A tribute to Scorsese's home town of New York City, the film stars Liza Minnelli and Robert De Niro as a pair of musicians and lovers.
On V-J Day in 1945, a massive celebration in a New York City nightclub is underway, music provided by the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra.
Francine, to get the audition back on track, begins to sing the old standard, "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me"; Jimmy joins in on his sax.
But there are problems — mainly, Jimmy's tendency to fight with his co-workers, overly dramatic behavior, and his increasingly violent arguments with Francine, who becomes pregnant with his child.
But Jimmy is not ready to be a father, or a good husband, and he abandons his wife, declining even to see his newborn son as he leaves the hospital.
Having just won the Palme d'Or, he arrogantly felt he could improve the script during filming, but his excesses led to mistakes like the opening V-J Day sequence being an hour long.
[2] Scorsese's cocaine addiction made matters worse, and according to Peter Biskind, the director was also taking lithium to control his anger.
[9] Robert De Niro studied the saxophone with Georgie Auld, a veteran of swing giants Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman's bands.
De Niro was so demanding of Auld's time that the musician felt like a "slave", and his wife worried the actor would be joining them in bed with the instrument.
Scorsese had spent $350,000 of the budget on filming a musical-within-a-musical called "Happy Endings" which depicts Francine Evans as a movie star.
[2] Fred Ebb and John Kander's initial submission for the theme song was so bad that Robert De Niro rejected it outright.
[15] Two years later, Frank Sinatra recorded a cover version for his triple album Trilogy: Past Present Future.
[22] Christopher Porterfield wrote in Time, "If this movie were a big-band arrangement, it would be a duet for a sax man and a girl singer, but with the soloists in a different key from the band.
"[25] In the Chicago Reader Dave Kehr concluded, "Scorsese created a very handsome and dynamic film, but the spectacular set pieces don't add up to much.
"[27] Time Out's Geoff Andrew enthused, "Scorsese's tribute/parody/critique of the MGM musical is a razor-sharp dissection of the conventions of both meeting-cute romances and rags-to-riches biopics.
[29] In Cinéaste, Leonard & Barbara Quart called the film "an interesting and at sometimes exciting failure..." They pointed out the self-conscious parallels with the work of Liza's mother in A Star Is Born and praised Scorsese's "stylized settings (gold tinsel snowfalls, claustrophobic reddish interiors, and spotlit, dream-like musical solos)" but felt they were "too calculated and without purpose".
His hard work backfires...The character of Jimmy Doyle is completely obscured by the spectacle of DeNiro attempting to come to grips with an impossibly one-note role.
"[31] The film has an overall critical score of 57% on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 49 reviews; the site's consensus explains, "Martin Scorsese's technical virtuosity and Liza Minelli's magnetic presence are on full display in New York, New York, although this ambitious musical's blend of swooning style and hard-bitten realism makes for a queasy mixture.