Martin Scorsese (1977)

One of the things I remembered from seeing New York, New York at the time of its original release was that the heroine Francine (Liza Minnelli) lost the baby she and her husband Jimmy (Robert De Niro) were expecting.  I misremembered.  Jimmy Jr is not only born alive but survives to appear as a lad in the film’s closing scenes.  (He’s played by Adam Winkler – the nine-year-old son of one of New York, New York’s producers, Irwin Winkler, and today a professor of constitutional law at UCLA.)   I think my bad memory is forgivable, though:  by the time Francine and Jimmy (Sr) have a shouting match turbulent enough to send her into labour, New York, New York has become so splenetic that you’ve got used to assuming the worst.  Whereas Damien Chazelle’s La La Land exploits movie-musical history to buoy the audience, Martin Scorsese mines the genre with what feels like a hardening determination to depress.  Yet New York, New York, in 1977 and forty years on, is such an imaginative and absorbing failure that it turns out to be, in spite of itself, a feelgood experience – unlike the much more efficient and less interesting La La Land.

Jimmy Doyle and Francine Evans first meet on V-J Day in 1945, at a celebration gathering in a New York City club.  Francine is sitting alone; Jimmy pesters her repeatedly for her phone number.  He doesn’t get it but he makes an impression.  Francine turns up asking for Jimmy at the hotel where he’s staying.  It turns out he’s a saxophone player and he drags her along to an audition.  It’s not going well so Francine starts singing ‘You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me’ to try and rescue the situation; Jimmy accompanies her on the sax; they’re signed up as a duo.  It’s the start of both their progress to professional success and their mutual infatuation that leads to impulsive marriage.  The latter is Jimmy’s idea, which Francine goes along with:  that gives an idea of the balance of power in the relationship but there’s soon conflict between them, due largely to Jimmy’s hot-tempered self-centredness.  We get an increasing sense too of their diverging tastes and aspirations:  he’s drawn to bebop jazz; she gravitates towards more popular musical entertainment.  Jimmy writes a number and Francine some lyrics to it.  Jimmy is characteristically critical of the words, Francine no less typically tentative (verging on apologetic) about them.  The relationship continues to deteriorate during Francine’s pregnancy, especially when recording agents show interest in signing her.  The event that ends their marriage is, shockingly, the birth of the baby:  Jimmy walks away from the maternity ward without even seeing his new son.

The narrative jumps forward several years.  Francine is now a Hollywood musical star and big-time live performer who also sells a lot of records.  Jimmy owns a New York jazz club and is successful in his own right as a composer and recording artist.  His instrumental – the theme he wrote when he and Francine were together years ago – currently tops the jazz charts.   It’s also Francine’s closing number, complete with the lyrics that she hasn’t changed, in the one-woman show that’s brought her back to New York.  Jimmy goes to watch her perform and they meet afterwards at a backstage reception.  Following a brief, affectionate conversation with their son, Jimmy takes his leave, then phones Francine, inviting her out for Chinese food.  She agrees; he says he’ll be at the stage door.  As Francine approaches it, she can see he’s not there, though in fact he’s hanging around outside the club.  Francine decides not to inquire without and returns to the after-show reception.  Jimmy walks away down the street.

The opening V-J Day party episode of New York, New York is lengthy but exhilarating.  The newspapers trampled underfoot in the crowded street outside and the big-band orchestra playing inside the packed club immediately give us our bearings; we’re familiar with this kind of setting as a boy-meets-girl story starting point.  We’re quickly aware too, in the visual and performing rhythms, of a film-making sensibility and an acting style different from those we associate with old-style Hollywood musical romance.  In 2017, however, the strongest nostalgic element in New York, New York is watching Robert De Niro – being reminded of how, in the 1970s, you felt he could do anything and, in consequence, excitement about whatever he  chose to do next.  (He appeared in Mean Streets, The Godfather: Part II, Taxi Driver, New York, New York and The Deer Hunter in virtually consecutive years.)  As Jimmy Doyle, De Niro is a brilliantly inventive blend of amusing and infuriating in the first half of the story.  He handles the saxophone convincingly (the solos are dubbed by George Auld, who also gives a tangy performance playing the hard-bitten bandleader Frankie Harte).  It’s integral to the intentions of New York, New York that we come to see the shadow side of Jimmy.   Robert De Niro, through the indelible connotations of his earlier roles as well as his expressive range in this one, easily prepares us for this darkening – even makes it seem a natural development.  But the film goes wrong as Jimmy becomes more unreasonable and dislikeable, not least because of its reliance on another element antithetical to the type of musical-comedy movie which Scorsese interrogates:  the scenes between Jimmy and Francine are more and more obviously improvised (and overlong).   Worse, because De Niro is much more experienced in this kind of acting than Liza Minnelli, they’re unbalanced:  he seems to be performing in a vacuum and she not to be contributing much.  There are times when you wish there was simply more dialogue and business supplied to, rather than by, the actors.  (The screenplay is by Eric Mac Rauch and Mardik Martin.)  Jimmy’s switches between aggressive nastiness and self-pitying remorse become mechanical and tiresome; in its acrid way, New York, New York comes to seem as flimsy as the sunny-side-up musicals that it subverts.

Liza Minnelli is a problem in other ways too.  Although Cabaret brought her enormous success, her casting in that film received plenty of criticism – on the grounds that Christopher Isherwood’s Sally Bowles is an idiosyncratic performer with little talent for singing or dancing.  I didn’t find this a difficulty.  Bob Fosse shot Minnelli’s big solos, ‘Maybe This Time’ and the title song, from Sally’s point of view so that they came across as expressions not of reality but of her egocentric fantasy:  the high-powered climax to ‘Maybe This Time’ is followed by a feeble smattering of applause in the Kit Kat Klub.  In comparison to Cabaret and in spite of the deliberately artificial sets devised by Scorsese and his production designer Boris Leven, Liza Minnelli is in New York, New York singing for real.  Her de luxe professionalism is formidable yet impersonal and the effect is cheerless – more so, I think, because of the dichotomy here between Minnelli the diva and Minnelli the actress.  Although she’s an excellent comic foil to De Niro in the early stages and her characterisation is clear throughout, the role of Francine, as implied above, is very limited.  You’re always uncomfortably aware too of Minnelli’s jolie laide looks, especially in profile, emphasised by the forties-into-fifties hairstyles and make-up she wears.  Her charisma and her irregular Betty Boop-ish features combine to make Minnelli an overpowering screen image.  Her (admirable) attempts to act naturally feel like a strenuous effort to subdue herself.

The musical numbers in New York, New York are unusually arranged across the movie.   The songs sung by Liza Minnelli (and, in smaller roles, by Mary Kay Place and Diahnne Abbott) were already standards in the 1940s and 1950s or, if not, soon after:  ‘You Brought a  New Kind of Love to Me’ is followed by ‘Once in a While’, ‘You Are My Lucky Star’, ‘The Man I Love’, ‘Blue Moon’ and ‘Honeysuckle Rose’.   The big-band numbers that supply virtual background music are similarly familiar.  I am decidedly no expert but the soundtrack seems very light on jazz pieces.   Except for the title number, which develops in stages, the songs written for the film by John Kander and Fred Ebb are crammed into the last half-hour’s summary of Francine’s success story.   The first of these, ‘But the World Goes Round’, is too like ‘Maybe This Time’, in theme and in several musical details, to avoid coming across as a parody showstopper.  The ‘Happy Endings’ numbers, which feature in a capsule of the Hollywood rags-to-riches movie in which Francine stars, are intentionally pastiche.  This expensively-produced section was cut from twelve minutes to much less in the 155-minute version of the film prepared for commercial release, and to nothing in the 136-minute version to which United Artists desperately resorted in the light of disappointing box office.  ‘Happy Endings’ was restored in its entirety in a rerelease of 1981, the year after Frank Sinatra’s cover of ‘New York, New York’ gave the song a cachet it had never enjoyed until then and which it’s never lost since.  Given how it’s used in the film, it’s something of an irony that ‘New York, New York’ has become a genuine standard.  Minnelli’s delivery of it, spectacular but almost insanely over the top, is shot by Scorsese as if to suggest not only that the red-clad performer is in danger of self-combustion but that, given the type of singer she is, that might be the best outcome:  the sequence exudes ill feeling.  Francine gets a standing ovation from every member of the club audience except one.   However much you may have come to dislike Jimmy Doyle, you sympathise with him at this point:  he applauds politely but stays sitting down.

Talking about the film in Scorsese on Scorsese, the director says:

‘It’s about two people in love with each other who are both creative.  That was the idea:  to see if the marriage would work.  We didn’t know if this marriage would work, because we didn’t know if our own marriages were working.’

The ‘two people in love with each other who are both creative’ theme is one of the strengths of New York, New York.  Although the extent to which Francine’s and Jimmy’s creativity is to blame for their break-up is arguable, they are clearly, in different ways, ambitious and competitive with each other.  Francine is a somewhat more substantial personality if we see her as passive aggressive but the male-female dynamic in New York, New York is nevertheless lop-sided – and bothersome in a larger sense.  In Martin Scorsese’s cinema, men tend to be incorrigibly unreliable; women are these-amazing-beautiful-creatures-that-men-go-crazy-for.  There’s a persisting sense that a man, be he ever so reprehensible, is somehow more interesting than a woman – certainly more deserving of the main role.  The semblance of equality of the sexes at the very end of New York, New York therefore comes as a relief:  there’s a parity in Francine’s realising it’s too much emotional trouble to look beyond the stage door and Jimmy’s deciding it’ll be easier to stay slightly out of her sight.  I find this closing diminuendo most effective, though it no doubt helped seal the film’s commercial fate.

11 February 2017