Saturday, April 09, 2005

Andrew Sarris

“…. Scorsese's movie [is] … mostly highlights with very few transitions. I don't mean just musical highlights, mind you, but behavioral highlights as well. This is the link I sense between Scorsese and Bertolucci: neither director has any cinematic small talk, neither director can reduce the emotional energy in one scene to increase the impact of the next.

“Scorsese's sensational opening big-band-on-V-J Day scene is a case in point…. [Doyle and Francine] don't meet "cute" like musical leads are wont to do, they meet nasty. In her period WAC uniform, piled-up hairdo and frou-frou makeup, Liza comes on like one of the Andrew Sisters, but with real-life suspiciousness, not regular gal playfulness…. The whole point of the scene seems to be for Francine to keep saying no without Doyle ever really saying please, but it is never made clear why these two abrasive people ever think they will find happiness together.

“Of course, they are both musicians in a movie musical and their union is preordained by backstage poetics, but the mysterious tensions between them persist. They never make any real progress as two human beings getting to know each other. Every scene builds from emotional ground zero, and heats up to a new frenzy. Halfway through the picture everyone seems to be paralyzed [?] by a fear of banality. Motives are mumbled, motivations are muddled. One cannot criticize the scenes themselves. De Niro is consistently brilliant, and Liza has developed a distinctive personality apart from memories of her mother….”

Andrew Sarris
Village Voice, July 4, 1977

[Note : my copy of Sarris is incomplete]

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