I’ve never liked “New York, New York,” or at least Sinatra’s rendition of it. I always associate it with hordes of freezing tourists, pretending to have a good time watching the ball drop in Times Square. Its lyrics are rife with clichés and platitudes that ultimately don’t amount to anything especially substantive about the city, and I hate Sinatra’s mannered crooning of it. I hate the way they dust it off for weddings and sporting events. I find it plodding and ponderous and I never need to hear it again.
But, here it is, scoring a strange little film from 1979 by a gent named Arnold Baskin.
Providing stark visual contrast to the tune’s lushly over-rhapsodized descriptions of living the high life in the Big Apple, most of Baskin’s film concentrates on footage of unsuspecting sunbathers in Central Park and senior citizens picking their noses on Broadway benches on the Upper West Side, all captured on a typically unrelentingly hot and sunny summer day in New York.
I can’t speak for the filmmaker’s intentions, but it seems like a rather heavy-handed rebuke of Sinatra’s vainglorious victory lap of an ode to New York.
This all said, it’s still kind of a telling slice of what the city looked like back then.
See what you think.
Recent Comments