CASINO 1995

A Movie Without A Hero

I've no idea if 19th-century English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray in any way inspired Martin Scorsese's Casino (screenplay by Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese from Pileggi's non-fiction book Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas). But I can't imagine the notoriously cynical author of The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844) and Vanity Fair (1887) would take issue with my updating the latter's subtitle to headline this essay on Martin Scorsese's mythic epic of misanthropy, Casino; an operatically grandiose fall-from-grace fable lacking in even a single virtuous character.  

Robert De Niro as Sam "Ace" Rothstein

Sharon Stone as Ginger McKenna

Joe Pesci as Nicky Santoro

James Woods as Lester Diamond

Alan King as Andy Stone

Don Rickles as Billy Sherbert

Based on a true story and shot in a lacquered, color-saturated style befitting the over-the-top, tacky opulence of its '70s-era Las Vegas setting, Martin Scorsese's Casino is mobster neo-noir (neon-noir?) on an operatic scale.   

A sprawling, blood-soaked, true-crime chronicle of the days of Mafia-ruled Las Vegas, Casino dramatizes a period in history when Sin City was still a slightly shady, post-Rat Pack, strictly-adults playground (no kid-friendly thrill rides), and the casinos served as the perfect false fronts of legitimacy for the Syndicate's meticulously planned and carried out money-skimming operations. 

As Mob films go, Casino doesn't cover much new ground (especially if you've seen Goodfellas), but as the saying goes, it's not the tale; it's in the telling. 

And from Casino's nearly three-hour running time, ten-year narrative span (1973 to 1983), prodigious body count tally (upwards of 24), and cast of over 100 speaking parts, all sporting more eye-popping retro costumes and hairstyles than a Cher retrospective; the telling is a clear case of form meeting function. Casino is the gangster movie recontextualized as a Paradise Lost parable advocating that you can take the wiseguy out of the mean streets, but you can't take the hood out of the hoodlum.  

The paradox of Las Vegas has always been that it's a city built on games of chance

 that stays profitable by making sure absolutely nothing is left to chance.

Casino kicks off with a (literally) explosive pre-credits sequence that hurls the audience and the just-seconds-old movie into "whodunit" territory with an abruptness of violence we'll come to learn is something of a Casino leitmotif. As an exercise in cinema economy, it's a killer of an opening (heh -heh) that instantly creates tension, disrupts the viewer's equilibrium (you're on guard against the unexpected before you've even had time to develop expectations), and establishes the basis for Casino's told-in-flashback structure and running voiceover narration.

Duel in the Sun

Said voiceover duties are shared (in often amusingly contradictory and self-serving narrative perspectives) by childhood pals Sam "Ace" Rothstein (sports handicapper) and Nicky Santoro (protection racket). A pair of Midwest Mafia golden boys granted (temporarily, as it turns out) the Keys to the Kingdom, and for Ace, an ill-omened stab at absolution through love (enter, traffic-stopping Vegas hustler Ginger McKenna).

For all that I love about Casino—and I am indeed crazy about this flick...exhilarating and ambitious, it's precisely the kind of movie that reminds me why I fell in love with movies in the first place—the main reason it ranks #1 as both my favorite and most re-watched of Scorsese films, is the toxic trio of characters at its center. 

An Ace, A Queen, and A Joker

"It should'a been perfect. I mean, he had me, Nicky Santoro, his best friend, watching his ass. 

And he had Ginger, the woman he loved, on his arm, But in the end, we fucked it all up."

Anyone familiar with this blog is aware that I have a fondness for - as I once described it: "Movies about neurotic characters in mutually dependent relationships, each harboring barely-suppressed hostilities and resentments, yet forced by circumstance to interact" (e.g., Carnage, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Closer, A Delicate Balance). 

So it should come as no surprise that I find the positively electric De Niro-Stone-Pesci/Ace-Ginger-Nicky dynamic of dysfunction the most compelling thing about Casino. No matter how big the film gets, the human scale always towers far above it. Scorsese, the master of the intimate epic, keeps the emotional drama center stage, while the actors somehow pull off the miraculous feat of humanizing these reprehensible characters without glorifying them. 

ROGUES GALLERY
Clockwise from left: Frank Vincent, Kevin Pollak, Dick Smothers, and L.Q. Jones

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

In addition to being fascinated by films about corrosive relationships, I also have a mania for movies about ostensibly "foolproof" schemes that go calamitously wrong (e.g., The Killing -1956, A Simple Plan - 1998, and Before the Devil Knows You're Dead - 2007). Perhaps it's because I've always been somewhat allergic to the self-aggrandizing side of the "hero myth" in American movies (one of the main reasons I've never cared for Westerns, war movies, or sports films); or maybe because real-life keeps offering daily confirmation that America's staunchest and most noble institutions are no match for America's simpletons. 

Whatever the reason (and it could be as simple as me relishing the tenets of film noir), I remain captivated by films that dramatize this almost biblical sociopsychological truth: There is no paradise so abundant, answered prayer so fulfilling, utopia so ideal, or technological advancement so life-changing that humans can't ultimately find a way to fuck it up.

Las Vegas as American Metaphor
Devoted to upholding the illusion of fairness while knowing absolutely everything is rigged

Although I liked Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990) a great deal, I'm one of the few (only?) who finds Casino to be the superior film. In melding two of my favorite movie subgenres (dysfunctional relationships/things spiraling out of control), Casino plays less like a gangster film to me and more like a conflict of human nature melodrama. And that's a win.

What's most dramatically compelling to me is how the characters in Casino are handed a Syndicate Shangri-La, yet they can’t get out of the way of their own egos, jealousies, and weaknesses long enough to make it work. In this, Casino has always felt a bit to me like the coin flip-side to Bob Rafelson's The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)…both films share a very late-‘70s, nihilistic sensibility in their attitude towards dreams, dreamers who fly too close to the sun, and the perils of mere mortals thinking they can play fast and loose with The Fates.

"Beautiful title sequence of our lead character falling slowly into hell."

Editor Thelma Schoonmaker on Casino's titles designed by Elaine & Saul Bass 

Religion almost always serves a function in Scorsese's films. Casino's themes reference Christian mythology. Specifically the notion of sin and absolution.   

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Scorsese is such a gifted visual storyteller. Early in Casino, we're treated to an aerial nighttime view of Las Vegas—an isolated, neon-lit island in a vast sea of darkness—that succinctly captures the precise appeal this desert metropolis holds for  Midwest mobsters: no neighbors.

Set smack in the middle of nowhere, Las Vegas is presented as a place apart. A world unto itself. An uncharted frontier where laws (and hands) can be broken, and ordinary rules of behavior simply don't come into play. No wonder Ace Rothstein calls it a gangster's "Paradise on earth."

While voiceover narration informs us that Vegas was wide open for guys like Ace and Nicky, Casino's visuals tell another story. The world of gambling casinos is a darkness-shrouded time/space limbo devoid of clocks or windows, illuminated exclusively by ceilings of neon suns and electric stars. Scorsese's frequent use of low-angle shots makes these ceilings look oppressive and looming, the casinos, closed-in and claustrophobic. Ace and Nicky like to think of themselves as free agents, but with cameras everywhere and the Mob bosses regularly reported-to, they're just two wealth-cocooned street guys living in garish gilded cages. 

With Plenty of Money and You

Scorsese's Las Vegas -an entire city done in exclamation points- is so isolated that it's not just out of touch with the rest of the world; it's out of touch with reality.

Everything from the cinematography (Casino has the sheen and saturated colors of a movie musical), period costuming (the '70s on steroids), and production design (gaudy glitz) to the editing (kid-in-a-candy-store jittery) reinforce a vision of Las Vegas as an oasis of overstatement. 

Sexy Beast

PERFORMANCES 

It's no surprise that De Niro and Pesci are phenomenal. They exhibit the same natural, improvisational intensity and chemistry they shared in Raging Bull and Goodfellas. (Although I confess that getting used to Pesci's voiceover initially took me a while. Nowadays, I delight in Pesci's profanity-laced commentary, but the first time I saw Casino, it felt as though I were trapped listening to an entire film narrated by Fats, that creepy ventriloquist doll in Magic - 1978). 

But Sharon Stone is the real revelation in Casino. Giving the film's only Oscar-nominated performance,  Stone brings it and is not fucking around. She owns that role and slays in every scene. I'll go to my grave saying she was robbed of the Oscar that year (she lost it to Susan Sarandon in Dead Man Walking). 

Stone gives a career-best performance and damn-near steals the entire movie, inhabiting her character with both a granite toughness and raw vulnerability...her skill in conveying the latter is the very thing that makes the Ace/Ginger scenes work: if we didn't get a glimpse of the "other" Ginger that Ace falls in love with, he would simply come across as a fool. Sharon Stone has so many great moments, but one of my favorites is a scene in a hotel room with Pesci, where he's warning her to be careful around Ace. Her delivery of the line: "I know. You don't have to tell me that. What do you think, I'm stupid?" and the look she gives him as he leaves (She's SO not stupid) just lays me out. Stone is hands-down 75% of why Casino ranks so high on my favorites chart.  

The Happy Couple

When I said that Casino is a story lacking in a single virtuous character, that went double for the city of Las Vegas. The film treats Las Vegas as another character in this drama. A character as bereft of a moral core as any of its flesh-and-blood castmates. 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

My favorite directors aren't favorites because I like all of their movies. I've seen nearly every film made by Martin Scorsese; some are dreadful (New York Stories – 1989), some are admirably flawed (New York, New York – 1977), some are unforgettable (Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore – 1974),  and some are even masterpieces (Taxi Driver – 1976). 

What tends to make a filmmaker a favorite is that their love of cinema is so passionate that even their failures are fascinating. 

With Scorsese, I always get the feeling that he respects the power of film and enjoys manipulating the tools of the medium (music, editing, camera angles, production design, costuming, casting, dialogue, story) to create authentic cinema experiences. 

Which means he leaves me to discover what I feel about what I see. He trusts me to do the work to interpret the unorthodox and risky. He understands that movies are about that magical exchange between the emotion of the story, the impact of the screen images, and the relationship forged with the viewer. Scorsese is a storyteller, and the obvious delight he takes in crafting a tale and bringing me into his world is as infectious as it is intoxicating. 

So, on that score, Martin Scorsese is not one of those directors I can always count on to deliver a movie that I'm sure to love, but he's a director I definitely trust to deliver a movie that's about something human and real.

Though not very well-received when released, Casino, nevertheless, more than any other film he's made, embodies what I most love about movies and represents what I've come to most respect and admire in Martin Scorsese as an artist and a filmmaker. 

CASINO opened in Los Angeles on Wednesday, November 22, 1995
I saw it that following Saturday at Mann's Plaza Theater in Westwood 

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2023

BLOODY MAMA 1970

"All right now everybody, reach for the nightgown of the Lord!"

It’s weird to think back to a time when I chiefly only knew these great ladies of the screen from the following movie roles: Bette Davis (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Dead Ringer, The Nanny), Joan Crawford (Strait-Jacket, Berserk!), Olivia De Havilland (Lady in a Cage, Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte), and Tallulah Bankhead (Die, Die My Darling), Barbara Stanwyck (The Night Walker), and Shelley Winters (The Mad Room, What’s The Matter With Helen?, Who Slew Auntie Roo?).

Certainly, this assortment reflects the tastes of a kid enamored of the cheap fright sensationalism of B-movies available on late-night TV or weekends at the movies (it wasn’t until I was in college that I came to appreciate just how distinguished these actresses’ pre-scream-queen careers were), but they also reflect a time in Hollywood when leading ladies were close to becoming an endangered species. Particularly actresses of a certain age. In the late 60’s-early’70s, if you saw an older actress on the screen at all, it was very likely as the mayhem target in a horror flick, or as the terrorizing psycho in a hag-horror exploitation film. 

Pistol Packin' Mama
Shelley Winters as Ma Parker in a 1966 episode of the Batman TV series
Shelley Winters as Ma Barker in Roger Corman's Bloody Mama - 1970

Hollywood’s youthquake explosion had little use for mature and untoned flesh, so it was characteristic of films of the time to depict the middle-aged in oversimplified, often negative terms. Older men were usually morally corrupt, impotent—figuratively and literally—figures of emasculated conformity standing in the way of the virile, rebellious antihero (think any police chief in a '70s detective movie). Women—at least those upon whom Hollywood’s male gaze no longer bestowed its singular gauge of feminine worth and validation: desirability—were portrayed as grotesques and figures to be shunned. 

Shelley Winters as Kate "Ma" Barker

Don Stroud as Herman Barker

Robert De Niro as Lloyd Barker

Clint Kimbrough as Arthur Barker

Robert Walden as Fred Barker

Diane Varsi as Mona Gibson

Bruce Dern as Kevin Dirkman

When Shelley Winters was cast as Depression-era crime matriarch Ma Barker in Roger Corman’s Bonnie & Clyde-inspired Bloody Mama, the sizable role was seen as more of a departure for the two-time Oscar winner back in 1970 than it appears to be today. A character actress known for her scene-stealing supporting roles, Winters was always a bit of a ripe performer, but it wasn’t until the late-‘60s that she began to bid adieu to the relatively subtle phase of her early career, and her film roles gradually began to take on the outsized dimensions of her then-frequent talk show appearances.

For better or worse—depending on your fondness for high-decibel melodrama with a side of stuffed ham—her performances in American International’s Wild in the Streets (1968) and her brief but memorable turn in The Mad Room (1969) became the Shelley Winters standard. These twin B-movies ushered in a decade that saw Winters delivering increasingly shrill and broad-strokes performances in a string of low-budget thrillers and TV movies while somehow still managing to wow in the occasional major release (she’s awfully good in Paul Mazursky’s Next Stop, Greenwich Village – 1976, and of course, her waterlogged, Oscar-nominated turn in 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure).

Mama Dearest
Mere months after playing mom to the fabulous Barker boys of Arkansas,
Shelley Winters played stage mother to Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Zeppo Marx
in the flop 1970 Broadway musical Minnie's Boys. 

Bloody Mama, the highly-fictionalized account of the criminal exploits of the real-life Barker Gang who terrorized the American Midwest from 1931 to 1935, plays on the since-refuted legend that Kate “Ma” Barker was the hard-as-nails ringleader of a gang of outlaws consisting of her four imbecilic sons. Screenwriter Robert Thom (director and writer of the 1969 Jennifer Jones error-in-judgement Angel, Angel Down We Go) embellishes the story with the fictional characters of Mona Gibson (Diane Varsi) a blasé, pragmatic hooker; non-familial gang member Kevin Dirkman (Bruce Dern), a stand-in for the real-life Alvin Karpis; and Sam Pendlebury (Pat Hinkle) a kidnapped Memphis cotton magnate substituting for Hamm’s Beer president and 1933 Barker gang kidnap victim William Hamm.

Directed by “King of the Bs” Roger Corman, the R-rated Bloody Mama is clearly inspired by Arthur Penn’s almost elegiac, mythologizing Bonnie and Clyde (1967), but Corman dispenses with the arthouse soft-focus treatment and goes straight for the in-your-face bluntness of Drive-In exploitation. The result is bracing sensationalism rooted in a look at Depression-era Americana that isn’t interested in romanticizing the white-trash south, ennobling its disenfranchised poor, or feeding into the folk-hero myths of Public Enemy outlaws of the 1930s.

Kate Barker says goodbye to the Ozarks and her ineffectual husband George (Alex Nicol).
In another example of foreshadowed casting, Winters here looks just like Lena Gogan,
 the mountain matriarch she will play seven years hence in Disney's Pete's Dragon (1977)

Before Bloody Mama is even 15 minutes in, there have been 2 rapes, male frontal nudity, implied incest, newsreel footage of Klansmen marching in Washington in protest of anti-lynching laws (Whaddaya know, MAGA ain’t new!), a man stomped to death, and hillbilly housewife Kate Barker taking off with her sons in a car stolen from the local sheriff and kissing her husband goodbye with the words, “You never did mount me proper. I guess your heart wasn’t in it.” And the hits keep on coming.

As envisioned by Corman and company, Ma Barker is a Bible-thumping, hymn-singing sociopath with a prudish streak when it comes to profanity (everyone else’s, anyway) and women’s emancipation (“Women was showing their bodies in public, smoking, doing God knows what else!”); yet thinks nothing of murder, kidnapping, and robbery so long as it secures her and her boys their stake in what she deems to be her proper chunk of the American Dream.

Mother Knows Best
Shunned as outlaws and outsiders, in a world seen as "them" vs. "us"
 Ma Barker makes her own rules when it comes to family 

A staunch believer in family-first loyalty and unquestioning obedience, Ma’s amorality, which extends to sleeping with her sons when the spirit moves her, brings about a kind of trickle-down depravity as her deplorable male offspring lay claim to a virtual smorgasbord of psychological disorders. Eldest boy Herman is psychotic given to blind, murderous rages; addlepated Lloyd is a drug addict; Fred is a sexual masochist who recruits his prison cellmate into the gang; and Arthur—seemingly the only member of the gang who can read and do math, and thus the brains of the outfit—shares his brothers' degeneracy (and women, on occasion) but is emotionally withdrawn to the point of shutdown.

When Lloyd tells a soon-to-be victim, “I’m not people, see? None of us Barkers is people,” he knows whereof he speaks.

Feeling a little down, Ma chooses her youngest son's lover to be her bedtime company

Newsreel footage and historical photos punctuating the crimes of the Barker gang make their social-climbing ascendance as Public Enemies look like an anarchic vision of the American success ethic. Meanwhile, Ma’s perverse insistence on keeping God and scripture at the forefront of their barbarism turns into a solid indictment of the role religious hypocrisy has always played in this country’s tradition of blindered self-mythologizing. 

Ma Barker and her motley gang are outlaws and outsiders, but if you’re looking for sympathetic misfits turned hardened criminals by a harsh world, you’ll have to look elsewhere. These Barkers are strictly dog-eat-dog.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

I’m a huge fan of Shelley Winters. Like Joan Crawford and Faye Dunaway, she’s an actress I find to be equally entertaining whether she’s bad or good. Happily, she’s good a great deal of the time. When I came to Bloody Mama (a movie I dearly wanted to see back in 1970, but saw for the first time this year) everything about it—the title, the subject, Corman, the American International thing, Winters’ late-career embracing of her tendency to go straight over the top—had me anticipating a deliriously campy evening of trash cinema. I was happily disappointed.

Pat Hingle as Sam Adams Pendlebury

On one level Bloody Mama is everything you’d expect from a Roger Corman film: a fast-paced, slightly loony meld of comedy, melodrama, and mayhem…the typical Corman pseudo-ineptitude served up with amble doses of sensationalized action, violence, and sleaze. Bloody Mama never comes close to giving Bonnie and Clyde anything to worry about (it doesn’t really even live up to its own tabloid title), but by its own modest merits, it succeeds in being a fresh, wholly satisfying and enjoyable no-holds-barred update of the classic era gangster flick. Solid storytelling on a budget, It’s arguably Corman’s best film.

Scatman Crothers as Moses

What I wasn’t expecting was for a movie called Bloody Mama to be so unironically good! The drama is compelling, the laughs (surprise of surprises) are of the intentional sort, the performances have dimension, and the film’s threadbare look works to its benefit. Shelley Winters' Ma Barker is pitch-perfect. And that includes the times she's pitching right over the fence. Is it a good performance? I'd say so. Good in the way an overstimulated movie like this needs. By turns funny, moving, and ultimately monstrous, I personally think she's better here than she is in The Poseidon Adventure. 

Diane Varsi, who appeared with Shelley Winters in Wild in the Streets (1968)
won an Oscar nomination for her film debut in Peyton Place (1957)

PERFORMANCES

An observation attributed to director Martin Ritt (Hud, Norma Rae) is “Directing is 80% casting.” In the case of Bloody Mama, I’d say it’s more like 99 and 44/100%. Without argument, Bloody Mama's outrageously distinguished cast is both its chief asset and primary recommendation. With the exceptions of Don Stroud and Diane Varsi, Method acting devotee Shelley Winters heads a cast made up almost entirely of members of The Actors Studio...veteran (Pat Hingle, who's a standout)...and novice alike. The performances are so compelling and detailed, the character-study side of Bloody Mama actually made the car chases and gunplay feel like a distraction.

In this, his second film, future superstar and multi-Oscar-winner Robert De Niro is impossible not to watch. Though a generous ensemble player, your eyes stay trained on him no matter who's at the center of a scene. It's no surprise that he's good, it's just amazing to see so much of his talent in evidence so early on.

Bloody Mama marks the film debut of actor Robert Walden (of TV's Lou Grant).
Clint Kimbrough (right) made his film debut playing another quiet, bookish character in Hot Spell (1957)

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

“I’m loud and I’m vulgar, and I wear the pants in the house because somebody’s got to, but I’m not a monster. I’m not!”   Martha in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Traditionally, it doesn't take much for a woman to be seen as a monster in films. Hell, in psycho-biddy films, she just has to be old. In Ma Barker you have a character who is indeed loud, vulgar, and wears the figurative pants...but comparatively speaking, those are her good points. Bloody Ma Barker is a monster, the genuine article. And unlike the romanticized subjects of so many of those Dust Bowl bandit films that came in the wake of Bonnie and Clyde, she's not anybody's idea of a heroine, anti or otherwise.

Kevin watches in horror as Ma Barker earns her bloody nickname 

Bloody Mama isn't a film suited to everybody's taste, but thanks to Roger Corman's stay-out-of-the-way direction, a smarter-than-it-needed-to-be screenplay, and as embodied by Shelley Winters' large as life and twice as natural performance; I'm persuaded to dub this fabricated incarnation of the '30s crime matriarch something of a fabulous monster for those willing to take a step through this 1970 looking glass.

Bloody Mama was released in Los Angeles in April of 1970. Earlier that year in January, public outcry met the unveiling of a billboard for the film on Sunset Blvd. The ad featured the tagline "The Family That Slays Together Stays Together".  With the Manson Family trial set for June that year, many considered the billboard to be in bad taste and eventually it was removed.

BONUS MATERIAL

"Bloody Mama" Clip 

In 1977 Euro-Caribbean singing group Boney M had a hit with "Ma Baker" a retelling of the Ma Barker legend to a disco beat. When asked why the name was changed to "Baker," lyricist Fred Jay stated it was simply because it sounded better.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2019

NEW YORK, NEW YORK 1977

It's an odd thing being a film enthusiast. One part of you regards film as an art form, worthy of all the aesthetic principles applied to fine art; the other makes peace with the fact that film is an entertainment industry "product" and just as likely the inspiration of tax shelters, hedge funds, and profit predictions. (I'm not naive to the realities of the movie industry, but I confess that I still find it a sobering experience watching the Academy Awards each year and hearing, instead of lofty speeches about their dedication to the higher principles of art, the gratified listing of professional associates like producers, agents, managers, and publicists.) 

It's for these reasons why, in this world full of directors more concerned with building an add-on to their Malibu beach homes than with building a legacy of work that has something to say about the human condition, I remain (sometimes blindly) faithful to and thankful for filmmakers like Martin Scorsese. Even when he falters, as I believe he does with New York, New York, he's still one of those directors who always appears to be trying to make films that matter.

Liza Minnelli as Francine Evans

Robert De Niro as Jimmy Doyle

I first saw New York, New York in San Francisco in 1977. Due to the success of Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese were extremely hot at the time, and San Francisco was all abuzz over the fact that, simultaneous to the release of New York, New York, Liza Minnelli was appearing at the Orpheum Theater in a pre-Broadway tryout of the Scorsese-directed musical, Shine It On (which became The Act by the time it reached Broadway). Minnelli had suffered a string of movie flops following 1972’s Cabaret, but the papers were full of gossip about her romance with Scorsese and predictions that New York, New York would return her to her former station as the queen of show biz.

Alas, despite high-running anticipations, New York, New York flopped rather spectacularly when it opened. The original version I saw on opening day was hastily re-edited within the week and a shorter version re-released to theaters, but to no great effect. The verdict was already in and the film pretty much declared D.O.A. by the critics.

DeNiro and Minnelli Make with the Goo Goo Eyes

The most extravagant film to date for the gritty Scorsese (the combined budgets of all his previous films didn't equal the $14-million spent here), New York, New York is a 1940s MGM backstage musical viewed through the dark prism of the '70s zeitgeist (individualism, commoditization of art, and feminism crop up amongst the nostalgia fetishism). Sweet-natured big band singer Francine Evans (Minnelli) falls for volatile saxophone player Jimmy Doyle (De Niro), and in the tradition of A Star is Born and Cover Girl, Francine’s professional ascendancy threatens De Niro’s ego and puts a strain on their romance.

Realistic Tensions on Stylized Sets

No expense is spared in giving the film the look and feel of those quaintly studio-bound romances of old, but Scorsese’s desire to contrast '70s naturalism with the stylized artificiality of '40s musicals doesn’t really gel, and the whole enterprise feels like an obscenely over-funded film school experiment.  

Without a doubt, Scorsese’s biggest and most fatal miscalculation is in mounting such a staggeringly sumptuous production and then neglecting to give us either characters to care about or a romance to root for (or, to be honest, much in the way of a story at all). What were the writers thinking in dreaming up De Niro’s Jimmy Doyle? Did Scorsese really think a guy this noxious (he's like a cross between Travis Bickle and Jake LaMotta) would make for an appropriate musical-comedy leading man? Even with the film structured as something of a dramedy, De Niro's lack of any kind of redeeming qualities leaves an emotional hole dead-center of this overstuffed opus. In addition, not only is De Niro’s character such a selfish, hot-headed, obnoxious bully that watching his scenes becomes an increasingly trying experience, but the level of passivity with which his abuse is met by Minnelli's character has the effect of souring our feelings toward her as well.

Robert De Niro: Star Quality? Yes. Charm? Not so much.

When veteran filmmakers lament the loss of the artistic freedoms that came with the "New Hollywood" of the '70s, one can't help but feel that a lot of the blame must fall at their own cocaine-dusted feet. Seventies darlings like Peter Bogdanovich and Michael Cimino provided the nails for their own coffins by misusing their success to cultivate costly, undisciplined vanity projects (At Long Last Love & Heaven's Gate, respectively), and Scorsese follows suit with New York, New York.

These directors, who were so resourceful with tiny budgets, all seemed to lose their minds when handed millions, prompting the studios and lawyers to ultimately step in, like stern governesses, and take back the keys to the candy store. Scorsese allows improvised scenes to drag on and on pointlessly, as if unable to ascertain when to cut; characters pop in and out with little information given as to their importance to the leads; and whole scenes look randomly assembled, able to be inserted and deleted with little effect to the plot. It's never a good sign when you can imagine a film being screened with its reels out of order, and it not making a whit of difference. I respect when a filmmaker tries to do something different, but creative self-indulgence on such a grand scale just feels needlessly wasteful.

Mary Kay PLace as Bernice Bennett

Barry Primus as Paul Wilson

Mary Kay Place (Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman) and Barry Primus (Puzzle of a Downfall Child) play peripheral characters whose significance to the plot varies significantly depending on which cut of the film you've seen.

 WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Given my criticisms, New York, New York might seem to be an odd choice to number among the films which inspire me. But I really do find something admirable in what Martin Scorsese attempted to do here, a feeling which has nothing to do with his inability to actually pull it off. It's a provocative idea to explore what a director known for his realist/naturalistic style could bring to a genre as grounded in artificiality as the classic Hollywood musical. To his credit, Scorsese doesn’t mock or cynically hold himself superior to the genre. He really appears to respect the dramatic and emotional potential of musicals and clearly has an affinity for their dream-factory allure. If anything, New York, New York makes a good argument for the unpopular theory that, in terms of professionalism and mastery of craft, contemporary directors can't hold a candle to even the most journeyman studio-contract directors of the past.

PERFORMANCES

This is the first love story I’ve ever seen that had the audience on its feet cheering when the lovers DON’T end up together! I’m really not equipped to judge Robert De Niro’s performance because the character he plays is so detestable I can’t tell if De Niro is simply miscast, or if he thinks his creepy stalker act is actually supposed to be charming (sad to say, but I've known many women -and men- who would willingly put up with such behavior if the guy looked like De Niro). What I can speak to is how terrific Liza Minnelli's performance is. I think it's her absolute finest post-Cabaret film work, and she is in the best voice of her career. Though ill-served by the script, she is exactly right and a perfect fit for what should have been the role of a lifetime and another Oscar nomination. After spending most of her career trying to distance herself from comparisons with her mother, Minnelli just goes all Garland on us here, and the results are fantastic. Any warmth and heart that the film has is chiefly due to her.

Minnelli's finest film moment: Singing the hell out of "The World Goes 'Round"

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

On par with how far afield this film goes emotionally, is how superbly the film works musically. Scorsese handles the musical sequences surprisingly well and displays a real knack for the ways in which music can be seamlessly integrated into a narrative. The score is chock full of great postwar standards, and the new songs by Kander & Ebb (Chicago) are among their best work. That the terrific title song failed to get an Oscar nod, and was otherwise largely ignored until covered by Frank Sinatra some two years later, attests to the level of public indifference New York, New York was met with on its release.

A great many subpar classic MGM musicals have been saved by spectacle. Unfortunately, New York, New York's many splashy musical numbers aren't enough to fully surmount the film's narrative shortcomings.

Diahnne Abbott (then Mrs. De Niro) appears as a singer in a Harlem nightclub

         

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Some people can forgive a film anything if there are lots of explosions or chase scenes. Me, I'm a sucker for a film that's beautiful to look at. Cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs (Easy Rider), costume designer Theadora Van Runkle (Bonnie & Clyde), and production designer Boris Leven (West Side Story) give New York, New York a period gloss that almost, just almost, makes up for the fact that, while all dressed up, the film ultimately has nowhere to go.

My Favorite Set: The Neon Nightclub

Obviously, everything I've written about New York, New York are the impressions I was left with after I saw the film. That's the fair bargain struck between the filmmaker and the movie-goer: let me have your attention for a couple of hours (or three) and you are free to take from this experience what you will, pro or con. That's straightforward and honest to me. I invest my time, they invest their ideas and inspiration. What pisses me off is when I've invested my time and it's nakedly apparent that the movie I'm watching is a product of pitch meetings, dealmaking, and ledger sheets.

Which is precisely why, flawed as it is, New York, New York still remains such a valuable piece of cinema to me. Love it or hate it, whether you think it's courageous or foolhardy, there's no getting around the fact that Scorsese was at least trying to do something interesting. Who's to say what part drugs and addiction played in giving the final film its hodgepodge feel (reports lean toward considerable); but I like that it's so obviously the work of someone vitally excited by filmmaking. The missteps are easier to take when there is some passion on display. I'll take a wrongheaded, artistically well-intentioned flop over a calculated, market-researched blockbuster any day.

THE AUTOGRAPH FILES
By the way, I was one of the many who went to see Ms. Minnelli at the Orpheum Theater that summer in 1977, and stood out by the stage door to get the photograph below autographed by both Scorsese (lower left) and Minnelli (w/smiley face). Considering all the pressures of the show, the movie, and everything else, you couldn't have met two nicer people.

Above: Larry Kert appeared in the "Happy Endings" number that was initially cut from the film and later restored. Got this autograph when he was appearing in a play in Los Angeles

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2011