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John Cusack,
Jack Warden,
Chazz Palminteri,
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Woody Allen
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: Miramax
: Comedies
: 99 min.
: English
: English
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Bullets Over Broadway is a Woody Allen romp that, as the title suggests, combines gangsters with show business at the height of the Roaring Twenties. David Shayne (John Cusack) is a straight-arrow playwright who plans to stand firm against compromising his work, but quickly abandons that stance when his producer (Jack Warden) finds a backer to mount his show on Broadway. There's just one catch, however: the backer is a mobster (Joe Viterelli) who sees Shayne's play as a vehicle for his dizzy, talent-free girlfriend, Olive (Jennifer Tilly). Shayne also has to deal with the demands of veteran theatre diva Helen Sinclair (Dianne Wiest) and is shocked to discover that Olive's hitman bodyguard, Cheech (Chazz Palminteri), is probably a better playwright than he is, as he secretly revises Shayne's work when he sits in on rehearsals. ~ Don Kaye, All Movie Guide
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| A Play So Depressing and Morbid Gene O'Neill Had to Meet the Author
by RJones3
January 28, 2008 - 11:48 AM PST
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1 out of 1 members found this review helpful
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| The play within a play is a natural vehicle for farce, a form for which I have a soft spot. Recall Mel Brooks' The Producers of 1968, which was either "shoddy and gross and cruel" (Renata Adler, N.Y. Times) or brilliantly funny, or both. The 1982 play Noises Off by Michael Fern was not especially successful as a movie but had me laughing hysterically when I saw it in a community theater. Now we have the 1994 collaboration between Woody Allen and Douglas McGrath, directed by the former. Of the over sixty movies I have rented from GreenCine, this is the only one that I saw twice through in one sitting. There were wonderful throwaway lines in the second viewing that I had missed in the first. The love scenes between Dianne Wiest and John Cusack brought me back to the dialogs of my youth between Elaine May and Mike Nichols, ferociously self-mocking. Wiest was particularly funny in her sincerely contrived dramatic gestures, shushing her admirer when it suited her. A bonus in this movie is the painstaking evocation of the twenties, especially in the incidental dance numbers and the music of the opening and closing credits. |
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GreenCine Member Rating
(Average 7.19)
170 Votes
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| The list is only 75 titles long, because GreenCine doesn't have the following titles: The Plague Dogs, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, Last Exit to Brooklyn, The Nasty Girl, City of Hope, Gadjo Dilo |
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