Arts

It's a wonderful film?

Clancy Sigal

New York, New York (Odeon Leicester Square) In recent months I've had two chastening experiences, both from Streisand films. Originally when I saw The Way We Were its flatulent romanticism bored and embarrassed me. But then, talking to otherwise rational people who had enjoyed it, I realised that was precisely the quality that had hooked them. (Including, to my astonishment on a visit to Los Angeles, my blacklisted contemporaries who adored having their political pasts re-varnished this way.) Later, I wrote in this column that my idea of hell was having to sit through A Star Is Born a second time. Well, for business reasons I had to see the Streisand/Kristofferson tearjerker again and grudgingly had to admit to being caught up in its compellingly lush neuroticism. Both The Way We Were and A Star Is Born are blisteringly bad movies but do have (I see now) an undeniable quality of coming in at treetop level, so to speak, and evading our intellectual radar. We like beini ducked into baths of warm cinematic molasses.

So I want to tread a little cautiously with Martin Scorsese's New York, New York (A). It's a noisy, long, all-stops-out compromise between a 1940s musical and a 'realistic' backstage romance between Liza Minnelli as a big band thrush (as they used to be called) and Robert De Niro as Jimmy Doyle, a wild tenor sax man who seems to be a weird mixture of Charlie Parker's genius and Donald O'Connor's anythingfor-a-laugh antics.

De Niro's performance is, as usual, stunningly intense — though to what end I'm still not sure. Minnelli warbles pianissimo as if every number will be her last, with hardly a bow to the way real band ladies like Jo Stafford or Helen O'Connell actually phrased swingtime ditties. And she is oversupplied with original Cabaret-style torch numbers (Munich 1920s) that, pretty and expectable as they are, have as much to do With the musical 1940s— when the big bands were breaking up under the impact of smaller groups and a new bebop sound — as Streisand's barbie doll Communist was a real radical in The Way We Were.

But most damagingly, the director makes the huge mistake of encouraging Minnelli to sweeten up her basically tough character (the same mistake Streisand made on Streisand in A Star Is Born), so that any truth in her up-and-down relationship with De Niro becomes muddled and sentimentalised. (That Scorsese knows better we saw from his extracting such a stubborn, wry performance out of Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More.) The script is a mush that never really decides what is happening with its two lovers but gives Scorsese plenty of leg room to exercise his peculiar notions of romantic nostalgia.

Everything about New York, New York is artificial. Much of this is deliberate. As far as I could tell, all the sets are studio cutouts, including one quite funny scene when De Niro, pursuing Minnelli who has been leading him a catch-me-if-you-can chase, misses his train and is pushed along an icy platform by a Pullman that is obviously merely a moving cardboard silhouette. Earlier in their courtship the camera peeked over Jimmy Doyle's shoulder as he watched an anonymous sailor and his girl do an On The Town balletic dance to the sound of a rushing subway train, an interlude meant to emphasise the picture's stylised romanticism but•which left me squirming.

I think audiences will identify with Minnelli and De Niro partly because these two look like the kind of couple who might come together passionately in a gigantic sexual Krunch! They then gradually fall apart because she is ambitious for herself and succeeds while he is ambitious for his 'progressive', experimental music and fails to achieve her super-heights. Parts of New York, New York distinctly echo A Star Is Born, especially when De Niro takes a runout powder on pregnant Minnelli. In Steisand's film Kristofferson masochistically sacrificed his life to Barbara's burgeoning career, But De Niro is too much the prowling street cat for that kind of nonsense.

De Niro's is an interesting characterisation but has too little to work against in Minnelli's vulnerable little kitten. There's only one scene, when they're spatting in De Niro's parked Buick and a couple in another car demand the kerb space, when Scorsese lets Minnelli fly. She raucously screams at the strangers, `G'wan, beat it!' and we see a quick flash of the brash, ugly toughness Scorsese should have insisted on. But he's too implicated in shaping New York, New York as a love-letter to Minnelli.

This softness and confusion extends to the music. (And the picture, after all, is about music.) Audiences probably will like

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some of the old-time melodies — the film opens on V-J Night with an impersonated Tommy Dorsey smoothly tromboning his 'Sentimental Over You' theme. But Scorsese misses the actual big band (and small combo) sounds by a mile. Despite the presence of a genuine jazz man, Ralph Burns, as musical supervisor, it mainly comes out as homogenised Radio One Nerful, Scorsese seems to be as afraid of the bouncing, tuneful energy of the real 1940s music as he is of showing De Niro and Minnelli actually working together on the bandstand. Their few perfunctory scenes jamming together radiate incredibility.

Talented as they are, neither star is a swinger — a term which once described a certain relaxed, even unassertive rhythm.

De Niro, who has mastered the fingering technique well enough, looks as natural on a saxophone as Kirk Douglas did with his trumpet in Young Man With a Horn He's always drawing attention to himself, the actor who is 'building a character', and tak ing it away from the music — played offstage, beautifully, by Georgie Auld. Yet even the most strung-out musicians of the period found ways of laying back and letting their music take over and occupy stage centre once in a while.

De Niro cannot do this. Or is not encouraged to. Scorsese almost forces his stars to over-inflate by the tepid way he mixes the tunes into a kind of Mantovani-porridge background to his unthought-out love story.

He may not even understand what was hap pening musically back then. There is a truly vulgar scene when De Niro, blowing in a Harlem club, spies a black man flirting with Minnelli, Though he has come to feel her very existence as an assault on his seedy male vanity, suddenly De Niro goes crazy with jealousy, his eyes as wild as a panicked steer's over his saxophone which he bleats and wails with terrifying anger. Dramat ically it's effective; musically it's pure Disney. Like Fantasia, it encourages the audi ence to make a quick one-to-one equation between 'angry' music and similar emotional states in the musician. Anyone who loves Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Lenny Tristan°, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie — some of the 'breakthrough' musicians on whom Jimmy Doyle must have been modelled — will grow very depressed at such a simplistic programming of this grand, piercing music.

It's all of a piece with a film whose idea of 'failure' for De Niro is to end him up as the owner of a large, successful jazz club. The real Jimmy Doyles finished, at best, as unremembered sidemen on now-forgotten gigs, or prematurely dead on booze and junk.

But, mindful of how 1 had to eat my words on the Streisand films, I'd like to be a little mealymouthed about New York, New York. I think audiences will like this picture because of De Niro's acting, the natural electricity between him and Minnelli and the pseudo-hip music. It has the kind of emptiness one can fill with one's own longings.