In a 6.13 chat with Variety‘s John Bleasdale, Geoffrey Rush insisted that one of the most difficult to endure films in movie history — Martin Scorsese‘s New York, New York — as well as one of the biggest cocaine movies of the ’70s was and is a comic joy.
I’m not saying Rush is wrong or deluded, but it certainly takes all sorts to make a movie-loving world.
Rush is certainly permitted to hold this opinion, of course, but there is exactly one “funny” scene in New York, New York — the one in which Robert DeNiro‘s Jimmy Doyle is thrown out of a nightclub by a couple of bouncers, and while literally being carried through a lengthy, well-lighted entranceway DeNiro manages to kick out a dozen or so lightbulbs…pure malice and spite.
The scene isn’t humorous by Average Joe standards. It’s perverse guy humor — the same kind of only-in-the-midtown-Manhattan thing that Joe Pesci got into with the late Frank Vincent in that Raging Bull Copacabana fist fight.
Otherwise New York, New York mostly gives you a headache. Honestly? During my first and only viewing I was hoping that DeNiro would get clipped or hit by a taxicab.
Rush: “I have memories of being in the Leicester Square cinema when I first went to London in the 70s and seeing New York, New York. I’ve never heard laughter like it. When you watch that film on your own, you don’t realize it’s such a big comedy.”
