Play It Again, Sam
                
Director: Herbert Ross
Year: 1972
Rating: 5.5
I am not sure if any film should begin with the ending of Casablanca playing in a theater. It might be the best final minutes of any film ever made. Whatever follows can't be as good. This is based on a Woody Allen play who then wrote the screenplay. But he left the directing to Herbert Ross. Ross at the time didn't have the reputation he was later to get with only Goodbye, Mr Chips and The Owl and the Pussycat in the bag. But this is Allen's film. He is in about every frame doing his now well-known shtick as the nebbish, complaining clumsy intellectual Jewish guy. He may not have felt himself ready to direct this film with only the slapstick Bananas and Take the Money and Run with him at the helm.



I used to find Allen hilarious back in the day and maybe it's just me or maybe it is all the weirdness about him since then, but by the halfway mark of this film I had enough of his self-deprecating comments and clutzy behavior around women. Taken by themselves, each of the comic lines are funny but there is too much of it putting himself down. I liked the ones that were just situational.

Allen to a woman he is trying to pick up.

"What are you doing Saturday night"

"Committing suicide"

"What about Friday night".


His wife (Susan Anspach) has just left him. "I don't find you fun anymore. I don't dig you physically. But don't take it personal". He falls into a depression surrounded by his Bogart pictures and posters on the wall. And starts having conversations with an imaginary Bogart (Jerry Lacy0 in the dark with his trench coat and fedora on. The world is full of dames Bogart tells him. His married friends Tony Roberts and Diane Keaton try and pep him up and encourage him to date. Look for girls for him. What kind do you like. Smart ones with big breasts.



The Keaton character in particular spends time with him while hubby is on the phone all the time for business. Keaton is adorable, part Annie Hall five years before that film made her a pop icon. All of his dates are disasters "I snapped my chin down onto some guy's fist and hit another one in the knee with my nose.". But he has Bogart pitching to him. We all have Bogart in us. He begins to fall for Keaton and Bogie is right there by his side giving him tips. But Allen really just wants a Casablanca ending more than anything.