On Screen

...Danny, unbowed by defeat, continues with his charitable ways', looking after his woebegone troupe...

...A group of vintage comics (led by Sandy Baron and including Corbett Monica and Will Jordan) sit at a table in the Carnegie Delicatessen and regale one another with "can you top this...

...Were it not by Woody Allen, Danny Rose would have a tough time hawking it...

...Through Danny's unceasing efforts (down to showing him how to delight the ladies in the audience by playing catch with the microphone), Lou is finally hired to perform at a benefit at the Waldorf...

...Splash manages to locate itself somewhere between the commercial and the idiosyncratic: It is accessibly eccentric...

...The meek shall inherit the circus tent...

...The conductor, unhinged by jealous rage, schemes to murder his wife and her lover, artfully planning it so that the violinist, and not he, will be implicated...

...Connolly meant this as a dig at the British upper classes...

...There is much dashing about and slipping up on red herrings...

...If you thought to ask what the editor did with the bums after the spread was shot—did he throw them back in the gutter in their three-piece suits?—then you are probably missing the point...

...Still, the movie has a certain slaphappy appeal and fans of Arthur will be delighted to see Dudley Moore do his stagger-and-slur routine once more...

...he knows, as flashier directors like Lawrence Kas-dan don't, when to pull back and let a scene—instead of the camerawork— speak...

...I'm not sure what Woody Allen thinks he's doing in Broadway Danny Rose...

...Broadway Danny Rose is set on the seamy side of tinseltown, amid entertainers who aren't entertaining...

...This could be the Big Time: He implores Danny to pick up Tina in New Jersey and bring her along as his date...

...anecdotes: "And remember the time Danny tried...

...An opening flashback to 20 years ago (segregated further by being shot in black-and-white), shows us how on a boat ride on Cape Cod with his parents and horny brother, Freddie (John Candy), Allen fell into the water and was caught by a tiny, female creature...

...Broadway Danny Rose, a rather stylized portrait of life in the losing lane, is dolorously—very dolorously— funny...

...Called upon to act fey and breathless, she seems merely strained...

...the high spot is a quite cleverly orchestrated musical duel between the two men...

...presumably he wasn't aware, as Jewish comedians are, of Epstein's penchant for laughing at the mention of his name...

...he takes his fans for granted...

...Danny, a saint disguised in plaid jackets and baggy pants, believes in all of them...

...It is similarly not ours to wonder why Allen, as King of the Misfits, gives himself all the good lines and beneficence while the rest of the misfits get to do nothing more than act misfit-ish...

...Kornbluth finally prevails, Madison is captured and languishes in an observation tank, and Allen backs off...

...And who should be seen coming out of their apartment in the wee hours of morning but the handsome foreign violinist with whom the conductor is scheduled to perform...

...I don't find her perfomance the least brilliant—except as it faithfully reflects the gleam in her director's eye...

...Nastassja Kinski, however, is entirely outofherelementin this trifle...

...Here, in a wink, is what happens: A famous conductor (played in his trademark shuffling manner by Dudley Moore) comes home to discover that his rather new and very young wife (Nastassja Kinski) has been cheating on him...

...There is even a trace of the contempt that marked Stardust Memories in the shallowness of the conception, therepetition of jokes from earlier films...

...instead of evoking our concern for the losers who surround Danny, it suggests that we admire Danny—and his creator—for stooping to conquer...

...For the story line to keep our interest at all, it would have to be on the basis of the dialogue or the acting...

...This relatively witless remake of the Preston Sturges comedy of the same name is the kind of movie where everything of importance happens in the first 15 minutes...

...His gift of failure—his ability to spin dross from dross—has taken on the sheen of legend...

...It is difficult to tell yet whether she is too intense a personality—or untalented an actress—to act against her grain...

...his record of near-misses becomes an industry myth...

...What is clearest is that with each successive movie Allen has become less interested in pleasing moviegoers...

...But a good deal of the credit obviously belongs to the first-rate script, on which the visual delights of the movie depend (the underwater cinematography is fittingly lyrical, all dapples and bursts of light...

...Despite the fact that the locale is New York City, the natty settings— elegant duplex, large "island" kitchen, ornate hotel rooms—look like they belong anywhere in Cinemaland...

...You leave it with a sense of possibility, not exactly transported but suspended above the mundane...

...The mermaid (Daryl Hannah) has long blonde tresses and is beautiful, the way mermaids are supposed to be...

...The newest addition to Danny's risible registry, Lou is a departure from the usual novelty act—he is a torch singer who has composed a serenade to la-sagna—although not that much of a departure, since he is a has-been hoping to grab on to the coattails of the nostalgia craze...

...Perhaps the one thing that intrigues Allen in this new offering is the ideal of transformation...

...He has applied the lightest of touches (indeed he seems to have directed with one hand tied behind his back) to an essentially heavy-hearted story, and the effect verges on the schizoid...

...Kinski's screen presence is heavier and less dextrous...

...But she is assuredly not a naif, the sort of ingenue that Audrey Hepburn used to play so fetchingly and that Elizabeth McGovern is now often cast as...

...Rooted in the scant soil of whimsy, the film is fertilized by bits and pieces of earth-bound reality—Bloomingdale's makeup counters, "Crazy Eddie" commercials, surly cabdrivers—and grows increasingly solid...

...Adrift in a small boat, waiting to be taken to the other side of the island, he falls into the water again and is saved once more...

...The only real laughs from the audience when I saw the film were inspired by those tried-and-true cracks about rabbis and uncles from Brooklyn—feeble yet sure cues for "people who think the word Epstein a j oke in itself," as the critic Cyril Connolly once described them...

...She arrives stark naked at the Statue of Liberty, is arrested ("This ain't California," growls one of the policemen...

...There is a very funny Godfather party that Danny faux passes in and out of, until he winds up being chased with Tina through the swamps of New Jersey by a pair of murderous Mafia brothers...

...I found that scene particularly misjudged...

...Of course, the ever reliable Danny delivers Tina in time to observe Lou's moment of triumph and is promptly stabbed in the back for his kindness...

...after that it is one drawn-out winding down to a happy resolution...

...We don't go in for this stuff here"), and is claimed by Allen...

...Unfaithfully Yours was concocted by a trio of young writers and directed by Howard Zieff with slick professionalism...

...But not for long: Guided by the Visa card in Allen's wallet, which she kept, Madison follows him to NewYork...

...Danny's jinxed attempts to collect the gum-snapping, hard talking Tina comprise the core of the movie...

...The focus of Broadway Danny Rose is the history of one Lou Canova (played to beefy perfection by Nick Apollo Forte...

...The writers who worked on Splash, Lowell Ganz, Baba-loo Mandel and Bruce Jay Friedman, had the good instincts to play the humor of their vision up and the nostalgia— which goes way back to the womb— down...

...If laughter, as Baudelaire thought, "comes from the idea of one's own superiority, " then that would explain why a lot of people seem to find Unfaithfully Yours passingly funny: The mix-up the plot turns on is so obvious, so amenable to clarification, that viewers must either be chortling at the characters' idiocy or at their own clear-eyedness...

...The clients that stick with him are bottom-of-the-barrel types no other agent would dream of taking on, much less attempt to find jobs for—a blind xylophonist, a woman who plunks out tunes on a row of water glasses, a stammering ventriloquist...

...Madison learns to speak English while watching TV for six hours at Bloomingdale's, and for the next six days (she has announced, mysteriously, that she can only stay until "the moon is full") all is bliss...

...It is interesting to note that Dudley Moore, who teamed up so smoothly with McGovern in Lovesick, doesn't seem to know what to make of Kinski (other than to duck her opulent aura) in a comparable situation...

...Just when Allen proposes and Madison is ready to reveal her watery secret, the dastardly Kornbluth (played in a sympathetically compulsive manner by Eugene Levy) wreaks havoc with their plans...

...This is the genuine hybrid article—a romantic comedy that short-changes neither aspect...

...Director Ron Howard (of Opie fame) deserves some of the credit...

...Splash is a love story about a man who can't swim and a mermaid...

...Lou wears intensely ruffled shirts, drinks too much, and is torn between his family life (loyal wife and kids) and his infatuation with his mistress, Tina, the blonde widow of a Ma-fioso (acted, unaccountably, by Mia Farrow...

...I came out of the theater depressed, but I guess your response will depend on how poignant you like your chuckles...

...The audience first gets to hear of him through the recollections of others, like a cautionary tale told around a camp-fire...

...After Allen's girlfriend Victoria moves out of his apartment because he can't bring himself to say "I love you," he returns to Cape Cod—by taxi...

...An Italian valet, mistaking the conductor's directive to "keep an eye" on his wife, has hired a private eye to video her comings and goings in his absence...

...He also visits another agent who got put in the hospital by the Mafia brothers instead of him...

...The film, shot in black-and-white by Gordon Willis, appears to be narrated in the present about a time in the recent past...

...The film's soul seems slightly askew...

...The singer, not a bad guy but a malleable one, has been advised by the steely Tina to drop Danny in favor of a more influential agent now that he is again in demand...

...Tina, meanwhile, has been suffering the pangs of a belatedly blooming conscience (the seeds were planted by Danny during their escapades), and tries to find Danny so she can apologize...

...Af least that appears to be the case...

...Since Madison, as the mermaid will be named (for the avenue), is also adoring and unimpededly erotic, some might say the movie centers on a specifically male fantasy—except the notion of finding one's ideal companion, the missing part that will make you whole, is pre-sexist in origin, dating back to Plato...

...This being a fairy tale, though, the man and his mermaid get to live in their kingdom in the sea...

...Broadway Danny Rose is oddly motivated, an eerie mix of the wishful and brutal...

...Unfortunately, neither sparkles...

...this retrospective angle is not quite convincing because Allen hasn't bothered to create a tangibly different look for the two periods, but it works to impart the story with a fable-like quality...

...This is a gentle, witty movie: Race, don't crawl, to it...

...To this end, he has rendered Mia Farrow unrecognizable...

...Today in New York City the brothers run a wholesale produce market...

...Do we really want to see, in the middle of an ostensible comedy, the bandaged wreck of a man whose name Danny gave as his own, erroneously believing him to have sailed for Europe...

...He gets a tantalizing glimpse of the now grownup mermaid, who darts out from between the weeds to check on him and then, with a flick of her tail, is gone...

...Then there is a cut to a flashback of Danny trying to convince a jaded club manager to book a man-pulling-rabbits-out-of-his-hat act, even though the rabbits are sickly...

...Decked out in exaggerated blonde curls, dark glasses and a padded bra, this once most delicately honed of actresses cocks her hips and barks in Brooklynese...

...I was reminded as I watched it of Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts and, more uneasily, of the Esquire issue of several years ago in which some editor got it into his head to pluck several bums off the Bowery and dress them up in spiffy outfits...

...In a closing scene worthy of Dickens at his most bathetic—or of a freak show— Danny is serving up frozen Thanksgiving dinners to his babblingly grateful clients when Tina, like the Ghost of Thanksgiving past, appears at the door...

...Splash is a perfect divertissement: It delivers on its promise while it lasts and then lingers briefly before fading, like the afterglow of a pleasant dream...

...Rose (Woody Allen) is a sweet schlemiel of an agent who invariably is abandoned by his acts just when they begin to make it...

...A frenzied marine scientist who is determined to prove to his scornful superiors that he has spotted a mermaid, Kornbluth has been stalking Madison, haplessly throwing pails of water on the legs of a woman he mistakes for her in the hope of turning them into a tail...

...But the convolutions of the revenge motif get a bit tedious, especially since our doubts about the wife's innocence have been cleared up earlier on, and the contrivance of their being played out twice—first in the conductor's daydreams and then in reality—sent me off into my own dreams...

...The man (Tom Hanks) is ardent yet tentative, the way men are...