I don’t want to oversell Woody Allen’s 31st feature, which I happen to like. The script is full of holes, most of the one-liners are weak and mechanical, and the plot—a nightclub magician gets two of his hypnotized subjects to steal jewels for him—is so deliberately stupid and contrived that one can probably enjoy it only by pretending it’s a routine, low-budget second feature on an old-fashioned double bill, which is obviously what Allen intended. Yet it’s possible for a picture to be not very good and still be likable—something that doesn’t happen very often for me with Allen’s pictures. (It happened, momentarily, in Everyone Says I Love You—when Allen exposed his vulnerability by singing the first 16 bars of “I’m Thru With Love.”)
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C.W. Briggs (Allen) has been working as an adjuster/investigator at a New York insurance firm for 20 years, and Betty Ann Fitzgerald (Helen Hunt) has been an efficiency expert at the same company for six months. They may snap at each other a lot, but the movie overall is conceived as a duet between them. A duet is even what we hear behind the opening and closing credits—a lovely double improvisation by baritone saxophonist Harry Carney and alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges in Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady”—though working out which character corresponds to which saxophone isn’t as simple as it sounds, because both are gruff and aggressive and neither has the lyricism of Carney or Hodges. (Later, when the two characters develop romantic feelings for each other—mainly, it appears, thanks to posthypnotic suggestions—their love theme becomes a swing version of “How High the Moon.”)
I recently took another look at my favorite Allen picture, his sweet and underrated valentine to showbiz losers, Broadway Danny Rose (1984). This time I think I understood a little better why its title character, played by Allen—a small-time agent for hopeless entertainment acts who gives his all to his clients and never gets ahead—registers with such power and poignancy. Like John Updike’s most memorable character, Rabbit Angstrom, Danny Rose is a significant part of his creator but also his ostensible opposite, the phantom that haunts his sleep—a creation based on what he left behind when he moved away from the boondocks and became a professional success, which gives this character a moral force and authenticity that’s missing from Allen’s other heroes. C.W. is coarser and simpler than Danny Rose and considerably less generous—a street-smart yet embittered gumshoe who’s basically given up on romance and is content to flirt idly with an office secretary (Elizabeth Berkley, the star of Showgirls, virtually unrecognizable here) and have occasional one-night stands. He may be closer to a genre type than a character Allen understands personally, yet it’s interesting that Allen gives a real performance in the process of putting him together, rather than falling back on his usual persona. Apart from clearly being in his 60s, C.W. isn’t completely different from the usual Allen hero—neither is Danny Rose, for that matter—but in both cases affection for Allen’s working-class origins is allowed to creep into the performance, replacing the usual fear and disgust.
Directed and written by Woody Allen
With Allen, Helen Hunt, Dan Aykroyd, Brian Markinson, Elizabeth Berkley, Charlize Theron, Wallace Shawn, and David Ogden Stiers.
