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PLAY IT AGAIN SAM
Rating: 
USA. 1972.
Director – Herbert Ross, Screenplay/Based on the Play by Woody Allen, Producer – Arthur P. Jacobs, Photography – Owen Roizman, Music – Billy Goldenberg, Production Design – Ed Wittstein. Production Company – Apjac.
Cast:
Woody Allen (Allan Felix), Diane Keaton (Linda Christie), Tony Ross (Dick Christie), Jerry Lacy (Humphrey Bogart), Susan Anspach (Nancy Felix)
Plot: Neurotic movie buff Allan Felix becomes depressed after his wife Nancy leaves him. His two best friends, Dick and Linda Christie, try to get him out of it and to find someone else, but Allan’s klutzy neurosis fouls up every attempt. But then Allan finds that he has fallen in love with the equally neurotic Linda. As he tries to woo Linda, the spirit of Humphrey Bogart steps in to tell Allan how to succeed with ‘dames’.
Play It Again Sam is an early Woody Allen film, one that Allen adapted from Allen’s own 1969 play, which had also starred himself and Diane Keaton in the roles they play here. Although Allen had been directing films since What’s Up Tiger Lily (1965) and his own work since Take the Money and Run (1969), Play It Again Sam is one of the few occasions he has allowed himself to be directed by another director, in this case Herbert Ross, who also made the likes of The Seven Per Cent Solution (1976), The Goodbye Girl (1977) and Steel Magnolias (1987). Play It Again Sam was also the only time up until the 1990s that Woody Allen didn’t shoot in his home turf of New York City but instead in San Francisco.
Although it is sometimes not entirely regarded as one of the canonical Allen films, Play It Again Sam is in all ways a Woody Allen film and just as funny. As usual it is a witty run through Allen’s neuroses and ritual on-screen self-humiliations. Indeed Allen has never done his kind of neurotic hangups about desirability and dating schtick funnier than he does here – the film is at its most side-splitting during the string of disastrous dates that he gets set up on.
The film’s central joke is the contrasting of Allen’s perpetual angst and neurosis up against the gruff macho of Humphrey Bogart’s man’s man with quite hilarious results. (Allen would later returned to the idea of characters from bygone cinematic eras stepping into reality in The Purple Rose of Cairo [1985]). The ending appropriately conducts an elaborate, if downbeat, restaging of the climax of Casablanca (1942).
Woody Allen’s other genre films are:– Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (1972), Sleeper (1973), Love and Death (1975), A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), Zelig (1983), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), New York Stories (1989), Alice (1990), Shadows and Fog (1992), Mighty Aphrodite (1995), Deconstructing Harry (1997), Match Point (2005) and Scoop (2006).
Copyright Richard Scheib 2002
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