Like a number of major films released at the end of the 1970s by established New Hollywood auteurs—William Friedkin's Sorcerer (1977), Steven Spielberg's 1941 (1979), and, of course, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980)—Martin Scorsese's New York, New York was a major disappointment. Its critical reception was tepid at best, and audiences simply didn't connect with the director's desire to merge the look and feel of glossy, studio-bound postwar Hollywood musicals with a grim drama about show business and personal sacrifice. At the time, Scorsese was on a roll, having earned wide critical accolades with Mean Streets (1973), Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), and Taxi Driver (1976), which won the Palm d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and he was fully invested in his own press, thinking he couldn't fail if he stayed true to his vision.

One could say New York, New York was doomed from the start because it was all concept and no soul. Scorsese's old-meets-new musical idea is admittedly intriguing, but the execution created a bloated mess, the result of rushing into production without a completed script and relying on the amorphous idea that it would all somehow fall into place, guided by Scorsese's genius. The screenplay, which was originally penned by novelist and screenwriter Earl Mac Rauch and then substantially rewritten by Mardik Martin (who worked with Scorsese on Mean Streets, is structured along the familiar arc of the tortured artistic genius struggling to balance his commitment to his artistry with genuine human connections. The tortured genius in this case is Jimmy Doyle (Robert De Niro), a jazz saxophonist who has recently returned from serving abroad in World War II. At a V-Day event he meets Francine Evans (Liza Minnelli), a USO singer who at first rebuffs his increasingly obnoxious advances, but eventually melts into being both his romantic and musical partner.

The ups and downs of their relationship are easy to chart and dull to recount, especially as they are stretched out over a nearly three-hour running time that moves in awkward fits and starts. Much of the dialogue and action was improvised, which was not new to Scorsese—he had had his actors improv quite a bit in his previous films (try finding the "You talkin' to me?" monologue in Paul Schrader's script for Taxi Driver), but it was more controlled and fit within the context of a completed script and a sharp artistic vision. On New York, New York, improv was a desperate necessity since the script was constantly being rewritten and there was no sense of how it would all fit together in the end (there is a reason why there are five credited editors, including Marcia Lucas, who abandoned the editing of Star Wars to try to help Scorsese complete what everyone assumed would be another masterpiece).

Watching New York, New York decades after its failed theatrical release, you can sense both Scorsese's drug-fueled mania and his attendant lack of attention to the very elements that had made his previous films so visceral, memorable, and complete. New York, New York is a series of setpieces with thinly stretched connecting material, and when it launches into lengthy musical montages, it feels less like homages to Busby Berkeley and MGM's famed Freed Unit and more like an act of desperation to put something on the screen that might connect with the audience, because little else does. To his credit, Scorsese conveys quite effectively his love and admiration of big band music and jazz, and many of the musical sequences have an energy that unfortunately makes the dramatic scenes feel that much more turgid—which brings us to the characters.

We are meant to empathize with Jimmy and Francine and their personal and professional struggles, but it is hard to feel anything other than contempt. From the outset, Jimmy is an insufferable egoist whose smirking self-admiration and cocksure attitude quickly devolve into a toxic stew of emotional and physical abuse. When De Niro played Jake La Motta a few years later in Scorsese's masterful Raging Bull (1980), he was fully in command of the character's awfulness; he channeled it into a brutal portrait of violence that knows no bounds. Here, De Niro seems to think that Jimmy's toxicity is alternately charming and a tragic byproduct of his artistry. Liza Minnelli, who had made only a few films since winning an Oscar for Cabaret (1972), is therefore stuck in the place of having to absorb his abuse, which she does repeatedly in ways that make little sense except in the fleeting moment, which is testament to the film's lack of structure and consideration of character arcs. She allows Jimmy to mistreat her because, if she did otherwise, the film would end.

While the flaws add up, they don't entirely blot out what is good in New York, New York. The overall look of the film is gorgeous in the way it evokes the unreal reality of its time and place; the production design was overseen by the veteran Boris Leven, who had won an Oscar for West Side Story (1961) and whose filmography stretched back into the very classical Hollywood era that Scorsese so desperately wanted to evoke. There is never a moment when it feels "real," and while that chips away at the human element of the story, it provides plenty to enjoy visually (the great cinematographer László Kovács, who had worked extensively with Peter Bogdanovich and Bob Rafelson, was behind the lens). And then there is the music. The composer-lyricist team of John Kander and Fed Ebb, the minds behind the Broadway hits Cabaret (1966) and Chicago (1975), wrote the songs, and it wouldn't be untrue to say that the best thing to come out of the film was the title song, which Minnelli performs with such gusto at the film's climax that she very nearly shreds the screen. While the film bombed during its original theatrical release and has lived on largely as a cautionary tale about artistic ego run amok (although there have been some attempts at critical revisionism), Kander and Ebb's Broadway-style tune quickly became a bona-fide classic beloved by New Yorkers everywhere that is played at most major Big Apple sporting events. At least the music is good, right?

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