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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.
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.
The people in Woody Allen's Interiors are destroyed by the repressiveness of good taste, and so is the picture. Interiors is a puzzle movie, constructed like a well-made play from the American past, and given the beautiful, solemn visual clarity of a Bergman film, without, however the eroticism of Bergman.
Interiors looks so much like a masterpiece, and has such a super-banal metaphysical theme (death versus life) that it's easy to see why many regard it as a masterpiece: it's deep on the surface. Interiors has moviemaking fever, all right, but in a screwed-up form — which is possibly what the movie is all about.
The problem for the family in the film is the towering figure of the disciplined, manipulative, inner-directed mother (Geraldine Page). She is such a perfectionist that she cannot enjoy anything, and the standards of taste and achievement that she imposes on her three daughters tie them in such knots that they all consider themselves failures. Alvy Singer, the role Woody Allen played in Annie Hall, was just such a compulsive, judgmental spoilsport, and Allen's original title for that film was Anhedonia — the lack of the capacity for experiencing pleasure.
Among the many puzzling aspects of Interiors: How can Woody Allen present in a measured, lugubriously straight manner the same sorts of tinny anxiety discourse that he generally parodies? And how intentional is most of what goes on under the friezes and poses? Are we expected to ask ourselves who in the movie is Jewish and who is Gentile?
The characters are so sterilized of background germs that the question is inevitably raised, and one of the film's few overt jokes is an overheard bit from a television show in which an interviewer asks a boy, "What nationality were you at the time of your birth?" and the boy answers, "Hebrew." Surely at root the family problem is Jewish: it's not the culture in general that imposes these humanly impossible standards of achievement — they're a result of the Jewish fear of poverty and persecution and the Jewish reverence for learning. It's not the joy of making cinema that spurs Woody Allen on (as he made clear in Annie Hall, he can't have that kind of joy), it's the discipline of making cinema.
The movie, with its spotless beaches, is as clean and bare as Geraldine Page's perfect house: you could eat off any image.
The prints of Interiors were processed on a new film stock, and during the showings for the press and people in the industry in Los Angeles, Allen had the print returned to the lab after every screening to be washed. Which makes this the ultimate Jewish movie. Woody Allen does not show you any blood.
The father (E.G. Marshall) asks his wife for a divorce and then marries a plump, healthy, life-force woman (Maureen Stapleton), and so there are two mothers. The tall, regal first mother, an interior decorator (who places a few objects in a bare room), wears icy grays and lives among beiges and sand tones; the plebeian stepmother bursts into this hushed atmosphere wearing mink and reds and floral prints. This is the sort of carefully constructed movie in which as soon as you see the first woman caress a vase and hover over its perfection you know that the second woman will have to break a vase.
The symbolism — the introduction of red into the color scheme, the broken vase, and so on — belongs to the kind of theatre where everything is spelled out. But under this obviousness there are layers of puzzle. The two mothers appear to be two side of the mythic dominating Jewish matriarch — the one dedicated to spiritual perfection, the other to sensual appetites, security, getting along in the world, cracking a few jokes.
It's part of the solemn unease of the film that no one would want either of them for a mother: they're both bigger than life, and the first is a nightmare of sexual austerity, the second an embarassment of yielding flesh and middle-class worldliness. If the two are warring for control of Woody Allen, the first (the real mother) clearly has him in the stronger grip. She represents the death of the instincts, but she also represents art, or at least cultivation and pseudo-art. (As a decorator, her specialty, like Woody Allen's here, seems to be the achievement of a suffocating emptiness.) Maureen Stapleton, the comic life force, lacks class. The film might be a representation of the traditional schizophrenia of Jewish comics, who have had the respect for serious achievement planted in them so early that even after they've made the world laugh they still feel they're failures, because they haven't played Hamlet. Groucho Marx talked morosely about not having had the education to be a writer, and said that his early pieces for The New Yorker were his proudest achievement. For Woody Allen, the equivalent is to be the American Ingmar Bergman.
The three daughters represent different aspect of the perfectionist neurosis. The oldest (Diane Keaton) is a well-known poet, determined, discontented, struggling with words while unconscious of her drives; the middle one (Kristin Griffith) is a TV actress, dissatisfied with her success, and snorting cocaine; the youngest (Mary Beth Hurt), who looks like a perennial student, rejects sham and flails around, unable to find herself. In plays, the youngest is generally the one who represents the author, and whenever you see a character who's stubbornly honest you know that you're seeing the author's idealized version of some part of himself.
With Mary Beth Hurt, if you have any doubts all you have to do is look at how she's dressed. (You'll also notice that she gets the worst — the most gnomic — lines, such as, "At the center of a sick psyche there is a sick spirit." Huh?). She's unsmiling — almost expressionless — closed in, with specs, hair like shiny armor (it says hands off), and schoolgirl blouses and skirts. She's like a glumly serious postulant, and so honest she won't dress up; determined not to be false to her feelings she actuallys dresses down for her father's wedding to the "vulgarian," as she calls her. (She's there under duress, and her clothes are an explicit protest.) She's the Cordelia, the father's favorite who refuses to lie, even to the mother, whom she alone in the family truly loves (she guiltily hates her, too).
The men's roles are relatively minor; Sam Waterston's part, though, is the only one that's unformed in the writing and doesn't quite fit in to the formal plan. Geraldine Page is playing neurosis incarnate, and the camera is too close to her, especially when her muscles collapse; this failure of discretion makes her performance seem abhorrent. But Maureen Stapleton livens things up with her rather crudely written role. Hers is the only role that isn't strictly thematic, and you can feel the audience awake for its torpor when she arrives on the scene and talks like a conventional stage character.
Diane Keaton does something very courageous for a rising star. She appears here with the dead-looking hair of someone who's too distracted to do anything with it but get a permanent, and her skin looks dry and pasty. There's discontent right in the flesh, while Kristin Griffith, the TV sexpot, appears with fluffy hair, blooming skin, and bright white teeth — the radiance that we normally see in Keaton. This physical transformation is the key to Keaton's thoughtful performance: she plays an unlikable woman -- a woman who dodges issues whenever she can, who may become almost as remote as her mother.
For Allen, who is a very conscious craftsman, it is surely no accident that the mother's impoverished conception of good taste is sustained in the style of the film. But what this correlation means to him isn't apparent. Interiors is a handbook of art-film mannerisms; it's so austere and studied that it might have been directed by that icy mother herself — from the grave.
The psychological hangups that come through are fascinating, but the actors' largo movements and stilted lines don't release this messy material, they repress it. After the life-affirming stepmother has come into the three daughters' lives and their mother is gone, they still, at the end, close ranks in a frieze-like formation. Their life-negating mother has got them forever. And her soul is in Woody Allen. He's still having his love affair with death, and his idea of artistic achievement (for himself, at least) may always be something death-ridden, spare, perfectly structured -- something that talks of the higher things.
(If this, his serious film, looks Gentile to people, that may be because for Woody Allen being Jewish, like being a comic, is fundamentally undignified. This film couldn't have had a Jewish-family atmosphere — his humor would have bubbled up.)
The form of this movie is false, yet it's the form that he believes in, and the form of Interiors is what leads people to acclaim it as a masterpiece.
People like Woody Allen for a lot of good reasons, and for one that may be a bummer: he conforms to their idea of what a Jew should be. He's a younger version of the wise, philosophic candy-store keeper in West Side Story. His good will is built partly on his being non-threatening. He's safe — the schlump who wins, without ever imposing himself. People feel comfortable with him; the comedy audience may even go to Interiors — to pay its respects to the serious Woody. Woody Allen's repressive kind of control — the source of their comfort — is just what may keep him from making great movies. Interiors isn't Gentile, but it is genteel. He's turned the fear of movies — which is the fear of being moved — into a form of intellectuality. September 25th, 1978
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