![]() ![]() ![]() In order to bring his vision to life, Scorsese and his director of photography Laszlo Kovacs and production designer Boris Levin used intentionally artificial looking sets and specific lighting to recall the old days of studio musicals, with a touch of film noirish qualities thrown in for good measure. Over time though, the pressure of show biz see the fall of their love as their careers rise. He meets a low level club singer with big hopes and the two form a perfonal and professional relationship with one another. The film follows a go-getter sax player named Jimmy Doyle who's got talent, but can also be overwhelmingly obnoxious, stubborn, and hard to deal with. It was a noble effort, and no one can deny the fact that this is made with tons of love, care, and respect. For this, Scorsese decided to abandon the gritty realism of his previous works and craft a loveletter to his city, big band (and some jazz) music, and the lavishly produced movie musicals of Old Hollywood. It was his follow-up to Taxi Driver, and needless to say, this didn't make the impression left by that one. The film was a departure and an experiment for Marty. This is a Scorsese film that typically gets overlooked, and, while I can see why (to a degree), I think it's actually pretty good, and probably one of his most underrated- and that last little bit is something that needs to change. Save for the title song, which is an old-fashioned masterpiece, "New York, New York" is a misfire. It was a courageously un-hip and un-masculine tribute to old movies, but it just doesn't come together. Its running time is also particularly long. It's actually hard to get through this movie. So rather than getting swept up by emotion, I found myself limply watching actors pretend to have feelings. I really never cared about either of the two main characters. Unforgettable.)īut Scorsese really fell down on the job when it comes to story development - always a disaster when you're trying to do melodrama. 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. 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. Scorsese surely chose the cheesy sets intentionally. The sets are so cheap and fake that at one point Minnelli virtually rips a railing apart with her bare hands. The editing is atrocious, with every scene twice as long as it should be. Scorsese stumbled awkwardly through the whole film almost every scene has a false tone. I admire the cojones but not the final product. He follows "Taxi Driver" up with a musical! My God, that is gutsy. Fresh from his triumph with "Taxi Driver" (1975), Scorsese could easily have gone on auto-pilot, churning out another gritty, masculine, urban neo-noir. There are things about the film that I find wonderful. It's known as Scorsese's only bomb, with the famous theme song its only redeeming quality. It's good to get that history finally straight. 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. ![]() I thought it was a song from the 1940s originally recorded by Sinatra. 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. ![]()
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