Rating: - One of the Great Films
If you look up this film on Wikipedia you find it is on several "100 Greatest Films" lists by several groups including Time magazine and various film groups. It is a tribute to all the great Hollywood musicals and noir films of the 1940s and 1950s and as Sorcese explains in the commentary everything is a little brighter, cleaner, neater than real life, to capture that sound stage feel of the studio era.

De Niro plays a tough new Yorker whose main love is Be Bop, a pure musical jazz form with little commercial appeal but he cares for the music and an appreciative audience more than money. Minelli plays a singer of mainstream Broadway style hits of the 1950s with great commercial and audience appeal. Both excel at their art form but it takes them down different roads and as much as De Niro's character loves Minelli's he loves his art more than her, and in the end it looks like she feels the same.

The movie opens with "Sing, Sing, Sing", the quintessential swing era hit, and moves through the music of the era to the fifties. The music is terrific, and the move treats it like one of the principal actors, letting the other actors and the audience pause and take note while the music takes center stage, which it often does. All the production values are terrific, including the clothing, and the sets.

Highly recommended.

New York, New York