Monthly Archives: December 2015

  • Broadway Danny Rose

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Woody Allen (1984)

    Danny Rose is a Broadway talent agent with a list of no-hoper acts (a one-legged tap dancer etc).  The biggest – the only – name among his clients is a washed-up lounge singer called Lou Canova.  Lou is having an affair with a woman called Tina Vitale, previously a gangster’s moll.   He gets a date at the Waldorf Astoria, to sing in front of Milton Berle:  Lou and Danny see this as the last chance to resurrect his career but Lou is worried that Tina’s jealous ex-boyfriend is going to order a hit on him.  So Lou gets Danny to pretend to be Tina’s boyfriend instead …  According to IMDB, this is the only feature film that the musician Nick Apollo Forte has appeared in but he’s highly convincing as Lou Canova – much the best thing in Broadway Danny Rose.  (Forte wrote Lou’s songs, which he performs in convincing style.)  The main focus in this underpopulated film is, however, almost entirely on Woody Allen as Danny and Mia Farrow as Tina and there’s not a lot going on between them.  When their relationship turns serious in the closing stages, it’s artificial respiration – a false and clumsy attempt to give the piece retrospective substance.  Casting Mia Farrow against type as a tough cookie – with a tarty wig, dark glasses and high heels – is funny when she first appears but pointless after that.  She’s not the kind of actress capable of looking or sounding thoroughly different from what she’s normally like and she lacks the histrionic verve needed to bring a caricature like Tina fully to life.  At the same time, she’s too conscientious to rely for comic effect – as Woody Allen has sometimes successfully done – on the incongruity of her own persona and the role she’s playing.  She’s likeable here because she’s trying hard but she isn’t funny.   Allen himself is underpowered:  playing a man who’s not the brightest crayon in the box, he seems to be struggling not to let his own wit come through too strongly.

    Allen writes incidents to make up for the sparse ration of characters.  The crime caper is mildly entertaining but the mildness makes it tiresome too.   There are laughs in the film – bits of performances by the hopeless acts managed by Danny, the helium-falsetto voices after gas escapes at one point of the mob’s pursuit of him and Tina – but they’re laughs familiar from elsewhere, not distinctively Woody Allen ones.  While it’s not integral to the conception in the way it was in Manhattan, Allen’s decision to make the film in black and white seems right, at least in the Borscht Belt club sequences.  (As Bob Fosse demonstrated in Lenny, monochrome really brings out the seedy glitz of this kind of locale.)  Broadway Danny Rose is a shaggy dog story and Allen uses as a framework for it a gaggle of real life standups and impressionists (none of whom I recognised) – gathered in the Carnegie Deli, where they recall the local legend that is Broadway Danny Rose.   This opening conversation is promising – it places the film immediately and exactly – but its flavour quickly dissipates.  There’s nothing interesting in the juxtaposition of the group in the deli and the main action:  the reminiscing comics don’t, for example, have memories of Danny specific enough for the scenes that involve him either to confirm or to contradict what they say.  We learn that the Carnegie Deli menu includes a Danny Rose sandwich but it isn’t clear why Danny is a legend in his own lifetime (which we assume hasn’t ended yet).  This framing device looks like something Woody Allen added when he realised the main story couldn’t stand up on its own.

    9 January 2012

  • Smiles of a Summer Night

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sommarnattens Leende

    Ingmar Bergman (1955)

    The sex comedy Smiles of a Summer Night, set at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century, sees Ingmar Bergman at his most light-hearted (that’s a relative term) and displaying a perfectly light touch.  The time is midsummer and the place is Sweden so darkness visible is not much in evidence.  Even so, the passage of time is structurally important and, as so often in Bergman, a persistent memento mori, both sonic and visual.  There are ticking timepieces, a crowing cock and, eventually, a dawn chorus.  Whenever a clock chimes the hour, worried-looking figures emerge from and move round it, a death’s-head among them.  The principals in the story – four men and four women – are Bergman’s means of exploring different kinds of desire, lust and love.  Some of the partners at the start seem ill-matched; by the end of the film, each coupling is the right one.  The characters’ impulsions are expressed in different social registers, ranging from the blunt to the would-be sophisticated.  They combine to create a celebration of love and of the folly of love.  Bergman must have had A Midsummer Night’s Dream in mind when he wrote Smiles of a Summer Night:  the picture often brings to mind Hippolyta’s judgment of the mechanicals’ play as ‘the silliest stuff’.  The farce form helps Bergman bring out the humour in this all-is-vanity roundelay but he, his actors and the cinematographer Gunnar Fischer find poetry too.

    Fredrik Egerman (Gunnar Björnstrand), a middle-aged lawyer, has been married to the beautiful Anne (Ulla Jacobsson) for two years but the marriage is still unconsummated.  Henrik (Björn Bjelfvenstam), Fredrik’s son from his first marriage, is slightly older than his stepmother, who’s not yet out of her teens.  Henrik is studying to be a minister of the church but tormented by his feelings for Anne – feelings that she secretly reciprocates.  After a visit to the theatre, Fredrik goes backstage to renew his acquaintance with the famous actress Desiree Armfeldt (Eva Dahlbeck), Fredrik’s lover between his two marriages.   Desiree, who broke off that relationship, now has a young son (also called Fredrik) and is currently the mistress of an army officer, Count Carl Magnus Malcolm (Jarl Kulle).  He is the husband of Charlotte (Margit Karlqvist), a long-time friend of Anne Egerman.  The fourth pairing is Anne’s maid Petra (Harriet Andersson) and her lover Frid (Åke Fridell), also a servant.  Others in the cast include Bibi Andersson, in a cameo as an actress, and Naima Wifstrand, as Desiree’s mother, who invites the principals to a midsummer night’s party, at which she presides.  The ancient-looking Mrs Armfeldt tells her guests that she’s kept her health by never listening to what other people have to say.

    The main characters – just now seems a good time to call them ‘the loveful eight’ – are beautifully written by Bergman and, in all cases, beautifully interpreted.  Especially memorable are Eva Dahlbeck’s voluptuous, nearly overripe Desiree; Jarl Kulle’s Count, who, with his exaggeratedly straight-backed military bearing, is very comical; Harriet Andersson’s earthy, funny, vivid Petra; and the pivotal Fredrik Egerman.  From his first appearance, striding along the street in his close-fitting business coat, Fredrik is a figure of fun.  He is never in control in his dealings with women; he’s confidently authoritative only in conversation with his anguished son.  (This young man – shortly before he eventually elopes with Anne – tells God that, if His world is sinful, ‘I want to sin’.)  The confrontation between Fredrik and the Count climaxes in what is surely the most (the only?) enjoyable game of Russian roulette in cinema history.  Gunnar Björnstrand’s exquisite comic performance reaches a peak in this episode but it’s superb throughout.  Fredrik Egerman repeatedly loses his dignity.  As played by Björnstrand, he knows how silly he looks but he keeps trying unavailingly to limit the damage.  He is a true fool for love.

    It’s never difficult to get the gist of what’s being said in this film but the subtitling on the print I saw at the BFI this November was remarkably skimpy.  I can always find plenty to criticise about BFI, of course, but this is probably the right note in which to admit that I’m not sure what I’d do without it now:  I’ve a particular fondness for Smiles of a Summer Night not only because it’s a wonderful film but also because it was the very first one I saw after joining BFI in early 2003.  (I joined because they were running a full Bergman retrospective and I wanted to find out more about his work.)  Conversations between Frid and Petra explain the film’s title.  He tells her that the summer night has three smiles.  The first smile is ‘between midnight and dawn, when young lovers open their hearts and loins’.  The second is for ‘the jesters, the fools and the incorrigible’.  The third smile is for ‘the sad and dejected, for the sleepless and lost souls, for the frightened and the lonely’.  When the night smiles this last smile, it’s morning.  Out in the fields where Petra and Frid are, the windmill, on which Bergman’s camera finally rests, is still turning.

    21 November 2015

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