Scorcese's New York, New York: C or D?

Saw tonight, maybe fourth time in 37 years, in beautiful 35mm print with those soft Laszlo Kovacs images. I counted only two scenes shot outdoors that weren't brief interstitials.

Definitely Scorses's most 'artificial', studio-bound movie til Hugo (eccch). And def in his top 10, de Niro's top 10 performances too, and Liza is quite affecting in the dramatic scenes, and Judylike in the big numbers.

Also, Clarence Clemons on TRUMPET (looked like he was miming, not sure).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2UCfj8LCts

I like it a lot

Amerauteur is a hideous coinage btw, also Marty should do a Liza with a Z-style song about his surname

from the Reverse Shot Scorsesefest:

Like (Jimmy, Francine) ends up choosing music over marriage. Unlike him, she was forced to choose; his love was too commanding, too imperious, and too restrictive to let her flourish as a singer. Jimmy, on the other hand, could presumably have had creative freedom, or at least romantic happiness, like the radiant young couple he watched dancing silently under a streetlight on the night of V-J Day.

Why does he make himself choose? One possibility is that he is a stand-in for Scorsese, who, on top of his affair with Minnelli, was sliding at the time of the film’s production into a cocaine habit, recovering from the dissolution of his first marriage, and already feeling his second start coming apart at the seams. At one point, he was alleged to have kept over a hundred extras waiting while he stayed in his trailer on the phone with his therapist. Aspects of De Niro’s personal life surely made their way into the character, too. The pair once joked that they couldn’t finish the script until they knew how their current relationships—De Niro’s first wife Diahnne Abbott has a lengthy cameo in New York, New York as a singer at the fictional Harlem Club—would turn out. (In the end, perhaps not coincidentally, large chunks of Jimmy and Francine’s exchanges were improvised.)

Another possibility is that there is something in the very idea of marriage from which Jimmy recoils. Marriage, he realizes, is not a major chord—a total conflation of life and art—but a confession that some things in life are more important than art. What he chafes against is the knowledge that Francine, as his wife, has the right to make claims on him that take precedence over any his instrument might make. For Jimmy, who thinks and speaks in a language of absolutes, this is impossible. If love and art can’t be brought into harmony with each other, he decides, then one has to be eliminated; a choice has to be made. It’s worth wondering, since the protagonists of certain musicals seem to share Jimmy’s dream of establishing this perfect balance, whether the musical, too, is somewhat allergic to the idea of marriage as a sustained habit of life rather than as a grand romantic finale. What would An American in Paris have looked like if Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron had been married midway through the movie, instead of—implicitly, symbolically—at the end?

http://reverseshot.com/symposiums/entry/1862/newyork_newyork