[In addition to being a highly regarded film critic, Gilliatt was an acclaimed novelist, short story writer and screen-writer, best known perhaps for the Academy Award-nominated screenplay Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971). In the following excerpt from a review of New York, New York, she criticizes Scorsese for unsuccessfully remaking a style—the Hollywood musical of the 1940s—which was not amenable to the kind of serious story he wished to tell.]

"New York, New York." Of course, of course. But no, not the famous Bernstein-Comden-Green number from On the Town but another song, from a Martin Scorsese musical film that has the cheek to pilfer the name. To make a movie called New York, New York with a "New York" number that isn't the one you go into the cinema humming is rather like writing a children's book called Alice in Wonderland which is about another Alice. The producers are Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, one of whom is beloved by me for having said on the phone from Hollywood that So-and-So's choreography was just a pistache of everything he had ever done before. This musical is a pistache if ever there was one. I suppose it could courteously be said to be an hommage to all those musical films of the forties and fifties in which a boy and a girl fell in love, found that, as the ads say, "a love story is like a song … beautiful while it lasts," and then got driven apart by their talent.

The film opens on V-J Day in Times Square, with one of the few shots of the city we're going to get. (A minor idiocy of New York, New York is that it nearly all happens not in New York but on Hollywood back lots and in crowded night clubs that might be anywhere and in band coaches on the road.) Liza Minnelli is a struggling singer, wearing a hat like a maddened gardenia petal pushed forward onto her forehead. Robert De Niro, an equally struggling tenor saxophonist, joins the small-time band of which she is already a member. They fall in love. Well, not in love. De Niro says, "I mean, I didn't say I love you. I like you, I dig you." The film has much overlapping conversation, so as to seem natural, and many "you know"s, for the same reason, used like the commas of slow letter writers resting their pens in mid-sentence to think what to say next. De Niro—Jimmy Doyle—whips off Miss Minnelli—Francine—to be married in what seems to be a nightdress under an overcoat, breaking the glass of the front door of the local justice of the peace. Later, she faints and explains that she is going to have a baby. He doesn't want this baby, he says to her, in a rage. Music is what he cares about. We're told that he blows a barrelful of sax, and that he is keen on major chords. Francine writes him a pacifying song called "New York, New York," which has the repeated "New York" in the lyric. Decca Records grows interested in her, and a Decca highup has a meeting with Francine, accompanied by Jimmy. He squints with jealousy and becomes involved in a night-club brawl, and in the next shot the back seat of a car is loaded with flowers. You wonder if she's had a miscarriage, or maybe the baby, but it's just a checkup. So then there's "Honeysuckle Rose" sung by a girl with a flower behind her ear, aping Billie Holiday—many a piece of faked nostalgia here—and then there's the baby, a boy, whom Jimmy refuses to see. And then Francine becomes a tremendous star, with the child, now fourish, allowed to sleep in the recording studio while Mummy sings, valiantly going her own way. Daddy comes to hear her in a stage performance doing a shameless copy of Miss Minnelli's mother, Judy Garland, and edges his way into Francine's crowded dressing room after she has sighted him in the audience and sung a song by "a friend of mine who is a great believer in major chords." And then after he has rung from the stage door she says she'll meet him downstairs. And then she slips away, lonely in her fur coat, leaving him to push off miserably on the wet street. The last shot is of the tip of his umbrella on the sidewalk and his poor damp shoes.

Well. Martin Scorsese has made some very fine pictures—especially Mean Streets—but this film commits a lot of blunders. There is the initial plagiarism of a title and an era, which I suppose could be excused by the makers as a bow to an age. There is the facetiousness of the dialogue (written by Earl Mac Rauch and Mardik Martin, but much of it improvised, which was a mistake), and there is the ersatz nourishment that the story offers film-goers homesick for the movies of thirty years ago. There is the silliness of the movie's plangency: hard to feel soupy about a talented couple giving up their love because of the stardust in their eyes. Francine has such a colossal natural entertainment personality that one doesn't believe she has to struggle a great deal, so the Hollywood chestnut about ruthlessness being necessary to show-biz success doesn't hold good, and there's also not much tragedy about an ending in which two performers, both on their way to glory, choose to break up. The best thing about the film is De Niro's firm, rapid performance. He is a wonderful actor. As a forties sax player finding his way into the fifties and bebop, he convinces the movie audience of a sort of desperation underpinning his talent. The essential weakness of the film is the lack of any apparent sense of character given to the actors by Scorsese, which probably came about because he has undertaken what amounts to a remake of a style that didn't hold much feeling in the first place. Mean Streets was about interesting matters—the glamour to the Puritan soul of sin, a glamour that was slowly burned off by the blowtorch of Scorsese's own Catholic and more fanatic feelings of dingy guilt—but New York, New York is fatally knowing about its secondhand mode, and finds glamour to the end in the paltry hopes and punishments of its mechanical story.