A lot of work has just gone into staying on schedule in this series.
The definition of "on schedule" encompassed two things:
1) Watching the next Martin Scorsese movie I hadn't seen during the month of April;
2) Having that next movie be the next one, chronologically, I had not seen.
For a while there it didn't look like I could accomplish the latter, but then when it appeared I could, it seemed highly dubious that I'd be able to accomplish the former.
I've known since the start of the series that I'd have a hard time getting my hands on New York, New York, the 1977 musical drama starring Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli. My streaming services, YouTube and iTunes all came up empty for a movie by one of Hollywood's most celebrated directors. If I were to have a hard time finding something Martin Scorsese directed, I'd think it would be Boxcar Bertha, which I'd seen before this series started, or Who's That Knocking at My Door, which I watched to start this series in February. I would not expect it to be a film that starred two Hollywood icons.
Yet the outlook on New York, New York was bleak enough that I had to consider excluding it from this series, which would fatally undermine the whole idea behind the series. I could buy it on Amazon as a last resort, but I usually stop short of that nuclear option in a context like this -- I get fussy about what it means to add a movie to my collection, especially one I've never seen. But it wouldn't be the first movie I'd bought as the only means of watching it, and besides, the concept of a "collection" is not what it was prior to streaming.
The problem, then, became that it was only available via region 1, the region that includes the United States. This was never an issue for me in the past, but I have recently said goodbye to our region-free DVD player due to a malfunction with its tray. If I couldn't get this movie in Australia's region 4, Amazon was no help to me anyway.
It's worth pointing out that I still don't pirate movies. I'm still paranoid about some government agency arriving at my house and deporting me. I don't need that. (Plus a small part of me is worried about viruses.)
The options were clear: Drop the chronological order of the movies in the series, and hope I could work out the New York, New York issue at some point later in the year, or exclude the movie entirely. Exclusion had been an idea I'd put forth when I first introduced this series, if I couldn't ultimately find this film, and in that scenario, I was planning to make Killers of the Flower Moon, the new Scorsese movie, my final movie in the series. Except that movie just got pushed to 2023.
Well, around the middle of the month, something came along to unlock the possibility of actually watching this movie before the month was out. And that was my revival of my old laptop as a region 1 DVD player, as discussed in this post. Fairly quickly after making this discovery, I recognized its possibility to benefit me in terms of Settling the Scorsese. I got on Amazon quick smart and ordered a shipment of the New York, New York DVD from America, with an expected arrival date of April 29th. That left me a fairly short window to receive and watch the movie before the month was out, but at this point I realized what a person should never forget in this scenario: I am the person setting these deadlines and, without a doubt, am the only one who actually cares about them.
Instead of taking longer than advertised to arrive from the U.S., as shipments of all kinds usually do, the movie arrived Wednesday of this week, and I watched it on Thursday.
The technical challenges were not over yet. Oh no. I had to deal with one more annoying thing that threatened to drive me mental. Because my laptop was set up for my son's use, it kept asking to sign in to Microsoft to allow him to send access requests and the like to his parents. And every time this screen would pop up, it would jump to the front -- not just in front of the movie as it played in the background, but kicking the movie out of view entirely, so I could only hear the dialogue. Every time I would quit this application from the task manager, it would pop back up, and I couldn't stop the service because I didn't have administrator access on my son's login (and don't remember the password to log in as an administrator). Each time I thought I'd solved the issue, I'd get comfortable in my arrangement of beanbag chairs in the garage (where I continue to isolate with COVID), only to have it happen again five minutes later.
Finally, I determined that if I shut off the WiFi on the computer, it would no longer pop up this window because there was no way to verify my son's sign-in information. (I would have just put in the password but I didn't know it/remember it.) At this point I finally watched the rest of this movie -- this very long movie -- unmolested.
I wish after giving you a dozen paragraphs of preamble I could tell you that I liked New York, New York, but I did not like New York, New York.
In fact, at the start I hated it, and not just because I had an obnoxious sign-in window interrupting my experience every couple minutes. I hated the characters, especially De Niro, who I found to be one of the most unpleasant movie characters I'd met in quite some time.
Oh, it's not because this is one of De Niro's classic violent louts whose toxicity is built into this hair-trigger tendency to whack you or at least hit you at a moment's notice. I suppose saxophonist Jimmy Doyle is violent, in a certain way, but it's mostly limited to verbal abuse and a tendency to grab Minnelli -- first his unwitting and unwilling love interest, then his unaccountably willing wife -- by the arm and either walk or in one direction, or refuse to let her walk in the other.
No, it was his pure obnoxiousness -- which back then was supposed to pass as some sort of charm -- that put me out on Jimmy Doyle, and I never got back in. He meets Minnelli's character, Francine Evans, on VJ Day in New York, at a celebration where a big band is playing. It's clear she has utterly no interest in him -- like, utterly, not just being coy -- yet he pesters her and pesters her and pesters her. This goes across three or four different scenes in their lives, where Francine makes it as clear as day that she wants nothing to do with him, yet he keeps trying to kiss her and get her phone number and grab her by the waist. After a while I also found her deplorable -- first for allowing him as many liberties as he takes with her patience, and then for finally reciprocating.
Because of course she has to reciprocate. These are the two main characters in the movie -- she's a singer, he's a saxophonist, and they are destined to be together both professionally and romantically. But I hated them both for representing both sides of the classic on-screen relationship, where the woman resists the man and the man wears her down by some combination of dubious charm and brute force.
Now, to be clear, the movie does not ultimately land on Jimmy's side. He continues to display reprehensible and immature behavior, and it doesn't get him what he wants in life -- eventually. But that doesn't mean I wanted to spend two hours and 40 minutes watching things trigger his fragile ego and light his short fuse to toxic masculinity. I wanted Francine to be smarter than succumbing to Jimmy Doyle and she just isn't, for most of the movie.
The plot? Well they get married, go on the road with a band, start to become successful, and then start to go off the rails when Francine gets pregnant and Jimmy doesn't handle it well. Because of course he doesn't. Anything that comes along that could possibly take away the only two things he appears to crave -- professional success and Francine's singular devotion to him -- is a threat. So naturally he turns into a big baby all over again.
I would have hated this movie from start to finish except that I found some of the things that happen in the final third slightly redemptive. For one, Jimmy finally starts getting punished for his terrible behavior, which was very satisfying. But then the film also becomes more of a musical, capitalizing on Minnelli's abilities and even going on one of those flights of fancy from old Hollywood musicals that I don't really love, which is the extended musical sequence that lasts about 15 minutes. In New York, New York this worked for me, probably in contrast to what had come before -- I desperately needed it at this point.
Two last observations about New York, New York before I finally release you from my grip today:
1) I noticed a few distracting edits, cuts from one shot to the next that didn't follow from the previous one in terms of the staging. That led me to look up whether Scorsese's long-time collaborator, Thelma Schoonmaker, was that editor on this movie, and in fact she was not -- that job went to the trio of Bert Lovitt, David Ramirez and Tom Rolf, none of whom I have heard of. (Which isn't hugely surprising as there are only a handful of editors I could actually name.) The interesting thing to note is that Schoonmaker -- who did work with him on his debut film, Who's That Knocking at My Door -- was back on board for his very next film, Raging Bull, and has not left his side since. I'm wondering if Scorsese also noticed those bad edits and said "Okay, it's time to bring Thelma back."
2) I had no idea that this movie was the origin of the famous Kander and Ebb song that plays at the end of victories by the New York Yankees at Yankee Stadium, popularized by Frank Sinatra. If I'd known the actual name of that song, I would have -- it's "Theme from New York, New York" -- but I didn't. Given the ensuing cultural prominence, or lack thereof, of Scorsese's film -- I mean, you can't even watch it without buying it, and your DVD region options are limited -- I simply could not believe it had birthed such an iconic song, even if that song gives me the shits a bit as a fan of the Boston Red Sox. Nor could I believe that the song had only been around for 45 years -- it feels more likely that it was a hundred years old than less than 50, probably because it was already from an archaic musical form at the time it was first written. I was far more likely to guess that the movie took its title from the Sinatra song, and when I heard little bits of the familiar music being worked out by Jimmy Doyle throughout the movie, it was a bit of an Easter egg for those of us in the audience who were well aware of the song as a cultural institution. It's hard to believe that when Minnelli does finally sing it at the end of the movie -- making her, and not Sinatra, the one from whose lips it originally came -- that it wasn't some sort of big payoff for an audience who had been waiting the whole movie to hear it. In fact, they were hearing it for the very first time.
I've given each of the first two movies I watched in this series only two stars out of five. I hope to improve on that with the next film in the series, 1986's The Color of Money in June, which will require a viewing of 1961's The Hustler at some point before then.
