New York, New York

Did You Know?

• The film was adapted into a stage musical in Brazil, premiering on April 14, 2011, in Teatro Bradesco in São Paulo, with direction by José Possi Neto.
• A stage musical adaptation opened on Broadway on April 26, 2023, at the St. James Theater, but closed on July 30, 2023 due to poor reviews and high production costs.
• The 1981 re-release restored a twelve-minute musical-within-a-musical sequence called 'Happy Endings', choreographed by Ron Field.

Plot

On V-J Day in 1945, a New York nightclub celebration features the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. The next morning they share a cab, and Francine reluctantly accompanies Jimmy to an audition. Impressed, the owner hires them as a traveling boy–girl act. Their relationship deepens into obsession and love, but Jimmy's violent arguments with Francine escalate.

Jimmy rushes her to the hospital, where she delivers a boy, but he abandons his wife and newborn son. Years later, Francine records "But the World Goes Round", which becomes a hit and launches her career. Both find success: Jimmy as a jazz musician and club owner, Francine as a singer and film actress. Jimmy records a self-written saxophone piece that tops the jazz charts, and Francine cements her stardom singing "New York, New York" at the same nightclub where they met.

After the show, Jimmy calls to suggest dinner. Francine is tempted but changes her mind, and Jimmy, waiting on the sidewalk, realizes he has been stood up.

Production

Irwin Winkler purchased the screenplay before Martin Scorsese began filming Taxi Driver. Winkler and Robert Chartoff had a four-year contract with United Artists to release at least 12 films, and New York, New York was the first produced under that deal. Scorsese was announced as director in April 1975 with a $3.5 million budget. Lynn Stalmaster served as casting director.

Filming began on June 14, 1976. Scorsese aimed to combine the movie musical of his parents' generation with a documentary style, hoping the juxtaposition would highlight continuity in human relationships. Actors improvised dialogue on massive, unrealistic sets. Having recently won the Palme d'Or, Scorsese believed he could improve the script during filming, but his excesses led to mistakes, including an overly long opening V-J Day sequence.

The initial cut ran four and a half hours. Scorsese's cocaine addiction worsened the process; he was also taking lithium to control anger. He later said he was too drugged to resolve the structure and stopped press interviews a day early because he ran out of cocaine. He called it a miracle the film made sense.

Scorsese had an affair with Liza Minnelli during filming; his second wife Julia Cameron often visited the set. The improvisation strained Minnelli, who was unaccustomed to method acting. Robert De Niro studied saxophone with Georgie Auld, who also played bandleader Frankie Hart. Auld recorded the saxophone parts while De Niro mimed; Auld stood off-camera and signaled if De Niro made fingering or breathing mistakes.

Music

Fred Ebb and John Kander's first try at the theme song for the film was so bad that Robert De Niro turned it down. That version opened with the line "They always say it's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live here" and had an entirely different tune. The final "Theme from New York, New York" starts with one of Kander's signature vamps, a technique borrowed from ragtime where the melody sits under a repeated note. The soundtrack single only reached number 104 on the Billboard chart.

Two years later, Frank Sinatra covered it for his triple album Trilogy: Past Present Future. His version hit number 32 on the Billboard Hot 100 on June 14, 1980, becoming his last Top 40 hit. Both Sinatra's and Liza Minnelli's renditions are now strongly tied to Manhattan. Sinatra sang it at nearly every concert until he retired in 1995, and Minnelli still performs it regularly.

The film's soundtrack is a double LP, produced, conducted, and arranged by Ralph Burns. The song "Happy Endings" was cut from the movie but had been recorded. Musicians on the album include clarinetist Abe Most, saxophonists Bob Tricarico and Jerome Richardson, trombonists Chauncy Welsh and Jim Cleveland, trumpeters Conte Condoli, Snooky Young, and Warren Luening, pianist Russ Freeman, bassist Jim Hughart, drummers Bill LaVorgna and Sol Gubin, and engineer John Neal.

Reception

The film underperformed at the box office, grossing $16.4 million against a $9 million budget. The disappointment depressed Scorsese and worsened his drug addiction. United Artists had structured the film's box office as a bulwark against the expected flop of Rocky, but Rocky ended up covering the film's losses. Scorsese later explained he intended the film as an homage to Classical Hollywood musicals, breaking from his gritty realism with deliberately artificial sets and storyline, acknowledging the experiment did not please everyone.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 58% critical score with a mean of 6.8 out of 10, based on 53 reviews; the site's consensus calls it a queasy mixture of swooning style and hard-bitten realism. Christopher Porterfield of Time wrote that the film would be a duet with soloists in a different key from the band. Vincent Canby of The New York Times questioned why Scorsese would give a film buff's essay on a pop-film form never of first freshness. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said the film never pulls together into a coherent whole but offers a good time.

Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader concluded the spectacular set pieces don't add up to much. Variety praised Minnelli's performance of the title song as a wowser. Time Out's Geoff Andrew called the film a razor-sharp dissection of meeting-cute romances and rags-to-riches biopics. Gene Shalit said the argument between Francine and Jimmy in the parked car was the most realistic he had ever seen on film.