New York, New York (1977): Gutsy Effort by Scorsese, But a Misfire

Did you know that the song "New York, New York," which Frank Sinatra made so famous, was originally written for the 1977 Martin Scorsese film of the same name and first performed in that film? I can't believe it, but I didn't know that. I thought it was a song from the 1940s originally recorded by Sinatra.

The song was written by the legendary Broadway team of John Kander and Fred Ebb specifically for Scorsese's film and first sung by Liza Minnelli, who starred in the film opposite Robert de Niro.

It's good to get that history finally straight. Now for the movie. It's known as Scorsese's only bomb, with the famous theme song its only redeeming quality. I wouldn't go quite that far. There are things about the film that I find wonderful. But overall, it is a failure.

I love what Scorsese tried to do. Fresh from his triumph with "Taxi Driver" (1975), Scorsese could easily have gone on auto-pilot, churning out another gritty, masculine, urban neo-noir. Instead he did the complete opposite. He follows "Taxi Driver" up with a musical! My God, that is gutsy.

I admire the cojones but not the final product. Scorsese stumbled awkwardly through the whole film; almost every scene has a false tone. The editing is atrocious, with every scene twice as long as it should be. The sets are so cheap and fake that at one point Minnelli virtually rips a railing apart with her bare hands. And they didn't cut out that scene!

Scorsese surely chose the cheesy sets intentionally. I think he was trying to pay homage to the movies of the 1940s, particularly the female-driven melodramas (so-called "women's pictures"), which were always filmed on cheap Hollywood backlots. I absolutely love this idea. But it just does not come off well. The only way this could have worked is if the melodrama had been so captivating that it transported you back to the first time you saw "Mildred Pierce." (I can still remember seeing it for the first time on television as a teenager. Unforgettable.)

But Scorsese really fell down on the job when it comes to story development -- always a disaster when you're trying to do melodrama. I really never cared about either of the two main characters. So rather than getting swept up by emotion, I found myself limply watching actors pretend to have feelings. It's actually hard to get through this movie. Its running time is also particularly long.

It was a courageously un-hip and un-masculine tribute to old movies, but it just doesn't come together. Save for the title song, which is an old-fashioned masterpiece, "New York, New York" is a misfire.