If there is one central paradox to Martin Scorsese's movies, it must be their knack for harnessing a single-minded intensity of purpose to an instinct for charging off in a variety of directions. Such contradictory energy is also what makes his protagonists run; and on his home ground, in a Little Italy suffused with the pain of ruling passions running up blind alleys in Mean Streets, Scorsese is the peerless spokesman for a world where hell-raising is the only escape from some hell-bent obsession of temperament or ambition.

But, as indicated by the hesitant sketch of Who's That Knocking at My Door and the sterile steel trap of Taxi Driver—the before and after of Mean Streets—Scorsese may be a director with only one 'personal' movie to make and, on the other hand, too much talent and too little control to play the Hollywood genre game….

With New York, New York … Scorsese has, if anything, taken on a slice of Hollywood—the showbiz musical—even more insulated by tradition and upholstery, and has turned out a craftier pastiche and something quite brilliant in the way of recreation…. Scorsese has made over a Hollywood staple in a wholly original way, not so much adapting the musical as invading it like some long-abandoned relic, turning many of its salient features inside out and generally confounding audience expectations with every second scene.

In story and character, New York, New York is an efficient blend of old-style Hollywood and street-smart Scorsese….

Situated in fantasy, Jimmy Doyle … becomes uniquely blessed among Scorsese heroes—he is allowed to achieve his ambition, the fulfilment of what he calls the 'major chord', when you have everything in life that you want. But Scorsese plays the figure not as fantasy but as a character streaked by the same self-destructive fanaticism, unwavering drive and crippling ambivalence as any of his street punks on the make—and compresses the psychology of the character not into the predictable narrative of breakdown and break-up, but most tightly into the scenes where one most expects relaxation, i.e. the musical numbers. There is, for the first two-thirds of the film, very little sense of 'performance' about these numbers and considerable emphasis on the emotional tensions they submerge, diffuse or expose….

It is the narrative sections between [the] numbers, handled somewhat elliptically and often as simple montage, that now have the quality of interludes, of 'shticks' for playing out variations on themes established elsewhere….

In similar spirit, the pastiches of other musicals never acquire their expected weight, but serve simply to indicate where Scorsese has situated his film in relation to the musical tradition. If the overall theme has to do with the disappearance of the Big Band sound of the 40s and the emergence of 50s 'bebop', then Scorsese seems to be indicating that even more, for the 70s, the musicals of the 40s and 50s are gone beyond recall. (p. 252)

With its finale, New York, New York comes slam up to date, in spirit at least, when the quality of performance comes flooding back in Francine's rendition of the title number, and the film gives birth, as it were, to the style of grandstanding, biographical, star-is-made musical…. The passing of the old-fashioned, communal, let's-put-on-a-show type of musical … in favour of such individualistic celebrations is most cynically indicated, perhaps, in a remark by Jimmy, when he returns to playing in Harlem jazz clubs and is asked why he had slipped from sight for so long, and he replies that he had just been playing with bad musicians.

Scorsese delivers all this, both celebration and critique, in fine, airy style—his camera frequently serving the function of the bouncing ball that used to appear with on-screen song lyrics, indicating exactly where the emphasis should go. Crane shots float breezily above the big bands performing at the opening victory ball, while the scattered, broken scenes of Jimmy and Francine in rehearsal and on stage are filmed with a close-up intensity. Most rewardingly, the film seems to have effected a kind of opening-out—allowing Scorsese to tackle 'given' material more experimentally than in, and to pursue characteristic extremes of emotion without the over determined mechanisms of Taxi Driver. (pp. 252-53)