Scorsese/De Niro: New York, New York (Dir. Martin Scorsese, 2h43m, 1977)

'Martin Scorsese makes a Broadway musical' sounds like the punchline to a very peculiar joke.  Scorsese is not the first, the second, or indeed the tenth person you expect to make one, yet, here we are, straight out of Travis Bickle's Taxi and back in time, with Scorsese's 1940s-set musical, New York, York. Here, De Niro's sly sax player and Liza Minnelli's USO singer fall in and out of love and into fame. What follows, over nearly three hours is a film that holds the dubious accolade of being by far Scorsese's most critically mauled, and one of his most financially disappointing, films, yet, despite being hamstrung by its inconsistent tone, and almost ruinous grandeur and scale, is, from a director no stranger to the power of music in cinema, Martin Scorsese's loveletter to the Hollywood musical.

The year is 1977, and Martin Scorsese has two things; the first, as will become evident from his utter loss of control of both the budget and the tone of New York, New York, is a cocaine addiction-this will later nearly kill him, and the road back to sobriety will be through the most unlikely source, that of 1980's Raging Bull. The other thing he has is a lot of money and critical success; Taxi Driver has not just been acclaimed, collecting the Palme d'Or, alongside four Academy Award nominations, but a financial one, taking nearly $30 million on a budget of just $2 million. Martin Scorsese is a bankable director. For now. Scorsese had also long been a fan of musical cinema, placing An American In Paris (1951), and The Band Wagon (1953, both directed by Vincente Minnelli) on his favourite films of all time.

So Scorsese decides to make a musical. Along for the ride, alongside De Niro and Minnelli are scriptwriters Earl Mac Rauch (who will later go on to write the script for The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984), and Mardik Martin, responsible for co-writing Mean Streets and later Raging Bull, whilst the film's score and lyrics would be handled by Ralph Burns (already nominated for an Academy Award for Cabaret (1973) and later to compose the scores for All that Jazz (1979), and John Kander (the lyricist for Cabaret and Chicago). On paper, this may seem a crack squad for making a musical.

New York, New York revolves around Jimmy (De Niro) and Francine (Minnelli)'s personal-and professional relationship

This continues to De Niro and Minelli-from the moment he comes onto screen, among the VJ celebrations, De Niro is still fantastic, his roles between being in Bertoluci's 1900 (1976) and a nuanced performance in The Last Tycoon (1977), keeping De Niro, unlike his friend, in fine form, but this is a Robert De Niro we've not seen so far, and will rarely see again-as love interest. Much of New York, New York revolves around the relationship between De Niro's Jimmy and Minelli's Francine, from their initial meeting at a jazz club where she rebuffs his advances, to their slowly brewing chemistry between each other, to their fractious marriage.

Liza Minelli, for her part, is at her 1970s and 1980s best-when the film allows itself to be a musical, in its final, showstopping forty minutes, she is absolutely electrifying, and Scorsese's invocation of the 1940s movie musical bursts into life around here. Against De Niro, she's just as fiery; for the first time since Keitel, De Niro arguably has an actor of his calibre to work against. Their chemistry is immediate, despite their differences, especially when they begin to musically collaborate together, eventually falling in love with each other despite their differences, and when their relationship does begin to disintegrate, it is riveting as it is visceral, their diverging paths as they drift apart again after the birth of their son.

Yet, there is an undeniable charm to De Niro-we've seen this in Johnny Boy's strut, but to see De Niro play romantic lead is a surprisingly untapped well, with only Falling in Love (1984) and Stanley & Iris (1990) otherwise seeing him in this guise; in more recent years, De Niro has played it straight, and upon his considerable reputation in the 1970s and 1980s as disapproving fathers and middle-aged widowers; for all his undeniable machismo, rarely has Robert De Niro got to play the romantic. In abstraction, these are two superb, well-acted performances, well-matched together and held together by their shared love for music and pulled apart by their individual passion for it.

Viewing New York, New York is to watch a fractured mess of a film; De Niro and Minnelli seem to be in a different movie to everyone else-Scorsese's cocaine habit rears its head here most of all, convinced that what musical theatre needed was grit and improv, and what a gritty drama about a dysfunctional couple needs is song and dance numbers. This is not to say that musicals cannot have grit, more that it seems to come and go without warning, as scene gives way to scene-there's also the fact that these moments of musical cinema are punctuated with verité dialogue and the downbeat tone of the more typical Martin Scorsese works.

On the rare occasion New York, New York allows itself to be a musical, rather than an urbane drama, it's remarkably good, if retro-styled, fun

This does not work-it's the bricolage of a cocaine addict arc-welding this gritty drama to one that is a world of heightened reality at the very least, improvised dialogue bolted to a genre that by its very nature eschews improvisation at great lengths. The set designs, in particular, are jarring, these deliberately artificial backgrounds and cinematic sets utterly at odds with the realistic drama occurring around and against them, the whole sense of these moments of interpersonal drama utterly undermined by the incongruity of it all, Martha Lucas's editing doing its best to cobble together, in the same year she rescued Star Wars in the edit, the disparate parts, these two identities, these two New Yorks. And then everything clicks.

It's the closing number, Francine and Jimmy are long divorced-and as the film lets itself become a musical, so Liza Minnelli begins to sing, the film essentially coming full-circle, arriving back at the restaurant where they first met. That song, this final show-stopping number, is Theme from New York, New York, a last minute replacement after De Niro regarded the original song as too weak for the picture and it will not only become Minnelli's signature song, but, recorded by Frank Sinatra in 1978, his as well. In the half century since, it's become the unofficial anthem for the city Scorsese calls home; despite everything, despite the critical mauling, despite the financial disappointment, even this most junior of Scorsese's collaborations with De Niro left its impact on the American psyche...through song.

Rating: Recommended

New York, New York is available is available on DVD and BluRay via ‎Metro Golden Mayer

Next week, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro come back from the brink, and into the 1980s with the greatest sports movie of all time, the brutal and bruising Raging Bull.

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