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.

The DVD transfer for this item is NOT enhanced for widescreen TVs, just like the previously released version. It is an excellent film, but because MGM decided to pussyfoot around giving the actual film a better transfer and enhancement, I cannot justify anyone purchasing this piece of repackaged junk. If you love special features, this would be the only reason to double dip. I prefer the pristine transfer over anything else, and was deeply disappointed. As a huge Scorsese fan, this film by far gets the worst treatment of any he has directed. Even bare-bones editions of "The Color of Money" and "The Age of Innocence" are treated with more respect.

The version of the movie in this "special edition" is the same non-anamorphic transfer that was released in 2004. If you own a HD TV set you'll know what I mean. Instead of presenting the best version possible, this provides a flat letterboxed version well suited to the late 1980s.

Considering the chaotic, often drug-fuelled circumstances of its production, New York, New York seems a lot more disciplined and successful than it has any right to be. While there's never once a sense or flavor of New York - this is pure Hollywood all the way - Scorsese's mixture of stylised settings and naturalistic drama goes beyond the traditional happy ending and takes what starts out a standard boy-meets-girl musical plotline into darker emotional territory. It may lose its way towards the and (partially due to the overlong Happy Endings number taking us away from the characters for too long), but it gets a lot more right than it gets wrong, and has a great use of color. It was also interesting to compare the theatrical version and director's cut included on the DVD - surely the easiest restoration ever since Scorsese literally cut two reels and left the rest of the film intact.

I'll start by rephrasing what I said about the last DVD edition

Even the non Special Edition of Boxcar Bertha from the Martin Scorsese Collection was presented in Widescreen , but alas New York, New York was only Letterboxed.

It only included the so called restored version of the film which is in reality only one of three versions released.

If any film is more deserving than The Abyss for a "watch it the way you want to" DVD release it's New York, New York.

The deleated / alternate scenes included did not represent the differences between the first and third versions of the film, nor do they include the scenes deleted from the first release to shorten the running time for the second run release.

The Laserdisc Special Edition release had more bonus material than was included on that DVD.


Guess we'll have to wait for the Ultimate Edition Boxed set for a truely special edition .

In the meantime this one will due.

Oct 2007: Pre - order pages are appearing for New York, New York: 30th Anniversary Edition, Reportedly 2 discs. Hopefully it's a vast improvement on the last one.

Details are starting to appear :
Features
Region 1
Keep Case
Anamorphic Widescreen
Audio:
Mono - English, Spanish
Dolby Surround 5.1 - English
Subtitled - English, French, Spanish - Optional

Additional Release Material:
Disc 1: NEW YORK NEW YORK - Feature Presentation
Alternate Scenes - 1. Alternate Takes
2. Deleted Scenes
Audio Commentaries - 1. Martin Scorsese - Director
2. Carrie Rickey - Film Critic
Introduction - Martin Scorsese - Director
Trailers - 1. Theatrical Trailer
2. Teaser Trailer
3. MGM/UA Previews
Text/Photo Galleries:
Galleries - 1. French Lobby Cards
2. Original Posters
Stills/Photos - 1. Filmmakers, Cast & Crew
2. On Set
3. Research Photos
Storyboards
Disc 2: NEW YORK NEW YORK - Supplemental Material
Additional Release Material:
Audio Commentaries - Lazlo Kovacs, ASC - Cinematographer (Select Scenes)
Featurettes - 1. "The New York, New York Stories" Part One
2. "The New York, New York Stories" Part Two
3. "Liza on NEW YORK NEW YORK"


It still may not be the Ultimate Edition this film should have but in the meantime this one will due.

Sadly latest news is it's the same version ( so called director's cut)as the last release only and even the "Liza on New York New York" is abridged.
Only 5:35 minutes from a 30 minute segment done for an overseas release taped November 10th, 2003.

Shame on them.