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"Broadway Danny Rose" is a 1984 comedy that I regard as one of the least successful of Woody Allen.
It tells the story of a mediocre manager who loses his best artists, who, as soon as they sniff success, turn to more qualified agents with better connections. The film never takes off, it remains on bland and limp rhythms (it is at times improvised) and the actors don't deliver at all. For example, Mia Farrow, who I consider a nepotism case (Allen wrote a couple of lines of script to fulfill a wish of his wife), acts like a toilet bowl and wears a pair of very dark sunglasses throughout the film that completely invalidate any expressiveness. The goal was to create a character, but I repeat, Farrow's characterizations verge on the ignoble and pathetic. Moreover, the precarious acting of the Italian-American singer Canova (Nick Apollo Forte) derives from the fact that Allen retrieved him from a shabby suburban dive bar, trying to turn him into an actor. (In an interview, the director declared that Forte forced him to redo some scenes up to 50 times).
The film begins with an amusing gathering of unspecified characters who converse in a venue about anecdotes from the show business world until reaching the curious story of a small-time agent of artists, Danny Rose (Allen).
Danny shadows his protégé Canova, a chubby and semi-alcoholic Italian-American singer, with a lover (Farrow) whom he adores, but who demands he get rid of his wife. The little singer is in fashion, achieving decent performances and drawing closer to larger audiences when he decides to find a more tried and tested agent to really break through. The viewer can only witness the filth of the entertainment world through Danny Rose's failures, who seriously risked himself for his man. Bizarre and senseless is Danny's escape with the singer’s idiotic lover Tina from the henchmen of a mobster convinced that the agent was the man disturbing his chances of conquering the shadowy bad girl. To rid himself of the misunderstanding, Danny will mislead the Italians and will have one of his artists beaten to death. Tragic and chilling. Danny will be left empty-handed. The best piece of his stables will go with other agents, demonstrating an ingratitude probably now taken for granted in the show business world, despite having retrieved the runaway lover for him. Danny Rose will be left to spend a festive occasion with a leftover of unplaceable artists (like the stuttering ventriloquist and other failed cripples) in a surreal serenity of aware losers gathered. Unexpectedly, and it’s a gesture disconnected from the character Allen paints, Tina (Farrow) arrives, who hadn’t thanked Danny for his past services (and months had passed) and paradoxically remembers that insignificant little man, and when she arrives at the party it’s not really clear what she has to do with it: she mumbles, looks around bewildered, and hints at paraphrases of apologies and thanks. Danny will welcome her as a friend, and I still wonder why.
Allen is very decent and seeing him in borderline tragicomic situations means seeing him at his best. But the narrative is disconnected, and the peripheral sketches are null or nearly so. Then the story takes on grotesque aspects, but it is neither original nor particularly interesting. It veers into dark comedy and pokes at the comic, not the slapstick variety abandoned years ago. To demonstrate the rather unsuccessful episode, everything is forgotten without passionate residues after a couple of nights’ sleep.
The joke to remember is from Danny Rose: "Thank God I'm an atheist".
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