Arts
Monochrome
Peter Ackroyd
Broadway Danny Rose ('PG', selected cinemas) Another film in black and white! This is becoming a fad, and one begins to suspect the motives of those who make Pictures in monochrome: is the technique meant to remind the audience of the 'great days' of the cinema (in which case one needs something better than the mere aspiration), or is it meant to summon up scenes from a lost era? As far as one can judge, Woody Allen's latest film is set in the Sixties, when colour was a perfectly accessible means of reproduction. Perhaps the expense was too great — although, since Mr Allen has become a 'star' of that Part of the American cinema which consi- ders itself serious, money can be no object. It is baffling, all the more so since Mr Allen's last film, Zelig, was a disaster for those not fatally compromised by a taste for New York humour; and here he goes again, in a story which combines a credu- lous romanticism for 'show business' with a 'bitter-sweet' apologia for a world in which Only the extrovert can ever succeed. • Broadway Danny Rose opens in a res- taurant, where a number of ancient perfor- mers reminisce about a theatrical agent whose career has been spent in promoting blind xylophonists, budgerigar acts, bal- loon folders, and singers whose only value Ices in their potential for 'nostalgia' — in other words, it is the usual Manhattan story in which gush and sentimentality are Mixed in a combination which only Americanophiles find delightful: it is im- Possible, for example, to imagine a film in which English or German agents might discuss their past in such an egregious fashion; too much has happened for it to become an interesting scenario. New York, on the other hand, has gone from infantilism to senility in one easy move — a condition which romanticists find appeal- ing. The rest of us may not. Woody Allen plays the agent in ques- t. lOn; he wears a herring-bone jacket (most ,Of the characters in the film wear herring- bone jackets; perhaps they are a theatrical' e. osturne. ) But his manner is unmistakable: he has has made an art out of being downtrod- ?ell, nervous, anxious at the prospect of !allure; it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at him. There are times, however, when he stretches the hearts of the audi- ence a little too far — when that distracted the over-sensitive manner takes over from Lae matter, when he relies upon his perso- na, it is as if he and his jokes were working on auto-pilot. Certainly the plot itself — in which he promotes a singer, only to find himself at the mercy of the Mafia — is too slight to bear the weight of the Woody Allen manner, and the audience did not laugh in quite the usual way. The general atmosphere of Woody Allen's films is still effective — it has become as cosily reassur- ing as a Carry On picture — but he seems to lack the capacity of, for example, Mel Brooks and cannot as a result engineer those surprises or reversals which might change the image of Mr Allen himself. In fact, some people left before the end which, in an 'art' cinema like the Gate in Bloomsbury, is always a bad sign. Some of his jokes are still quite funny, although now they tend to stick out a mile; they are surrounded by that atmosphere of sen- timentality which Mr Allen always seems to provoke, and which is generally con- cerned with the fatal attraction a young woman suddenly feels towards the small, ugly and generally unprepossessing indi- vidual played by the comic himself.
Mia Farrow, as the girl, looks at first as if she will avoid the stereotype — she plays here a brassy blonde, wearing dark glasses and panting after the next or nearest 'meal ticket'. But it soon becomes clear that Woody Allen's fantasies will prevail against all the odds (since he is both writer and director of this film, this is perhaps not surprising) and before long Miss Farrow relapses into the part of a secondary Diane Keaton: the scatty, vaguely intelligent, woman who falls for Mr Allen's intellectual charms. And despite all the loose talk about his new observations of American life, or his interesting ability to anatomise the role of the 'loser', the fact that the same basic situation again applies suggests that his talent is only remarkable for its lack of development.
The most entertaining, because the least familiar, character is played by Nick 'Well t's not stigmata, it's a rash of some sort.' Apollo Forte; he is the overweight and slightly drunken singer, a combination of Mel Torme and Johnny Ray who has been able to ride on the crest of the nostalgia industry: 'You're the kind of singer', Woody Allen says, 'who can always earn a beautiful dollar in this business.' The same, of course, is true of Mr Allen himself, who seems to have become an indispensable ingredient in New York humour: but all those jokes about guilt, despair and cultu- ral satiety begin to pall after a while.
I suspect the critics admire him because he remains fashionable and because he has the great merit of being easy to write about; but his fame has perhaps gone too much to his head. As a performer alone, he has charm; as a writer, he has intelligence; as a director, he has a certain expertise. But when all three roles are combined, the result is lethal, and the audience is forced into the position of being a participant at Mr Allen's celebration of himself. He takes himself too seriously, and the more solemn moments in the film are too leaden to be acceptable to even the most jaded palate; Broadway Danny Rose spirals downward into that vortex in which 'hard-edged' satire and whimsical comedy become in- distinguishable. It is, in another context, called schmaltz, and it is not a success.
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