Broadway Danny Rose (Woody Allen) 1984

Danny Rose (Woody Allen) is a talent agent dealing with the absolute bottom of the barrell talent.  Danny has a chance to finally have one of his singers Lou Canova (Nick Forte) make it big when there is a revival for old lounge singer acts.  Canova’s big opportunity will be at singing for Milton Berle but Canova says he needs his mistress Tina (Mia Farrow) there to get his best performance.  Danny goes to get Tina, but there are complications when Tina doesn’t want to go and when a mob boss thinks Danny is stealing Tina away from him.

Broadway Danny Rose is actually a very simple road movie.  It is no more complicated than say, a Harold and Kumar go to White Castle.  Danny has a short amount of time to get Tina to the gig and wacky shenanigans ensue.  I’m not saying that is a bad thing.  It is just odd that in this period where Woody is at his most creative and close to the time where he said he wanted to do more serious work that he would do a simple road movie.

Broadway Danny Rose is almost completely carried by the performance of Woody Allen.  Here he is probably at his most nebbish.  He is always flailing his arms around, tossing out one liners like they are going out of style, and not a second goes by that he is not stuttering.  For those of you that hate the typical Woody character, you will absolutely hate this movie because he cranks it up to 11 here.  This is all Woody, all the time.  Hell, I love Woody Allen but there were moments even I wanted him to take his meds.  Allen does ultimately make this movie work as he does have some truly funny lines and makes the character lovable.

I know this one is a very short review but that is because there is not much to this movie.  And again, I don’t mean that in any negative way.  If you love Woody Allen’s characters then I think you will find this a funny movie.  There are one liners a plenty and Allen puts it all out there for a funny performance.  While I didn’t love it, it was a funny little movie.