On the day that excessive ambition becomes a marker for success, NEW YORK, NEW YORK will be rediscovered as a masterpiece. The film fails on many levels — on most levels really — but it is not for lack of trying. It is for trying too hard.

Scorsese claims he wanted to pay homage to the great Technicolor musicals. He also wanted to capture the moral ambiguities of film noir. He wanted to experiment with improvisation acting. He wanted to portray the impossibilities of love between two competing artists, and even more generally, between all men and women. In each count, Scorsese unquestionably succeeds. Yet the final result, while containing all of these elements, bears no narrative or thematic coherence, and has little of its forbearers’ emotional resonance. But with such disparate interests contained in a movie almost twice as long as it should be, how could it?

Most of the best material is contained in the lengthy scene that introduces the setting and characters (not coincidentally, it is also the only scene that was not heavily improvised according to Scorsese). De Niro, wearing a Hawaiian shirt laden with New York imagery, plays Jimmy Doyle, a musician trying to get laid on V-J Day. Liza Minnelli's Francine is a USO worker who resists Jimmy's cheesy pick up lines. The sequence contains both a virtuoso use of cinematography — where the clever use of costume, a crane, and framing beautifully introduce Jimmy Doyle as an outsider even in a crowd — and sharp dialogue worth of the screwball greats. When Jimmy finally gets the hint from Francine he says, "I'll take a rain check. Maybe next war." "She replies, "What makes you think you'll win the next one?"

From there the film is a lengthy, sometimes tedious, sometimes fascinating experiment. It is not boring but it is, in most critical ways, a failure. It has the visual tropes of classic musicals, and the emotional ones of noir, but it has the impact of waiting on line for a broken roller coaster: you wait and wait for progress, but none ever comes. All your left to look at in the meantime is the dormant track that lies around you, that suggests what could have been, but simply is not.

De Niro's Jimmy Doyle is a blueprint for his next role for Scorsese, Jake La Motta in RAGING BULL. He is possessive, bitter, and controlled by rage he cannot understand or release. Though De Niro made period films (THE GODFATHER PART II) he was associated with a modern style of acting. In NEW YORK, NEW YORK's anachronistic attempt to recreate highly stylized Technicolor grandeur, it's a strange fit. The old musicals are built upon an almost religious belief in the power of music to conquer obstacles, heal rifts and unite mankind. Scorsese uses the form for the opposite purpose: in NEW YORK, NEW YORK music destroys relationships and people, as all obsessions ultimately do in Scorsese's work.

As it was made for a major studio with a large budget, NEW YORK, NEW YORK might make an interesting companion piece for study alongside Scorsese's recent big-budget epics GANGS OF NEW YORK and THE AVIATOR, which (the former more than the latter) suffer their own problems of unappealing or uninteresting characters . Scorsese is such a potent filmmaker when his subjects are small and personal — TAXI DRIVER and MEAN STREETS tell complete stories with almost documentary authenticity.