Star Spangled Girl (1971)

          While not an outright flop, Neil Simon’s comic play The Star Spangled Girl ran for less than nine months in 1966 and 1967, a disappointment given the outsized expectations created by Simon’s previous successes—Barefoot in the Park had a four-year run, The Odd Couple lasted more than two years, and so on. Ever the pragmatist, Simon agreed with critics that The Star Spangled Girl was not his best work, a notion instead of a premise, and the play’s clumsy engagement with ’60s counterculture revealed that politics were not good fodder for Simon’s imagination. Nonetheless, Simon’s name had gained sufficient marketplace value by the early ’70s that even his failures were given screen adaptations, hence this middling and tiresome romantic comedy.

          In 1970s Los Angeles, impoverished activist Andy Hobart (Tony Roberts) publishes an underground newspaper, The Nitty Gritty, out of the filthy garden apartment he shares with his one and only contributor, brilliant but eccentric Norman Cornell (Todd Susman). Andy makes ends meet through chicanery and petty theft. One day, wholesome would-be Olympic swimmer Amy Cooper (Sandy Duncan) moves into the same apartment complex, and Norman becomes infatuated with her, which distracts him from writing. Norman harasses Amy relentlessly, breaking into her apartment and spray-painting love messages all over town, but she finds him repellant. Eventually, Andy persuades Amy to take a part-time job at the paper, hoping this will inspire Norman to resume his work. Predictably, Amy and Andy fall in love, putting a wedge into Andy’s friendship with Norman.

           At its most tedious, the film features drab political “debates” between Amy and Andy, she the aw-shucks heartland gal and he the intellectual pinko. It is beyond inconceivable that these characters find each other attractive. Even though screenwriters Arnold Margolin and Jim Parks tweaked Simon’s narrative to pull the story forward into the ’70s, traces of the play’s temporal origins peek through the surface in unhelpful ways. It’s as if this movie desperately wants to engage with the fraught political atmosphere of the period during which the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War were escalating, but lacks the nerve to do so. Furthermore, because Star Spangled Girl forefronts romantic banter and sight gags, the sense that something more substantial is being suppressed makes the film feel even more trivial than it might otherwise. In sum, Star Spangled Girl pairs frenetic silliness with unformed political musings, so the film strikes out on two levels at once.

          That said, Roberts—later to become a staple in a decade’s worth of Woody Allen movies—delivers Simon’s one-liners well, and both Duncan and Susman exhibit boundless energy. Star Spangled Girl also contains a peculiar shout-out to another movie: During one early scene, a lookalike for Midnight Cowboy character Joe Buck references Buck’s experiences in that film.

Star Spangled Girl: FUNKY

The Million Dollar Duck (1971)

          Based on a story by Ted Key, who created the characters Hazel and Mr. Peabody and Sherman, this amiable live-action picture from Walt Disney Productions offers a modern spin on the old Aesop fable about the goose that laid the golden egg. Adhering to the Disney trope of building stories around bumbling professors, The Million Dollar Duck stars Dean Jones as Albert Dooley, a kindly young professor with financial troubles. One day at his lab, a duck that hasn’t proved useful as a research animal wanders out of its cage and into a neighboring lab, where the fowl gets irradiated. Albert takes the duck home, only to discover that the duck now lays eggs made of pure gold. This development delights Albert’s scatterbrained wife, Katie (Sandy Duncan), even though the couple’s son, Jimmy (Lee Montgomery), simply enjoys having a pet. (He names the duck Charley.) Seeing a way out of his fiscal woes, Albert conspires with his buddy, a lawyer named Fred Hines (Tony Roberts), to sell the eggs and make a fortune. Meanwhile, Albert’s next-door neighbor, U.S. Treasury employee Finley Hooper (Joe Flynn), suspects Albert is up to something. Farcical intrigue ensues.

          All of this stuff is completely silly, of course, and The Million Dollar Duck is filled with tomfoolery along the lines of adults sitting on all fours and barking like dogs to make Charley do his trick, since the duck has a phobia about canines. Per the Disney formula, the picture also features a very long climactic chase filled with questionable special effects. (Picture Jones riding the cherry picker attached to a truck, then squealing every time the truck nears an overpass.) Nonetheless, the filmmakers keep things simple in terms of narrative elements, so instead of trying to anthropomorphize the titular critter, The Million Dollar Duck merely depicts what happens when Albert, Fred, and Katie get greedy. Chances are you can guess whether the major characters learn to accept wholesome values by the end of the story. Flynn and Jones provide their usual competent work, while aggressively wholesome costar Duncan, appearing in one of her first movies, makes the most of a trope about her character spewing malapropisms along the lines of “You don’t have to yell at me—I have 20/20 hearing.” Plus, it’s hard to get too stern about a flick that features crusty supporting player James Gregory speaking this unlikely dialogue: “Yes, there does seem to be a certain degree of duck involvement here.”

The Million Dollar Duck: FUNKY

Le Sauvage (1975)

          The sleeky entertaining French farce Le Sauvage is like a Gallic spin on a Blake Edwards movie. Fast, funny, sexy, surprising, and touching, the picture matches two iconic stars—breathtaking Catherine Deneuve and suave Yves Montand—with masterful storytelling by director/co-writer Jean-Paul Rappeneau. Le Sauvage is frothy entertainment at its best, exactly because it’s not frothy in every scene; Rappeneau realizes that audiences need moments of sanity in order to care about characters when things get crazy.
          Here’s the short version of the plot. Frenchwoman Nelly (Deneuve) is in Venezuela to marry her hotheaded Italian fiancé, Vittori (Luigi Vannucchi). Just before the wedding, she changes her mind, so she runs away and seeks shelter in a hotel, where an altruistic stranger, Martin (Montand), intervenes when Vittori breaks into Nelly’s hotel room and tries to drag her home. Escaping the hotel, Nelly tracks down her former lover, an American named Alex (Tony Roberts), for help leaving the country. Vitorri finds Nelly at Alex’s place, too, so she flees again—taking Alex’s prized Toulouse-Lautrec painting with her so she can sell it for traveling money. More chases and close encounters ensue, until Nelly finds her perfect hideaway on Martin’s private island, even though Martin has no interest in visitors. Unlikely romance blooms as various forces converge on the island, some pursuing Nelly and some pursuing Martin.

          It’s all completely outlandish, but Rappeneau presents events in such a methodical way that the story never spins out of control. Quite to the contrary, the narrative has a comfortable rhythm of intimate scenes and noisy set pieces. Rappeneau also takes full advantage of a series of dynamic locations, with scenes set in France and New York in addition to the various South American locales. Montand suits this material perfectly, his macho energy leavened by poetic sensitivity; Vannucchi is wonderful as the maniac who’ll stop at nothing to recover his runaway bride; and it’s a kick to see Woody Allen regular Roberts smoothly delivering lines in French.

          Yet the whole piece revolves around Deneuve, since only a woman of her exquisite beauty could support a plot predicated on men chasing her across the globe and tolerating her quixotic behavior. While never disengaging from her familiar screen persona of chilly sophistication, Deneuve lightens up considerably here, and it’s impossible to say enough about how ravishing she looks. Even when scampering around the island wearing nothing but one of Martin’s shirts, she’s mesmerizing. That’s why the main gimmick of the love story—the notion that Martin finds Nelly highly resistible because she’s such a pain in the ass—is so fun. The ending is never in doubt, but the path to the ending is filled with delightful detours. Plus, befitting the analogy to Blake Edwards’ work, Rappeneau stages physical-comedy scenes with the artistry and grace of a choreographer. So even though Le Sauvage isn’t about anything, it’s consistently playful, vibrant, and warmhearted.

Le Sauvage: GROOVY

Play It Again, Sam (1972)

          The romantic comedy Play It Again, Sam is significant for two very specific reasons: It’s one of only two ’70s movies that Woody Allen acted in but did not direct, and it’s the first screen collaboration between Allen and his definitive ’70s leading lady, Diane Keaton. Adapted by Allen from his own stage play of the same name and directed by the always-elegant Herbert Ross, Play It Again, Sam is a silly trifle about a nebbish who falls in love with his best friend’s wife while receiving advice from an imaginary version of movie icon Humphrey Bogart. The contrast between geeky little Allen and suave, trenchcoat-wearing Bogie (played by Jerry Lacy) is consistently amusing, and the chemistry between Allen and Keaton, who play simpatico neurotics, is terrific. So, even though the movie is never laugh-out-loud funny and even though the story gets overly mechanical toward the end, Play It Again, Sam goes down smoothly.

          Set in San Francisco, the picture stars Allen as Allan, a film critic whose wife, Nancy (Susan Anspach), just left him. Allan finds comfort in the company of his pal Dick (Tony Roberts), a self-involved businessman, and Dick’s amiable but high-strung wife, Linda (Keaton). As Dick and Linda try again and again to connect Allan with new women—most of the blind dates go disastrously bad—Allan daydreams that his favorite tough-guy movie star, Bogart, has materialized to offer romantic advice. This culminates in a complex scene of Allan putting the moves on Linda while arguing with Bogie, who pushes Allan to act more aggressively. Shtick ensues. Giving the sort of super-invested, almost desperate comic performance that marked his earliest films, Allen relies as much on physical slapstick as he does on his trademark wit—and while the trope of Allen bumping into walls and knocking over tables gets tired, his one-liners are great. (“I was incredible last night in bed—I never once had to look up and consult the manual.”)

          From a writing perspective, Allen does a great job of “opening up” the play, using cross-cutting and multiple locations to make the piece feel completely cinematic. Concurrently, Ross finds clever ways to slip the Bogart character into and out of scenes. It all basically works until the end, when Allen twists the story in knots so he can stage a riff on the final scene of Casablanca (1942). (The real thing appears during the opening scene of Play It Again, Sam, when Allan watches Casablanca In a theater.) This forced climax lacks the effortlessness that distinguishes the rest of the film, but it was probably the best means of paying off the whole Bogart angle. Flaws aside, Play It Again, Sam is quasi-essential viewing for ’70s-cinema fans, because a year after this picture was released, Allen and Keaton reteamed for Sleeper (1973), the first in the five Allen-directed ’70s movies they made together. In other words—and you knew this was coming, didn’t you?—Play It Again, Sam was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Play It Again, Sam: GROOVY

Annie Hall (1977)

          Whether it’s viewed as the climax of Woody Allen’s early career as a self-deprecating comedian or the beginning of his later career as a serious filmmaker, Annie Hall is an extraordinary piece of work. Among many other things, Annie Hall is Allen’s first attempt at a Big Statement, simultaneously a deep exploration of one specific relationship and a microcosmic study of relationships in general. Furthermore, the picture contains two of the most vividly sketched characters in ’70s cinema, both of whom are fictionalized versions of the actors playing them: Annie Hall, the eccentric singer portrayed by Diane Keaton, and Alvy Singer, the neurotic comic portrayed by Allen.

          To the filmmaker’s great credit, neither character gets off easily, because both are depicted as fascinating people capable of infuriating behavior—and both are shown to be almost pathologically incapable of subverting their identities into the collective identity of a couple, despite being very much in love. (Allen had a lengthy real-life affair with Keaton, his costar in a string of beloved ’70s films.) Yet the bond between Alvy and Annie isn’t the film’s only romance; Annie Hall illustrates Allen’s devotion to the island of Manhattan by creating several hilarious fish-out-of-water scenes depicting Alvy gasping for air whenever he’s taken off the bedrock of New York City.

          The bits of Alvy disastrously trying to cook lobsters in a beach house and trying to drive in Los Angeles are tiny comic masterpieces, just as the interaction between Alvy and his sitcom-producer pal, Rob (Tony Roberts), articulates Allen’s contempt for the assembly-line approach to creating Hollywood pabulum. Some of the most vivid material in the picture involves Annie’s WASP family, particularly the unforgettably funny/creepy scenes of Annie’s brother, Duane (Christopher Walken), giving a speech about vehicular suicide—and then taking a terrified Alvy for a car ride.

          As the title suggests, however, the movie’s most memorable invention is Annie herself, a character so individualistic she inspired a fashion craze as women tried to mimic Keaton’s offbeat wardrobe of repurposed men’s clothing. Whether you find Annie appealing or irritating is a matter of taste, but it’s impossible not to appreciate moments like the scene in which Annie magically leaves her body during sex because she’s bored.

          Beyond Allen and Keaton, both of whom are at their very best, Annie Hall features a deep well of colorful actors in supporting roles, from featured performers Colleen Dewhurst, Shelley Duvall, Carol Kane, and Paul Simon (yes, the singer-songwriter) to bit player Sigourney Weaver, who makes her blink-and-you’ll-miss-it screen debut at the end of the picture. Yet perhaps the funniest mini-performance in the picture is given by author Marshall McLuhan, who appears in a quintessential Allen moment: As Alvy waits in line at a theater, listening to a windbag pontificate about McLuhan’s media theories, Alvy wishes he could set the guy straight, so he yanks the real McLuhan from behind a poster, upon which McLuhan says to the windbag, “You know nothing of my work.”

          It’s a given that Allen’s movies aren’t for everyone, but Annie Hall winningly sets his intellectualism, narcissism, and neuroticism into a palatable framework by dramatizing the perils of being opinionated about everything; in a very important way, Annie Hall is the Allen movie for people who don’t like Allen movies, since it depicts the inability of a character very much like Woody Allen to comfortably exist in everyday life.

Annie Hall: OUTTA SIGHT