New York, New York

MOVIE #1,690 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 06.03.24 𝑀𝒶𝓇𝓉𝓎: A MARTIN SCORSESE DIRECTOR FOCUS 🇮🇹🇺🇸 This is perhaps the most forgotten of Scorsese films? I'm not even sure I was aware of it before launching into this D.F. His Taxi Driver follow-up is a period piece/quasi-musical about jazzman Robert DeNiro and jazzlady Liza Minnelli getting up to all sorts of nonsense in the Big Apple, baby! It’s V-J Day (Victory over Japan Day), 1945, and the evil Imperial Empire of Japan has just surrendered and people want to jazz and jazz hard. Look, I had a bad time with this because the music is nails on a chalkboard to my ears… for north of 2.5 hours! No thank you! The only way I got anything out of this is by imagining the DeNiro character as Travis Bickle if he had been born thirty years earlier. I actually think it kinda works if you do this. He goes from obnoxious dweeb to incredibly rapey FAST…

This is the difference between fighting in WWII and fighting in Vietnam: you become over-confident jazzman in the former, you become porno-obsessed loser in the latter, but... same person? (I'm trying my best.)

The contrast here after the raw, real energy of Taxi Driver is stark. This New York feels fake on purpose, leaning into the theatrical side of things like never before (and probably never again). We’re trapped in these massive, phony sound stages that are all lit like Italian horrors. When we venture outside, he deploys painted backgrounds and fake snow (see below). This idea is blown up to the nth degree with this cab drive green screen which utilizes period piece footage outside the windows…




The musical numbers are all staged performances so this is technically a musical but it might as well be because of the sheer volume of songs. I’m not gonna lie: I fast-forwarded through most of them. It’s unfortunate, because in-between there are some really good moments with DeNiro and Minnelli chewing up the scenery. I wish the whole movie had been scenes like this…


But it’s not.

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New York, New York is a 1977 American romantic musical drama film directed by Martin Scorsese from a screenplay by Earl Mac Rauch and Mardik Martin, based on a story by Rauch. It is a musical tribute, featuring songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb as well as jazz standards, to Scorsese's home town of New York City, and stars Liza Minnelli and Robert De Niro as a pair of musicians and lovers. The story is "about a jazz saxophonist (De Niro) and a pop singer (Minnelli) who fall madly in love and marry;" however, the "saxophonist's outrageously volatile personality places a continual strain on their relationship, and after they have a baby, their marriage crumbles," even as their careers develop on separate paths. The film marked the final screen appearance of actor Jack Haley. It was released on June 21, 1977.