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Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangster

by JACOB SUGARMAN

Broadway Danny Rose opens with Stand-Up Comedian Corbett Monica’s big Miami joke: "It’s like a $150 a day for a sleeping room. I asked the hotel clerk, 'What’s cheaper?’' He said, 'I got a room for $10 dollars but you gotta make your own bed.' I said, 'I’ll take it.' So he gave me a hammer, a board and some nails.” Such is the brand of humor to which the film and its auteur are firmly rooted. In a recent New York feature, Mark Harris argued that Woody Allen and fellow Hebrew in comedic arms, Larry David, were the last of a dying breed. If so, then consider Allen’s 1984 movie a final nod to the Sid Caesars and Milton Berles of yesteryear.

Like so many Allen tales, this story begins with a dinner party. Comics Jackie Gayle, Morty Gunty, Sandy Baron and a few other Catskills staples are kvetching over pickles and sandwiches at the Carnegie Deli, each with their own colorful anecdote about the “legendary” Danny Rose. Played by Allen, Rose is a talent agent extraordinaire whose poor taste is surpassed only by his undying passion for his clients. When one of his performers presents an animal balloon-twisting act, he coaches: "You should open up with the dachshund and then move on and BUILD towards the giraffe." Let’s just say that Ari Gold ain’t got shit on "Broadway" Danny Rose.

When he’s not finding work for a blind xylophonist or a dubious bird whisperer, Rose is busy nursing his lead act, Lou Canova —a throwback lounge singer who’s riding a wave of nostalgic popularity (not unlike Woody himself for the past 15 years). Canova seems destined for stardom when Rose books him as the opening act for a Milton Berle performance. Only in Woodyland can this be considered a big break.

Hilarity ensues when Rose attempts to woo Canova’s mistress, Tina Vitale (Mia Farrow), to come to his client’s show. Vitale's family mistakenly fingers him for ruining her relationship to a sensitive Italian gentleman and this sets a pair of bat-wielding Mafiosos on a mission to pluck Rose’s petals, so to speak. I’ll stop here but this is a Woody Allen movie starring Mia Farrow. You can probably see where this is going.

Broadway Danny Rose is a charming, uneventful comedy that’s still worth a rental for its small pleasures. Photographed by the great Gordon Willis, who shot a bevy of 70’s staples including The Parallax View and The Godfather, the film contains several playful allusions to Coppola’s classic crime saga. If you’re the kind of movie-watcher who likes pointing at his screen excitedly and screaming "That’s where Clemenza wacked Paulie Gatto!,” you won’t be disappointed. Allen’s film also has its share of unintentional comedy as Mia Farrow spends the majority of her screen time channeling the ghosts of Ed Wood.

Unable to convince an audience with half a pulse that she’s a tough, working class, Italian broad, she plays the entire movie behind a pair of oversized sunglasses with her hair up and a cigarette tucked into the corner of her mouth. The whole thing smacks of Bela Lugosi’s body double covering his face during his scenes in Plan 9 from Outer Space.

After being fed a steady diet of Allen’s neurotic, Jewish humor for 40 odd years, it’s easy to dismiss the jokes in Broadway Danny Rose as stale or dated. Still, you can’t help but crack a smile watching Rose tending to his menagerie of goofball clients and their pets (in the film’s closing scene, he’s seated next to a parrot dressed like Little Miss Moffet). It might not be as funny as Annie Hall or as affecting as Manhattan, but Broadway Danny Rose offers a glowing reminder of why we love Woody Allen, even when he’s babbling away like an addled uncle at your cousin’s bat-mitzvah. Here’s hoping he doesn’t go by way of the dodo bird anytime soon.

Jacob Sugarman is a contributor to This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about Robert Mitchum.

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In Which You Can't Let The Gloom Get You

With Friends Like These

by JACOB SUGARMAN

If Tony Soprano was a fan of Gary Cooper he must have loved Robert Mitchum. Cat sliced off his own finger in Sydney Pollock’s The Yakuza and didn’t make a peep. Just sweated a little and wrapped that bitch up in a napkin. 

When he wasn’t sucking on cigarettes in fedoras and trench coats, he even found the time to cut a calypso record and the sensationally titled country album, That Man, Robert Mitchum, Sings.

Really, who knew? With the May release of The Friends of Eddie Coyle on Criterion DVD, Gen-Y audiences have their first crack at Eddie “Knuckles” in this classic, 70’s crime saga and quintessential Mitchum vehicle.

The movie centers on Eddie “Knuckles” Coyle, a low-grade hoodlum and gunrunner famous for the extra set of knuckles he acquired from the wrong side of a dresser drawer. Such is the price for selling traceable arms to the Mafia. When he’s pinched for hijacking a truck, Coyle turns snitch for Detective David Foley in the hopes that he’ll have his sentence reduced. Because what would his charming, Irish hobbit of a wife do without him?

Meanwhile Jimmy Scalise (Alex Rocco, best known as Moe Green from The Godfather) and his crew are traipsing about the greater Boston area with guns and elaborate masks, robbing banks and taking names. Why? Because he’s Alex Rocco! He made his bones when you were going out with cheerleaders!

When Scalise’s crew is captured by the police, the mob fingers Coyle for setting them up. I won’t spoil the ending but a baby-faced Peter Boyle and a Boston Garden-era Bruins game are involved.

Made in 1973, The Friends of Eddie Coyle enjoys the same funk-infused score and gritty, urban texture as The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3. But while Joseph Sargeant’s caper caught the nostalgic eye of Tony Scott (who’s-gulp-slated to remake The Warriors in 2010), Coyle is the infinitely more stylish of the two films.

Scalise’s crew robs its first bank in translucent masks that look like a cross between John Waters and Ricardo Montalban. Take my word that this hybrid is as chilling as it is hideous. In their follow-up heist, they’re sporting rubber disguises that bear an awful resemblance to the president masks from the 1991 idiot-genius film, Point Break. I see you, Kathryn Bigelow! Your sexy DILF act is fooling no one.

With all the double-crossing, snitching and hammy Boston accents, it’s also hard to think that Martin Scorsese didn’t at least take a peak at Coyle before he started shooting The Depahted.

Yet for all of director Peter Yates’ artistry, this movie really belongs to Mitchum. Watching him stagger about like a man marked for death in the Frankenstein-like company of Peter Boyle, you can’t help but recall his appearance twenty years earlier in the classic film noir, Out of the Past.

Fatalism just agrees with him. But what makes Mitchum so compelling is that he never lets the doom and gloom of his characters drag him too far down. When asked about his approach to acting, he once famously responded: “I have two acting styles: with and without a horse.”

You can see from the still photographs of the movie shoot included on the DVD that Mitchum never took himself too seriously. And really, that’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle—a throwback, crime story long on verve and short on pretension. Arm your netflix queues accordingly.

Jacob Sugarman is the senior contributor to This Recording.

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