![]() ![]() ![]() (Frank Capra once called the MGM lot "the Bagdad of filmdom.") Scorsese asserted that his film was not a musical but “a film with musical.” In a musical, people break out into song when, in real life, they wouldn’t. “Happy Endings,” which has been restored to the film in full, is the progeny of Vincente Minnelli and Busby Berkeley, one of those rapturous show-stopping numbers that defined MGM’s best musicals. Well, I mean, I don't love you, I dig you, I like you a lot, you know…”Ī film of artifice and abstraction, of agony and ecstasy, New York, New York is less a deconstruction of a genre than a modern paean to a classic style of cinema. Consider Jimmy’s declaration of love to Francine, which takes place in a snowy forest so fake it could be culled from Kwaidan’s “The Woman of the Snow.” He blathers, something like: “I love you. But whereas the gaunt-faced Bickle is indolent, almost pitiable, and cuts an indelible image with his mohawk and army jacket, Jimmy is loquacious, slick, unlikeable and unmemorable. De Niro had portrayed Travis Bickle just a year earlier, and as with Bickle, he plays Jimmy as an anti-hero, a man of immedicable flaws and stubborn conviction. (“The War Was Over and The World Was Falling In Love Again,” the original poster reads.) Jimmy blows a mean horn, but he is also a mean bastard, mercurial, narcissistic, and emotionally abusive. More than any of Scorsese’s other films, it captures the ache of longing and the devastating capabilities of love, the pain of a heart beholden to a destructive force. It is a bitter romance, unrepentantly earnest yet never saccharine. Writing about New York, during his first visit back in 20 years, Henry James said, "So it befell, exactly, that an element of mystery and wonder entered into the impression-the interest of trying to make out, in the absence of features of the sort usually supposed indispensable, the reason of the beauty and the joy." Something similar can be said of New York, New York, a film devoid of traditional beauty and traditional notions of romance that nonetheless incandesces mysteriously with beauty. From these opening moments, Jimmy is immensely unlikable, and for the next 160-plus he remains immensely unlikable-and Francine eventually falls in love with him. He tries every routine, is unrelenting, as she says, “No, no, no.” 16 times she says, “No.” Still, he persists. ![]() He goes from woman to woman, prowling, esurient, until he meets a USO singer Francine Evans (Liza Minnelli), who steadfastly refuses his advances. ![]() In his Hawaiian shirt and white pants, the saxophonist stands out from the service members garbed in beige and olive, and from the more respectable people in proper dress attire. The din of celebration, of horns swinging. Jimmy saunters into a jazz club that is chockablock with bodies in joyous motion. A lanky, lecherous saxophonist named Jimmy Doyle (Robert De Niro) steps in front of the camera, just for a moment, his hair slick and shoes spotless, then disappears into the crowd as the camera pulls back to show the variegated mass of exultant Americans. The music is jubilant, the mood celebratory. (“The island of Manna-hata, Manhattoes, or as it is vulgarly called Manhattan,” Washington Irving wrote in 1809.) That film, New York, New York (1977), also begins with a shot of Manhattan, but now it's a painted backdrop, the city skyline in silhouette, like a miracle suspended from the stars. After the success of Taxi Driver, which made $28 million against a $1.9 million budget, the young Italian-American filmmaker wanted to make a more loving ode to his hometown, something that would capture the spirit of the city. ![]()
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