The Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
SWINGING IN THE RAIN OOOOO OOOOOOOOO THE SCREEN With Liza Minnelli playing straight man to Robert De Niro, New York, New York is certainly funny enough to be a comedy. With De Niro playing side...
...He has made a lot of old music come alive by making it part of the lives of his characters...
...On the contrary, the music is being relegated to the dramatic needs of the film...
...New York, New York has enough momentum to keep going on its own terms no matter what...
...With De Niro playing side man, on saxophone, for Ms...
...It's to provide an occasion for a reprise of an earlier scene and thereby make us feel the futility of Jimmy's relationship with his wife Francine (Mirmdli) - - t o make us see how that relationship is, literally, doomed to repeat itself...
...With her it is not so much the life as what it meant that has been so very unclear...
...All the effort to impart emotion is saved for the songs and concentrated in them, which is why the plots of musicals often seem so weak...
...Unable to bear the band's current success with its club date, Jimmy leaves Francine at their table and goes into an alcove where the bar is to get drunk...
...As sweet as she sings, that's how sweet she is," her manager tells a record producer, and it's true...
...Martin Scorsese is too compulsively a movie director for it to have been anything else...
...Moreover as Elizabeth Hardwick suggests from the front page of the N.Y...
...Hers was a mind at home with Greek philosophy and mathematics as well as Communist Party reversals and Hiflerian realpolitik...
...But this time she's the one who gets drunk, belting down every sticky grenadine concoction on the menu to drown her misery while a black singer does Lena Horne's old number, "Honeysuckle Rose...
...While the recording studio seems at first just another episode, the song she sings there is really a consequence of all that has gone before in the film...
...If Jimmy were brandishing a chair at Francine, we wouldn't care whether it were a Bauhaus design or Chippendale, elegant or clumsy, etc...
...It says something unique to this film alone, something the film itself makes immediate and important to us...
...Even if he had wanted to, he couldn't have subordinated his own performanee to that of his stars or the music, nor could he have made the sort of musical that might as well have been played on a stage...
...It's right in style that the singer on Jimmy's gig should be doing "Honeysuckle Rose," while Francine downs all those sugar-syrup cocktails, for what she's really getting drunk on, in the face of yet another rejection by Jimmy, is her own sweetness...
...But Scorsese goes about making his musical the other way round...
...Contradictory views, though of course all are correct...
...The reason for the scene, however, is not to provide an occasion for the music in it...
...In a musical, as the term itself specifies, the music takes precedence...
...In the reprise of this scene at the club in Harlem, although the gig is Jimmy's, the problem is still someone else's success~ his wife's, this time...
...A band singer at the end of the swing era, she is, like her music, sweet...
...He has kicked off the set with his rendition of a tune he and she wrote together...
...Avoiding the divisions would be dishonest, understating the polarities would be misleading...
...It is a continuous, long take, and a performance in the true sense of the word...
...While Scorsese begins the number like every other in the film, without any special staging, he gradually alters the lighting until Francine stands alone in a key light the way she might in a conventional stage or screen musical...
...In fact, the incompatibility of Jimmy and Francine is prefigured in the film as a whole by the incompatibility of swing and he-bop...
...Hers was a body at home with ascetic detachment and discipline as well as assemblyline engagement with chaos...
...unclear and troubling enough to have provoked over the quarter century after her death a discussion characterized by extraordinary claims and extraordinary denials, by inaccuracy, hagiography, violence, inappropriateness, and outright nonsense...
...She has come up to the club to discuss a record contract she's being offered, which again puts him in flight from their table into an alcove off on the side of the room...
...Where his idea was disruption, hers is reconciliation...
...Moviemaking is not here being made a showcase for a musical number, the way it ordinarily is in a musical...
...BOOKS i Simone Well: A Life SIMONE PETREMENT Pantheon, $15 Simone Weil was born in Paris in 1909 and died in Grosvenor Sanatorium just across the English ChannelwAshford, Kent--in 1943...
...It is there to be expressive of them, and therefore it gains a power it would not otherwise have...
...He takes it out on her, and this puts an intolerable strain on their marriage...
...The rightness of Jimmy's hem solo is finally just the way it epitomizes his personality...
...In fact, the best thing about his use of music is that he often makes it seem almost incidental...
...The song is "But the World Goes 'Round," one of the four which John Kander and Fred Webb, composers of Cabaret, have done for this film, and it's sung by Francine at a recording studio...
...If in France today there are those who regard Simone Well as "Sainte $imone" it is worth recalling that A LIFE PAID UP GEORGE ABBOTT WHITE De Gaulle while in London during WWII pronounced her "mad" and likely never read the manuscript of her prophetic Need /or Roots...
...Friends and foes may persist in this spectacle...
...headlines her as THE RED VIRGIN...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, .JR...
...This is the potential Minnelli's performance of the song lives up to...
...Of course...
...Even this biography's jacket must make us aware that "she was as illuminating in her thought and in her quest for spiritual purity as she was unrelenting in her need for martyrdom...
...In the earlier scene Jimmy and Francine go to another club, downtown, to hear a band whose leadership he lost when she had to quit as its singer because she was pregnant...
...Consider the way he uses music in one scene late in the film...
...Two scenes after the one in the Harlem club there is a number that is the first really typical of a movie musical...
...Simone Petrement, however, has had the good 22 July 1977:468...
...The Times Literary" Supplement has given each of her posthumous collections of essays, journals, and journal fragments respectful attention, yet Cambridge University's George Steiner regards her as "culty" and "perverse...
...But he immediately jumps into a solo that precludes any duet between them and virtually blows her off the bandstand and out of the club...
...It is, for one thing, the first tune that has been Commonweal: 467 done all the way through without interruption...
...But in another way, of course, $corsese has served the music best by serving his own art as filmmaker...
...One feminist journal Soundings is sensitive to her pivotal essay, "The Iliad, or, The Poem of Force," while Ms...
...A be-bop musician who's still a bit ahead of his time, he gets hot under the collar at the fact that the public isn't ready for him yet...
...In one way, the music functions here with almost the same indifference...
...Reprinting her penetrating essay "Factory Work" in Politics magazine immediately after that war, Dwight Macdonald also felt it necessary to editorialize in a postscript, "the remedies suggested appear as superficial as the evils previously analyzed are profound...
...Then when the next set begins, he goes up on the bandstand, picks a fist fight with the band's new leader, and gets bounced out of the club...
...At this point he has revamped the musical sufficiently that he can trust such show-stoppers not to stop the show...
...Music is only a means in his film, not an endmand only one means among many at that...
...Of course, with such sharp divisions and such striking polarities how could it be otherwise...
...Yet even here, what gives the song its wallop, more than any special treatment it get.~, is the place it has in Francine's story...
...The scene is set in a club in Harlem, the only place where saxophonist Jimmy Doyle (De Niro) can find an audience hip enough to dig him...
...By now Scorsese can afford to indulge himself, and after Minnelli does this spectacular song, he works in a couple of full-scale production numbers...
...Indeed, Jimmy's fellow musicians, unaware of what is going on with Francine, nod admiringly at the unexpected power of the solo...
...She interprets this as a friendly gesture and is coming up to take a bow or perhaps even sing...
...Yet it's really neither a musical nor a comedy, It's a movie...
...Times Book Review, the narrative of a personality in such contradiction ("breaking intensity") can only result in a certain soft confusion...
...Simone Weil was also ridiculous, abrasive, extreme...
...Fortunately for Simone Well and for those who wish to learn a measure of what she struggled so long and so hard to learn, her second biographer refuses to accept this contemporary American, academic intellectual, tough-minded liberal, pseudo-psychoanalytic, coolly objective, notion of biography-as-balanced-contradictions...
...The characters in this musical are larger than the music...
...When you notice how the music is used in them, you realize how purely directorial these two club scenes are...
...Scorsese has used it for his own purposes as surely as another director might use a prop, having the actor pick up whatever object came to hand in order to menace his wife with it...
...We have always been clear about those dates and reasonably clear about many others in her brief, searching, painful life...
...Minnelli's singing--there are twentyfour oldies and four original numbers in the film, many sung by her--it's also musical enough to be a musical...
...When Jimmy's next set begins, it is Francine who now staggers woozily up to the bandstand, though her motives are the opposite of what hi8 were earlier...
...It becomes, especially in Jimmy's angry horn solo, a cinematic element, a way to symbolize emotions which the music by itself doesn't contain...
...Hers was a spirit at home with Benedictine plainsong as well as Baptist spirituals...
...And the bulk of it, when spoken aloud or actually written, has come from those Simone Weil respected least and mistrusted most, those she endlessly confronted and made uncomfortable: middle-class academics and intellectuals, especially the ones seeking or justifying power...
...The trouble is that he's like his music too: hot...
...regrettably, the necessary balancing of biography must "obscure" and "blur" the exemplary (but hopelessly complicated and essentially inaccessible) life...
...But we take little notice of the music as music...
Vol. 104 • July 1977 • No. 15
