New York, New York

A movie that I had on my old DVR back at the old place before I moved was New York, New York. I was disappointed in not getting around to watching it before having to switch DVRs, so the next time TCM showed it, I made a special point to record it to be able to do a post on it. It's getting another airing on TCM, tonight at 8:00 PM, so now I've watched it to be able to do that review.

The movie opens up on V-J Day in New York City, or at least a stylized rendition of New York as conceived on a studio backlot since the whole movie is very stylized. Someone is throwing a military uniform out of a window, and later we see a man walk out of that building in an outfit reminiscent of a Hawaiian shirt, although they didn't call it that back in the day, I don't think (and the pattern isn't expressly Hawaiian). That man is Jimmy Doyle (Robert DeNiro), and he goes to the USO club where he's set to meet one of his friends. At the club, he sees Francine Evans (Liza Minnelli), who entertains the soldiers going through the club and also wants to be a singer. Jimmy, thinking he's a smooth operator, keeps trying to chat up Francine, although she keeps turning him down, at least until Jimmy's friend, who's found a date here, tries to set Jimmy up his date's friend, who turns out to be Francine, of course.

At Jimmy's hotel, the manager is pissed, because Jimmy turns out to be a smooth operator in dealing with hotel management, not only in trying to pick up women. Jimmy has run up a large tab that he has no intention of paying, and no ability to pay either. Surprisingly, this plot strand doesn't really get explored over the course of the movie. Instead, Jimmy and Francine wind up together the following morning again. Jimmy is a saxophonist who has an audition at a club out in Brooklyn. Unfortunately, he's been doing arrangements that are decidedly not what the club owners of the day want. Francine, hoping to get work as a singer, decides to have Jimmy play a standard to which she can sing along. The club manager is impressed and offers her a job -- but only as part of a double act with Frankie.

This is a problem, since Francine still doesn't really like Jimmy. But, as is the nature of a movie like this, you might guess that they fall in love. That does in fact happen. Not only that, but Jimmy gets his own band with Francine as a singer, and they go out on the road together. However, things hit a snag when, at some point after their marriage, Francine gets pregnant. A pregnant Francine could probably still sing in a studio and cut a record, but traveling with a band is a problem. And Jimmy is none too happy with his wife's pregnancy, even though he should have known this was a consequence of having sex with her. When the baby comes, Jimmy doesn't want to see the kid, and Francine eventually leaves him.

Jimmy stays behind in New York, opens a club of his own, and eventually records the standard "New York, New York", which was actually written for this movie and not a song of the early 1950s. Francine, for her part, has gone out to Hollywood and made it big there, doing the sort of movie musical that was soon to go out of style. When she returns to New York, she and Jimmy eventually meet again. But will they be able to reconcile?

New York, New York was not a success on its original release back in 1977, and frankly it's easy to see why. One big reason is that Robert De Niro is playing a character for whom the audience is supposed to have sympathy, but he's such a jerk to everybody around him that it's difficult to find that sympathy. Secondly, there's the production design of the movie. While watching New York, New York, I found myself thinking of the movie Pennies from Heaven, which was also set several decades in the past but has a look of being a way too antiseptic version of that past. Liza Minnelli looks way too like a product of the 1970s, and everything looks rather off. Maybe that look of artificiality was deliberate, but I don't think it works.

Perhaps the biggest issue is with the movie's running time. Supposedly, the original cut of the movie ran to over four hours, forcing a lot of edits. The version that got released to theaters ran a bit over two and a half hours, which is still too long. On a re-release, a scene depicting Francine's big number in her Hollywood hit was added back in, bringing the movie to a bit over 160 minutes. Frankly, New York, New York is the sort of thing that should have come in under two hours.

The one thing the movie will always be remembered for, however, is that title song, which Frank Sinatra would also sing and turn into a standard. That is not enough, though, to make New York, New York a good movie.

The Sterile Cuckoo

A trope of romantic movies for decades has been the free-spirited woman meeting the uptight man and the two falling in love. Back in the 1930s, it was screwball comedies, but in later years the women didn't necessarily have to be heiresses, or rich at all. And you could get darker movies too, as I recently saw when I watched The Sterile Cuckoo.

The movie opens with Pookie Adams (Liza Minnelli) sitting at a bus stop with her father to get on a bus to go to her college somewhere in central New York. Already on that bus, and also going off to college, is Jerry Payne (Wendell Burton), although the two go to different colleges a few miles away. Pookie sees Jerry and, despite never having met him, decides she's going to pursue him romantically the way that Katharine Hepburn goes after Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby. She's not going to take no for an answer, and gets one of the other passengers to change seats by lying that she and Jerry are brother and sister who are on ther way back from their grandmother's funeral!

Now, such things like that ought to set off red flags and blaring alarm sirens for Jerry. But he's captive on a bus where he can't really get away from Pookie, who isn't going to take no for an answer anyway. That, and Jerry is likely beginning to think with his little head instead of his big one. So when Pookie continues to contact him at school after he gets off the bus, he eventually gives in and decides to see her again.

The two start arranging trysts at various places in and around central New York, the movie having been largely filmed on location. And, they even get undressed and have sex, because sex has been on both of their minds, what with their being young and full of hormones. Jerry, however, starts to have some nagging doubts in his mind. How is he going to break the news to his parents? What if they don't like Pookie? The fact that later in the movie, he's told how his grades are suffering and it's going to require him to stay on over spring break, gives him further doubts.

But Pookie is determined, clingy, and manipulative. So she announces sometime between about Thanksgiving and Christmas break that she thinks she's missed her period and must be pregnant as a result. That's a serious thing, especially 50 years ago when there were much stronger stigmas surrounding both abortion and out of wedlock childbirth. But after Christmas, Pookie simply announces that she's no longer pregnant. And when Jerry asks what exactly happened -- was it a false alarm; did she have a miscarriage; and did she see a doctor -- Pookie simply won't answer those questions. Talk about your red flags!

Following a party where Pookie gets so drunk she embarrasses herself, Jerry, and his roommate Charlie (Tim McIntire), Jerry finally gets the gumption to suggest that perhaps the two of them should take a little time to be alone instead of together. And Pookie responds by simply dropping out of life all together! Why would anybody want to see her if she ever showed her face again?

The huge issue I had with The Sterile Cuckoo is how Pookie is just such a nasty, dislikeable character, but one the script argues we're supposed to look at as romantically kooky. We're supposed to root for these characters to wind up together in the last reel, instead of hoping that Jerry will learn from Bette Davis in Old Acquaintance and literally shake some sense into Pookie like Bette did to Miriam Hopkins. No! This woman has mentally unstable written all over her, and throws up one red flag after the other!

Liza Minnelli got an Oscar nomination, and to be fair to her, her performance is good -- it's just the script that's an absolute mess. The location shooting is pretty, but a lot of the camerawork feels to me like it's stuck in 1960s techniques (although I don't recall any ridiculous zooms of the sort that became a thing in the 1960s).

If you're OK with the sort of character Pookie is being whitewashed, then you'll probably enjoy The Sterile Cuckoo. If, like me, you're not, then you've been warned.

Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon

TCM had a spotlight on "Body Images in Film" a couple of months ago, which gave me the chance to watch another new-to-me movie, Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon. I recently got around to watching it.

Liza Minnelli plays Junie Moon, who at the start of the movie is in the hospital, having suffered burns on an arm and one side of her face, which have required quite a few skin grafts. Eventually we learn, in flashback, that Junie liked to go out with a bunch of different men, and one of them raped her in a graveyard and deliberately poured battery acid all over her face and arm. But right now, she's getting to the point that there's not much more the doctors can do for her, so she's about to be discharged from the hospital.

During her time in the hospital, she's made a couple of friends. Warren (Robert Moore) is a gay man in a wheelchair, having been paralyzed from the waist down in an accident. Arthur (Ken Howard) has some sort of epilepsy-like disease that results in seizures and a lot of people thinking he's intellectually challenged. Indeed, his parents put him in a state-run institution that was torture for him, and to an extent he was never really able to grow up mentally.

Warren is in some ways a very forward man, in contrast to the introversion of Junie post-rape and especially Arthur. Warren has a plan that he's going to get the three of them on welfare and find them a place to live where the misfits can live together. Junie is the first of the three to get out, and she finds a cottage in nearby Manchester, MA. She's even able to convince the house's owner, Miss Gregory (Kay Thompson) to let the three of them rent it.

Unfortunately, the three of them aren't going to get the chance to live happily ever after. They've got a really nosy neighbor in Mr. Wyner, as well as still having health issues and the need to get a job. You'd think Junie might be able to get something not customer-facing; likewise Warren could do desk work. But it's Arthur who goes looking for work, eventually finding it with bachelor Mario (James Coco), who runs the local fish market. But Wyner tries to sabotage that.

Mario begins to have sympathy for the oddball household, even offering to help them take a vacation, although it's Warren who scams the hoity-toity beach resort out of a free weekend stay. While there, Arthur begins to realize he's falling in love with Junie although she's not so ready; Warren falls in love with one of the bellboy-types (Fred Williamson) whose job it is to make the guests happy.

Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon is an odd little movie, and it's easy to see why it wasn't commercially successful. And indeed, sometimes the movie is too quirky for its own good. It's the sort of movie that you have to be willing to stick with, and by the end you might find out that it's better than the criticism would have led you to believe.