BROADWAY DANNY ROSE (1984) – It’s always a dame

The following is my contribution to The Magnificent Mia Farrow Blogathon, being hosted by the blog Pale Rider on Feb. 9 & 10, 2020. Click on the above image, and read bloggers’ takes on the life and career of this legendary actress!

In the 1980’s, Mia Farrow not only had a relationship with Woody Allen, but she also appeared in and influenced the tone of his movies as much as Diane Keaton had in the 1970’s. Nearly all of the Allen movies in which she appeared showed the beatific effect she had on him at the time — we’ll here forego any commentary on their relationship’s tempestuous end — and any of those movies demonstrate how Farrow’s gifts complemented Allen’s confident direction. But for the sake of this blogathon, I’ve chosen to discuss the Allen-directed role that is most foreign to our view of the waifish Farrow: Feisty Tina Vitale in Allen’s broad comedy Broadway Danny Rose.

Allen plays the title role, a down-on-his-luck theatrical agent — his acts include a woman who plays drinking glasses, and a parrot that pecks out songs on a keyboard — who always loses his higher-end acts when they get successful and want to move on to more assertive management.

One of Allen’s more promising acts is Lou Canova (Nick Apollo Forte), a crooner from the 1950’s who is getting by on the fumes of his past success. When the nostalgia craze comes in the 1980’s, suddenly Lou is hot stuff again, and he lands a gig on a big-time TV special. For his TV appearance, Lou has only one major request for Danny — that he act as a “beard” and bring Lou’s extra-marital girlfriend, Tina Vitale (Mia Farrow), to the special’s taping for good luck.

As luck would have it, two-timer Tina discovers that she herself has been cuckolded by another woman, and when Danny comes to pick her up, Tina is in the middle of a volatile phone call with Lou in which she says to forgot about her attending the special. From there, Danny goes into the world’s longest panic attack, as he tries to make amends with Tina as well as keep himself and Tina from getting killed by a couple of Tina’s low-life mobster acquaintances.

As rich as the characterizations and setting are, there are really only two characters you remember vividly after the movie ends. Allen eschews his usual schnook persona, but Danny Rose appears to be a not-too-distant relative. He gesticulates endlessly like a traffic cop gone haywire, and he is forever spouting Jewish homilies to placate his enemies. He’s quite a hoot.

But the real revelation is Farrow (also a million miles away from our usual perception of her) as the gum-chewing, hard-nosed Tina Vitale. According to Allen, he based Tina on an assertive waitress at an Italian restaurant that he and Farrow used to frequent. Farrow casually observed that she’d like to play a woman like that in a movie. The irony is that, when Allen wrote the script and presented it to Farrow, she feared she couldn’t possibly do it justice!

Happily, Farrow was wrong, as she fully inhabits her role — bleached blonde hair, dark glasses, and all — and makes Tina funny and touching, even when she’s at her loudest and least sympathetic. In fact, she dons the role so well that the only time we’re aware it’s Farrow is when she takes off those big glasses and we see Farrow’s delicate features beneath.

Broadway Danny Rose is Allen’s happy valentine (probably unintended) to those fans who prefer to see him being just plain funny. He provides the movie’s laughs, and Farrow provides its heart.