In Which In Every Man's Heart There Is A Mistress

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.

"y hospital" - Tree Hopping (mp3)

"w hospital' - Tree Hopping (mp3)

"q hospital" - Tree Hopping (mp3)

Tree Hopping myspace

In Which Everybody Gets Corrupted

The Impulse To Expiate

by EMILY GOULD

Woody and Diane Keaton meet, in Manhattan, and immediately start contradicting and one-upping each other. They do so intensely, with a focus that excludes the people they’re notionally on dates with. Watching them, you might find yourself suddenly seized with a strange and increasingly less-shakeable suspicion. You, too, have some habitual patterns of interacting with the romanceable people you meet, you've noticed. But have these habits developed organically, or are they just a set of tricks and tics that you subliminally learned from watching early Woody Allen movies? Do these movies succeed, as you’d assumed they did, by evoking the shock of recognition, or is the shock of recognition you feel, watching them, just the end product of a feedback loop?

Regardless, the depth of identification you (fine okay I) feel watching jerks fall in love can be so intense it’s jarring. And when those love affairs fail to end happily — and no matter how many times you’ve seen the movies, those failures somehow have the power to surprise again and again — it is possible to become super bummed out.

Manhattan is also a bummer because, while it is formally the best Woody Allen movie — the Woody-Allen-movie-est Woody Allen movie — it also codifies the fatal Woody flaw, which is his un-get-aroundably creepy thing for little girls.

Mariel Hemingway got an Oscar nomination for her performance as Woody’s Dalton-senior love interest in this movie, but the prize seems inadequate compensation for the then-16 year old's having been subjected to multiple takes of the scenes wherein the fortyish Woody gropes and kisses her. Her fundamental physical indifference, even as she mouths lines like "Let’s fool around!", is legible in every line of her coltish body.

The ick factor is especially pronounced when these scenes are juxtaposed with the ones that showcase Diane and Woody’s unfakeable chemistry. But we do believe that Mariel’s Tracy thinks she loves Woody’s Isaac, and that consequently he is able to hurt her. Their love scenes may be stomach-turning, but when he dumps her, Tracy’s obvious pain reveals Isaac’s essential sliminess with unprecedented vividness. "Why should I feel guilty about this? This is ridiculous!” he says, as her beautiful, reason-to-live face quivers on the verge of eerily childish tears. The chord of recognition is struck here too — we have all tried to break a heart guiltlessly, or witnessed someone try guiltlessly to break ours. (But did these movies teach us, and them, how to go about it?)

Tracy, we’re told, is mature for her age. That’s why Isaac is attracted to her, he says early on. But somehow the moments that are meant to demonstrate this maturity are the moments when his real desires slip out – part of his character’s charm, of course, is that he is always helplessly showing his hand. "You keep stating it like it’s to my advantage, when it’s you that wants to get out," she says when he explains why they should break up. "Don’t be so smart, don’t be so precocious," he commands. In their final scene together, when she refuses to buy the recantation of this breakup speech, he tells her not to be so mature.

Isaac's romance with Diane Keaton's Mary Wilkie has its creepy moments too. There is one moment especially when Mary is talking to Isaac but really she is talking to herself, about how she deserves better than Yale, Isaac's married friend who she’s seeing. She is giving herself a little self-esteem lecture about how she is young and beautiful and smart and deserves better. Like Isaac, she is helplessly showing her hand, but unlike him, her foibles aren’t presented lovingly. Isaac’s selfishness seems meant to come off, thanks to his ostentatious self-awareness, as a lovable quirk. Mary seems to have no idea how monstrous she’s being, and therefore seems doubly monstrous.

Isaac’s no monster, though, or at least he isn’t meant to seem like one. His overlay of protective self-awareness — his preemptive acknowledgment of flaws that you haven’t even noticed yet, the sense that he hates himself more than you ever could — has provided a reliable template for future generations of dudes, cinematic and otherwise. It’s this kind of guy who’d think to inoculate himself against charges of misogyny by having Bella Abzug make a cameo in his movie about a forty year old man who’s fucking a high-schooler. These dudes don’t just to get away with being assholes, they want to be loved both for and in spite of it.

You have met these dudes. As kids, they were mocked for the same traits that they’ve now transformed into social currency, but this reversal hasn’t fully salved the wounded rage in them. So they are maybe going to take that anger out on some powerless girls, but they’re going to be so super aware the whole time, of what they’re doing and why. To paraphrase the terrible novel whose opening paragraph Isaac is writing at the movie’s outset, New York is their town, and it always will be. And maybe they live here because the city is like them: trapped between the impulse to expiate or to celebrate its sins, and trapped in the misconception that admitting to them somehow accomplishes both things at once.

Emily Gould is the senior contributor to This Recording. She writes here.

"Godless" - The Dandy Warhols (mp3)

"Bohemian Like You" - The Dandy Warhols (mp3)

"Solid" - The Dandy Warhols (mp3)

"Nietzsche" - The Dandy Warholds (mp3)

You can find the index to Woody Allen Week here.

In Which There Is Always A Murder We Should Be Solving

There's a Murderer in the Building

by MARCO SPARKS

Two things I'm desperate to have happen before I die:

1. Find myself the reluctant amateur detective in a quaint real life murder mystery involving an eccentric cast of characters. I want to be the traveling detective a tad reluctant to get involved like Poirot, rather than the person giddy for each new homicide you encounter every place you go. That way lays madness and suddenly I'm Jessica Fletcher and with a body count rivaling some marquee diseases.

2. Find myself upper middle class rich at the very least, working in a creative field, probably living in New York, and enjoying sherry and decadent dessert with my equally rich friends from the arts after we've come back from plays and working on our novels. We'll complain about Wagner, talk about missed chances and what a mistake that last vacation with our ex-wives were (because those ex-wives were a mistake), contemplate opening a restaurant, and find ourselves bored and looking for excitement.

Manhattan Murder Mystery is both of these, in classic Woody Allen style, but also about a third thing: the death of excitement in a marriage.

Allen is Larry Lipton and in a grand reunion with his Annie Hall co-star, Diane Keaton is his wife, Carol. They’ve been together for a while, Larry’s a book editor, Carol’s currently unemployed and bored, especially with their son off to college. They humor each other, Larry dragging Carol to hockey games and Carol dragging Larry to the opera, which he later forces them to walk out of. "I can't listen to that much Wagner, ya know?" he tells his wife, "I start to get the urge to conquer Poland."

On their way home from one of these outings, they encounter their next door neighbors, the Houses, who invite them in for coffee. When you’re old and dying slowly in marriage, this is what you do: drag others into your misery for a short time and give them dessert and force your stamp collection upon them. The next night though, Mrs. House is dead, and Carol suspects foul play. Larry is comically nervously unconvinced, but Carol won’t let it pass. Murder! Right next door! It’s exciting and new, two things she’s desperate for in life at the moment, and Larry remains nonplussed at first.

Carol: I don't understand why you're not more fascinated with this! I mean, we could be living next door to a murderer, Larry.”

Larry: New York is a melting pot! I'm used to it!

Carol’s need for excitement in getting to the bottom of this mystery is fed by the couple’s friend, the recently divorced and wonderful Alan Alda, who’s willing to become her partner just in snooping and sleuthing, but in a possible restaurateuring venture as well. And perhaps more than that as he reminds her while on stakeout of a time years earlier when they could’ve cheated on their spouses together.

Is Carol interested in the advances of Alan Alda’s Ted? Probably not, but her growing closeness with him spurns Larry into action, desperate to stop the slowly growing rift in his marriage and join in on the mystery. And that’s when the film really takes off. People will tell you that this is a minor film, which isn’t inaccurate, but it’s also a treat for fans of the Allen catalogue. Some things to especially enjoy:

First and foremost, the behind the scenes story. The film was shot in summer of 1992, in the height of Allen’s breakup with Mia Farrow and the brutal custody battle that was fought afterward. You have to more than assume that is responsible for the theme of romantic deception and betrayal throughout the film.

At the last minute, Diane Keaton stepped into her role, which was originally written for Farrow and because of the timing and the complicated plot points, couldn’t be rewritten for her. It makes for fascinating viewing as the always perfect and electric Keaton makes Allen the straight man for the first half of the movie.

The second half, however, is not only an amazing madcap tour through Larry’s phobias as the couple discovers bodies and attempts to bluff a murderer, but it’s also a treat for mystery and noir fans as bodies are discovered along with dopplegangers and double crosses.

Of course, the movie is a love letter to New York (and if we couldn’t guess that, we’re told as much in the opening musical number, Cole Porter’s "I Happen To Like New York"), but in some ways it’s an imaginary sequel to Annie Hall, not just with the reuniting of Keaton and Allen, but because Anhedonia, Hall’s original title, was originally intended to be a mystery, but those elements were later removed by Allen and co-screenwriter Marshall Brickman to be reused here.

Just as unshocking, this isn’t just a love letter to New York, it’s a love letter to cinema in general, combining Bergman with Wilder and not just referencing Orson Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai, but literally forcing characters into a shootout in it.

We can blame this film for Zack Braff, who has his debut here in a brief scene as Larry and Carol’s son whose away at college. Oh, if only he stayed at college. There’s also blink and you’ll miss them short appearances by Joy Behar and Aida Tuturro.

Speaking of tragically short appearances: Anjelica Huston is delightful here as the sexy, confident author whose Allen’s Larry is the book editor for. Her character is witty and tuned in that, even though she’s not involved in nearly enough of the action in her handful of scenes, she can still not only figure out what’s going in this mystery plot, but explain it to the other characters not once but twice.

In a nice throwaway gag, the book of Huston’s that Allen’s character is editing is called Comfort Zones. A thing like that in a Woody Allen movie will never stop being hilarious to me.

And... Alan Alda again. Perfectly sleazy. I only wish I could get away with half of his lazy lothario charm at my age. And yet, as sleazy as you suspect he is or would like to be, he comes off as harmless, getting along more perfectly in a platonic way with the women in the cast rather than the men. Even as I type that, I’m just that much closer to pronouncing this case closed and moving to New York and write plays and retire into a life as an Alan Alda-esque gadabout.

All that said, this movie makes me think that maybe my life is boring. Yours too, probably. Look at us, we’re sitting here talking about filmmakers and actors and next door there’s probably somebody being killed. There’s probably a mystery being hatched just waiting for nosy neighbors to come get to the bottom of it.

Marco Sparks is a contributor to This Recording. This is his first appearance in these pages. His blog is here, and his tumblr is here.

“For Our Elegant Caste (acoustic)” - Of Montreal (mp3)

"For Our Elegant Caste (depressed buttons remix)" - Of Montreal (mp3)

"For Our Elegant Caste" - Of Montreal (mp3)