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
