All you need to know about talent agent “Broadway” Danny Rose is that he represents such bottom-barrel entertainers as one-legged tap dancers, one-armed jugglers, and a balloon-animal artiste who, in Danny’s words, is on the brink of becoming “one of the great balloon-folding acts of all time! Really, ’cause I don’t just see you folding these balloons in joints. You listen to me, you’re gonna fold balloons at universities and colleges.”
Probably never on a Broadway stage, however, despite the agent’s ironic nickname.
With a plot that gallivants between the ratty environs of mid-’80s midtown to fading Catskills resorts and the Jersey wetlands, Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose bops jauntily between slapstick and one-liners. The narrative is spun by a group of seen-it-all comedians clustered around a table at the old Carnegie Deli, on Seventh Avenue, which, as the movie progresses gets more crowded as the funny men vie to top each other’s anecdotes about the woebegone agent. One tells of a songbird impresario whose act suffers a catastrophe, which ends with Danny pleading with a promoter: “The cat ate his bird. That comes under the Act of God clause!”
Playing himself, comic Sandy Baron shushes his compatriots and proclaims, “Are you finished? Because I have the greatest Danny Rose story. Hold it now. Are you finished? I have the greatest Danny Rose story, all right? You wanna do anything? This is gonna take some time.”
Coffee is ordered, and the jester launches into the tale of a one-minor-hit-wonder from the 1950s, who three decades later is having a small-change renaissance due to the 1980s nostalgia craze. Crooner Lou Canova’s career trajectory is confirmed in the movie when we see him on Joe Franklin’s show, thanking his host, “I’ve been on the show three, four times, and it just helps. I mean, it helps everybody. You’re New York, what can I tell you?”
The city is gray and sodden as Thanksgiving approaches, out-of-date wheat-pasted posters flapping in the chill wind, steam wafting from manholes as stray snowflakes descend.
Of course, NYC TV fixture Franklin welcomed stars of widely varying brightness to his homey set in the Broadway district, and the exchange between the two is pitch-perfect, capturing the optimistic chutzpah of those acts that occupy the grub layer of the loam from which springs the hearty weeds and prickly roses of America’s sprawling entertainment ecosphere:
Franklin: I always had the feeling, I don’t know how I can express this, that you, you were never obsessed to be a superstar, you were never driven to be a superstar, you just let it drift and take its own course, right?
Canova: Well, when I had a record out in the fifties, you know, it made some noise and everything like that, and you start to get to feel as though, hey, maybe you wanna be a bigger star, you wanna be this, you wannabe that. It didn’t really bother me. But now, I’m doing cruise ships, I’m doing bigger shows and such. I feel, I feel great, I mean, it’s a good time in life to do it.
Certainly Canova, despite his heavy gut and sagging chin, is acting as if he’s that kid 30 years earlier, enjoying the fruits of his renewed — if tenuous — success by stepping out on his wife. Thus we meet the beautiful Tina Vitale, played by Mia Farrow, the mistress who glitters like shattered glass and has a temper to match. Danny reluctantly acts as the beard to escort Tina to Lou’s make-or-break gig, which includes Milton Berle — looking for a nostalgia singer for his TV show and Vegas act — in the audience. Traveling to Jersey to pick up his “date” for the show, Danny runs afoul of Tina’s mobbed-up family and friends, and the pair lands in the Jersey wetlands, pursued by baseball-bat-wielding contract killers. A shoot-out in the storage hangar for Macy’s massive Thanksgiving parade balloons continues the witty subplot about inflatable animals that threads through the film.
Curiously, critics over the decades have marveled at Farrow’s portrayal of the brittle, brassy, and occasionally brutal Tina, who, we discover, yearns for an intellectual soulmate who can appreciate her aspirations to become an interior designer. When the film was released, in 1984, the Voice’s Andrew Sarris wrote that audience members might do “a double and triple take before one recognizes Mia Farrow under all the cheapness and tackiness … a tribute to Allen’s ability to make Farrow stretch for a role out of her range.” Indeed, Farrow is incandescent as Tina, but in retrospect, perhaps the former Mrs. Frank Sinatra wasn’t stretching very much at all, since Old Blue Eyes was Hoboken-born and had numerous questionable acquaintances and business partners over the decades. No doubt Farrow had many a real-life Rat Pack shindig from that first marriage to help her put meat on the bones of her moody Jersey mob widow.
Broadway Danny Rose was shot in sumptuously gradated black and white by cinematographer Gordon Willis, anchoring the theme of sweet reminiscence that pervades the film. The monochrome palette seamlessly segues us back and forth between tired Catskills acts of yore and a shambolic mid-’80s Gotham, still bedraggled from the fiscal crises of the ’60s and ’70s. The city is gray and sodden as Thanksgiving approaches, out-of-date wheat-pasted posters flapping in the chill wind, steam wafting from manholes as stray snowflakes descend. Yet the relationship between the unlikely pair — less star-crossed lovers than accidental heartthrobs (a bit where Danny and Tina have to wriggle against each other to slip out of ropes knotted by inept gangsters sexily conveys their developing, off-kilter romance) — adds genuine warmth to an often LOL script.
As always with Allen, Broadway Danny Rose presents a very specific, limited view of New York; in this case, propelled mostly by a bunch of white guys just sitting around kibbutzing. Allen’s wry screenplay eschews some of his other films’ underage love interests and ponderous musings on mortality, and his deft direction propels the plot as gracefully as a tap dancer too talented for Danny ever to represent.
Ultimately, our small-time hero, surrounded by his misfit retinue, must decide if he can bear breaking bread with a loved one who has left him bruised and betrayed.
But isn’t that exactly what Thanksgiving dinner has always been about? ❖
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Originally published: July 9, 1970
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