Blu’s in the night

By Christopher P. Jacobs
Movies Editor

Martin Scorsese is noted for his taut crime thrillers and tough character dramas about gangsters, from “Mean Streets” and “Taxi Driver” to “Cape Fear,” “Gangs of New York,” and “Shutter Island.” Often starring Robert DeNiro or Leonardo DiCaprio, they typically explore the seedier side of big city life, especially in New York, and are often built around performances improvised by the actors. But when his reputation as a top young director was just starting to grow, Scorsese tried his hand at one of his favorite movie genres, the Hollywood musicals he’d loved as a child growing up in the 1940s and 50s. The result was “New York, New York” (1977), which came out on Blu-ray earlier this summer.

The film covers about a decade or so in the lives of a jazz saxophone player (Robert DeNiro) and a big band singer (Liza Minelli) who meet in Times Square on VJ-Day and gradually form a stormy romantic and professional relationship during the 1940s and 50s while trying to further their careers, first separately, then together, then separately again. The film alternates between straight drama and musical performances by its main characters, on stage, in night clubs, a recording studio, and in the movies. The lyrics of most of the songs are chosen to fit the point of the plot they’re heard, intensified by the expressive art design, lighting, and camerawork.

When it was first released to theatres, “New York, New York” received mixed critical reaction at best, and bombed at the boxoffice, confusing audiences with its disturbing clash of styles. The troubled love story between two independent-minded creative artists is a familiar subject of the movies (including among others “The Red Shoes” and several versions of “A Star is Born,” which this film often references in a number of ways). But Scorsese misjudged how viewers would accept his stylised recreation of the Hollywood studio look combined with his modern approach of heavily flawed characters played by actors improvising most of their scenes for the camera.

“New York, New York” certainly isn’t a bad film. Much of it is a dazzling demonstration of cinematic artistry. The film is packed with great music (Kander and Ebb’s title song was written especially for Minelli to perform in this film), wonderful scenes, and great sequences, but too often it feels like it should be moving on to the next scene. Because of Scorsese’s preference for improvisation, many scenes simply run on too long for comfort. We see in the documentary that even the editor called his job “a nightmare,” although he admitted that both he and the producers felt the four-and-a-half-hour roughcut was a masterpiece and a later three-and-a-half-hour cut was impressive. The official cut of 163 minutes drags the most during its first half-hour or so, when the obnoxiousness of DeNiro’s character is slammed in the viewers’ faces relentlessly.

Once he and Minelli’s character eventually connect, most of the film moves at a more natural pace. Scorsese’s periodic halting of the plot’s dramatic momentum to include a complete musical number is never a problem. It’s just the scenes that seem to halt because actors are struggling to respond to each other without knowing what lines are coming next that can quickly become tiresome. Some scenes work much better—those that Scorsese mentions they had time to rehearse until they could lock down the lines and movements for the camera before shooting, rather than those made up on the spot with the camera rolling. And Minelli’s singing is first-rate throughout, sometimes filmed live rather than to a pre-recorded playback, and quite often looking as though she’s channelling her mother, Judy Garland.

The Blu-ray’s high-definition transfer is quite good and very film-like, although viewers should understand that the mid-1970s film stock used for many scenes was unusually grainy by standards of 15 years later or 15 years earlier, and that grain is very apparent at times. The audio quality is excellent, especially the fine stereo recordings of the music, even if the surround channels are largely ignored.

There is a generous selection of extras, culled from previous DVD releases over the past decade (unfortunately all in standard-definition) and the audio commentary track prepared about 15 years ago for the laserdisc release. There’s a very good two-part retrospective documentary, a nice interview with Liza Minelli, a five-minute introduction by Scorsese edited from the interview he did for the documentary, and a 10-minute selection of scenes with commentary by cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs. Very instructive on Scorsese’s style are about 19 minutes of alternate takes and deleted scenes, showing first-hand how the actors improvised and varied their performances each time, and including an alternate ending with a completely different feeling from the ending finally used.

The commentary track is shared by Scorsese with critic Carrie Rickey (each recorded separately). Rickey’s comments give sporadic but thoughtful observations and analysis of the film, often matching the scene we’re watching, whereas Scorsese provides an interesting rundown of his personal influences and the film’s production background but tends to ramble on randomly, independently of what is on screen. Besides the English soundtrack in DTS-HD 5.1, there are five foreign-language dubbed tracks and a choice of seventeen languages for subtitles, besides optional English titles for the audio commentary.

The biggest annoyance about the disc, as with all of the recent MGM/Fox Blu-rays, is that there is no main menu, so all features must be accessed through a popup menu. Still, for about $15 or so (perhaps $10-$12 on sale) it remains a good deal, certainly worthwhile for fans of Scorsese or Minelli or 40s and 50s jazz.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK on Blu-ray— Movie: B- / Video: A / Audio: A / Extras: A-

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