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Memorabilia blowout, dissonance and harmony. V-J Day in Times Square is a downpour of streamers, an early gag has the camera sweeping over the cheering crowd until an arrow-shaped electric sign singles out the protagonist, "a five-star pain in the ass" in a loud Hawaiian shirt. End of a war and beginning of a relationship or vice versa, the pushy saxophonist (Robert De Niro) won't be denied by the WAC (Liza Minnelli). "I guess a little small talk's in order." "Can it get any smaller?" The disagreeable meet-cute encapsulates Martin Scorsese's gambit—choreography plus messiness, splashy artifice plus improvised abrasion. The jazz bandleader is a martinet in art and in love, the pop chanteuse valiantly puts up with his antics, he plunges while she ascends. Showbiz melodrama, same old song? "How can it be old if you wrote it for me?" From Wellman's A Star Is Born Scorsese has Lionel Stander as the agent, from Cukor's version he has Garland's daughter in an uncanny incantation. (De Niro's modalities include MacMurray in Swing High, Swing Low and Cagney in Love Me or Leave Me, a manic lout who believes he's the romantic lead.) The Technicolor inferno comes down to an excruciating nightclub dinner with blazing red neon, a phosphorescent green bar, and a corridor of flickering light bulbs. "If nothing else, we can get a tan here." A poisoned valentine, an epic of dysfunction, a painted backdrop for chaotic emotions. The abusive husband becomes a meek impresario in the heroine's movie-dream, a bravura piling up of The Band Wagon and Singin' in the Rain and West Side Story for the spangled usherette in the dark. "Happy endings on a silver screen... that's Hollywood." Coppola in One from the Heart continues the experiment. Cinematography by László Kovács. With Barry Primus, Mary Kay Place, Georgie Auld, George Memmoli, Dick Miller, Murray Moston, Clarence Clemons, Frank Sivero, and Diahnne Abbott.
--- Fernando F. Croce |