too drunk on his obvious love for old movies and their stars to remember that movie-making consists of more than reviving old genres - and more than composing eulogies. Those great movies are still out there - on cable channels and in repertory houses and on DVD and e-Bay. Maybe that wasn't the case in 1977. But even so, what's the point of trying to improve on them by leeching out all the sincerity and most of the fun?