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Rating: Have you ever thought that, in the fortunate case where Woody Allen acts again in one of his films, we will no longer have his Italian voice? Since the wonderful Oreste Lionello left us, we have lost in advance the vocal component of what for us is Woody Allen, since childhood. Of him Woody said: "With his voice, he made me a better actor." It's true, after all, you can watch Allen's films in English, with obviously wonderful results, but I still can't chase away a bit of sadness from my heart. It's something unconscious, I can't help it. The last Woody Allen I left in "Scoop".
But no, I don't want to sadden you, dear readers: on the contrary, with this review, I want to drive away a bad moment or a disgusting day with the favorite medicine of many men in this world: indeed, a film by Woody Allen. For the record, the director of the film is the honest Herbert Ross, who will have much success in the eighties with "Footloose"; but the screenplay is by our beloved, and it shows. Let's tell the truth: "Play It Again, Sam" (Play It Again, Sam, 1972) is one of the most beautiful chapters in Woody Allen's early career, that is, before the masterpieces from "Annie Hall" onwards.
The plot is simple yet effective and full of insights: film critic Allan Felix (Woody Allen) is left by his wife Nancy, tired of his laziness and disinclination to the adventurous life she so desires ("I want to live! I want to tour Europe on a motorcycle! You and I go, at most, to the cinema." "They send me there. I work for a film magazine!"). It will be friends Dick and Linda, played by Tony Roberts and Diane Keaton, who cheer him up and arrange dates for him, always ruined by the clumsy and nervous Allan. Linda does not give up and begins to keep him company, to talk to him and ensure everything is going well. Gradually, the feeling and friendship between the two will become so good and pleasant that something in the air will start to change. After all, Dick is always traveling for work...
But much of the film is amplified by the beautiful parallel with "Casablanca", particularly with Humphrey Bogart, the king of noir-cool. In fact, the film opens with Allan Felix almost in a trance in front of a cinema screen: he is watching, for the hundredth time, "Casablanca". His eyes are hypnotized by the detached yet powerful stage presence of Humphrey Bogart, by his words as sharp as rocks, by his drawn but elegant snout: he is saying goodbye to Ingrid Bergman at the smoky airport in a scene we all know. The points of contact and quotes from the historical film will be many: take the final part at the airport, where Linda and Dick are about to leave, and Allan is there with them.
In the English version, the final line will be "Play it again, Sam", play it again, Sam, quoting what Ingrid Bergman says to the black pianist at Rick's Café. In the Italian version, however, the meaning changes, because Woody Allen is Sam Felix, not Allan Felix. Hence the title "Provaci ancora, Sam", which nevertheless is apt but loses the quotation. Even more wonderful is the fact that throughout the film, Allan begins to suffer from a specific form of hallucination: seeing Humphrey Bogart in a trench coat and hat continually, intent on giving him advice on life and women:
BOGART: "There's no secret, kid. Women are very, very simple. Never met a woman who couldn't understand a slap in the face or a .45 caliber bullet."
ALLAN: "I could never hit her, Nancy. That kind of relationship wasn't between us."
BOGART: "Relationship? Where did you learn that word? From a Park Avenue shrink?"
ALLAN: "I'm not like you. At the end of Casablanca, when you lost Ingrid Bergman, weren't you destroyed?"
BOGART: "No big deal. A whiskey and soda, and on."
ALLAN: "You see, I don't drink. My body doesn't tolerate alcohol."
The screenplay of the film is robust and flowing, with great injections of comedy: in short, it's the classic well-made Woody Allen film: the theme of the man-woman relationship, love, sex; more generally, humor, poetry, and splendid dialogues. The whole is based on a theatrical text written and performed by Allen himself at the Brodway Theatre, together with Diane Keaton. It was there that the two met and began a relationship, which throughout the seventies would continue in an incredibly magical way thanks to a fascinating reality-film binomial. Diane Keaton is beautiful, in this film, but beautiful, with a somewhat fragile beauty: almost nervous, in Woody's words. Her aesthetic characteristics and her way of moving and acting make her perfect for the role of Linda, who is, after all, just one of the many side characters provided to Woody Allen in many of his films, always wonderful, tender, and funny: Sonja in "Love and Death", Annie in "Annie Hall", Mary in "Manhattan", Carol in "Manhattan Murder Mystery".
It is undeniable, therefore, that the main components of the film are memory and imagination, which in cinema, in art, tend to mix. It's not hard to think, in fact, of a little seven-year-old Woody Allen already with big black glasses sitting in the cinema watching "Casablanca," and being fascinated by it, as well as more generally by that whole American world of the forties so dear to him, splendidly told in "Radio Days". A period almost mythical, in all its romanticism. A period in which everyday reality mixed with the invisible yet familiar voices of the radio, and where famous actors were part of an unconscious Olympus that everyone occasionally visited. The stars, the dreams of youth. It was, in a word, magic.
Today is a bit different. More and more, I have the impression that no longer are there stars and actors with an aura so powerful as to let us capture this kind of magic, real or fake as it may be. No more idols that were Bogart and Ingrid Bergman or the Marx brothers, Clark Gable, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, James Dean, Audrey Hepburn, Marylin, Brando, Newman, McQueen (to mention the most famous, there are fifty more to mention).
We can have ours, more modern, why not, although the magic is no longer so strong, indeed... But easily capturing Woody's and combining them with his humor, we obtain a cocktail of celluloid that allows us to be transported to another world for an hour and a half. A happy world.
Bogart as a sidekick: what an invention, folks! Who knows what old Freud or the funny Jung would have said about this? And Dr. Chomsky? The one who hits patients with a ruler??
The message is this: rewatch as many films as possible by or with Woody Allen because who knows how much longer we can do it, knowing that in the meantime, he is there on the other side of the ocean, warm in his Manhattan home, with his two-sizes-too-big pants. And if, to reconnect to the beginning of this emotional review, we can no longer have Woody Allen's Italian voice talking to us, this will always remain in our memories and our films. It means we will continue to follow him in the original, with his voice. What do we care? It's hilarious. Indeed, since I'm here, on this magical site, with a touch of imagination, I want to do something. As soon as I send this review, it will immediately become a small time capsule, making Allen stay with us forever, allowing him to (quoting his words) become immortal not thanks to his works, but to become immortal without dying.
Let it be clear, this is not meant to be a sad or rhetorical review: it is just a small gift to someone who gave me so many hours of good humor and great cinema, as well as excellent cues to forge over time my personal humor. I believe it applies to you too. Everything that happens and that we see around us can be filtered through the lens of humor and imagination: Fellini did it, Wilder did it, Allen does it here with Bogart.
Final fog on Casablanca airport. Lights barely cutting through the night. Laughter and pleasant rustling in my mind. What a thing, guys: Panella said it, and Battisti sang it, that the truth lies in memory and fantasy.
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