Taking Liza Minnelli and Robert De Niro from their first meeting after VJ Day, film proceeds slowly and deliberately through their struggle to make it as a band singer and saxophonist and as a marriage in which her voice is early acclaimed while his music is ahead of its time. The two are making it pretty good until her pregnancy sidelines her.
Though still professing enduring love, the couple breaks up with the birth of the baby and the film lurches forward several years. Now she’s a big film star, banging out the new numbers by John Kander and Fred Ebb, and the 1950s have brought his style into vogue and he’s a big name, too, if not as big as she.
In a final burst from Old Hollywood, Minnelli tears into the title song and it’s a wowser.
[In 1989, an uncut 163-min. version was released on homevideo, including the musical number Happy Endings]
