Woody Allen: A Voice Laughing in the Wilderness

Two views of the same subject often serve to enhance an image. Reviewers Harry Cheney and Lloyd Billingsley, two writers living in Southern California, here offer separate yet complementary impressions of a single film.

Broadway Danny Rose

Orion Pictures; written and directed by Woody Allen

Woody allen is a true believer, floundering in a sea of skepticism. A buoyant hope keeps him barely afloat. “You have to have faith in people,” Mariel Hemingway admonished him in the final scene of Manhattan, and Woody has taken her advice to heart. His earnest characters are yet pessimistic about eternity, occasionally morose over an empty universe, but there remains an abiding faith in the preciousness of life that borders on reverence. Allen’s understated style is consistent with the modest aspirations of his movies. His intimate morality plays are examples of personal artistic expression, unique in the Hollywood corporate structure.

Broadway Danny Rose is such a sweet epiphany: a wisp of a film that celebrates the uncommon virtues of a common man. Danny Rose, the title character, lives a life of hyperactive failure. As a Broadway agent he has become a local legend, representing all the well-meaning but woefully untalented worms in the Big Apple. He labors diligently for his clients—the stuttering ventriloquist or the woman who plays water-filled drinking glasses—doting on them as if they were kin. The amorous adventures of one of these errant children (an overweight, over-the-hill night club singer named Lou Canova) puts Danny in jeopardy as two half-witted mobsters chase him and the singer’s paramour through a New Jersey swamp. The luckless talent agent ultimately escapes, only to be betrayed by Canova, who has managed to find more upscale representation.

In between some hilarious one-liners and slapstick shtick, Woody the moralist manages to speak: “Forgiveness, acceptance, and love”—concepts that sound like a radically condensed version of the New Testament themes are, in fact, the guiding principles of Broadway Danny Rose. Danny is a small-time show-biz messiah to the halt and lame of the Great White Way. Where others see ineptitude, he sees perfection through his own cockeyed interpretation of 1 Corinthians 13. He “believes all things” in spite of the evidence. This is not so much optimistic humanism as an urgent hope. With Woody Allen, at least, there is a distinction. One senses a desperation that is never quite defined, a tension between his agnosticism and his unrequited faith in mankind. Love and laughter alone survive as the last standing barriers between the comedian and despair. At the center of his precarious universe he has placed undependable humanity, knowing full well the words of the poet, “things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” In the thundering silence of God’s assumed death, Woody has become a prophet without credentials: the voice of one laughing in the wilderness. As a true comic artist, he cannot help but recognize the irony of his position. And we, the audience, cannot help but adore him for it.

HARRY CHENEY

The entertainment and idea markets are competitive places. In view of the superabundance of material on every hand, and on every subject, why should the offerings of Woody Allen merit our consideration?

One of the privileged few unshackled by commercial constraints, Allen can make any sort of film he likes. He assumes an intelligent, literate audience. Beyond the laughs, one senses a treatment of serious issues that deserves, if not agreement, at least a hearing.

Allen is like a man who goes through life wearing mirror glasses—backwards. Everything reflects himself. He is frequently the only fully developed character in his films. In Broadway Danny Rose, the other characters, like volleyball players, set up big lines for Danny to spike.

It is all wonderfully funny, of course. Allen has few equals in pointing out the absurdities and posturings of the human condition, whether in witty repartee, one-liners, or in slapstick. However, the humor falls short of Allen’s earlier works and shows none of the technical trickery of last year’s Zelig.

Neither does Allen escape his parochial New York Weltanschauung. One still gets the impression that anyone outside of New York is a cultural Neanderthal. To turn Shakespeare on his head, the stage has become a world, with its own rules. In this one, Jews are always intellectuals, Italians boozy singers or homicidal mobsters. (Perhaps he is laughing at his audience?)

Finally, Woody Allen the philosopher/theologian is still with us, interjecting his metaphysical musings with refreshing honesty. “Do you believe in God?” Tina asks Danny during a discussion on the utility of guilt. “No,” he answers, “but I still feel guilty about it.” (One might ask how an impersonal, mechanistic universe could produce someone as creative as Woody Allen.) Danny has primal fears; he is a “landlocked Hebrew.” Laughs are part of life, he says, but so is suffering. Though his creed is “acceptance, forgiveness, love,” Danny has learned that “we all want what we can’t have.” Woody Allen might want acceptance, forgiveness, and love; who wouldn’t? Whether we can have these things without God is a question beyond the scope of Broadway Danny Rose.

LLOYD BILLINGSLEY

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