New York, New York (1977)

On V-J Day in 1945, all of New York is celebrating and a presumptuous and pushy jazz musician (Robert De Niro) foists himself on a promising singer (Liza Minnelli). They eventually fall in love and the film follows their rocky relationship to its inevitable conclusion. One of Martin Scorsese's most divisive films. I've met people who adore it and I've met people who hate it with a passion. I think I'm smack dab in the middle veering toward an appreciation of it. Scorsese's film is an attempt to marry the classic Hollywood musical with the new (1977) Hollywood but he can't find the right tone to make it all work. He uses artificial looking stage bound sets in some scenes, there's a certain glamour to the movie and some of the musical numbers are clearly a homage to the musicals of the 1940s and 50s. But his characters don't resemble the people of those movies, they're contemporary and hold nothing back. You'd never find a character like De Niro's Jimmy Doyle in an MGM musical. He's arrogant, egotistical and an unlikable lout. De Niro plays him perfectly but he's a difficult character to sit with through an almost 3 hour movie. It's an ambitious failure but not without some striking images (Laszlo Kovacs did the cinematography) and moments like Minnelli's rendition of the title song. With Lionel Stander, Barry Primus, Mary Kay Place, Georgie Auld, Clarence Clemons and Diahnne Abbott.