Play It Again, Sam (1972)

There is a point at which Woody Allen’s caricature of an obsessive compulsive, neurotic, and generally weird little man stops being endearing and starts becoming annoying. For me, we reached that point a long, long time ago. If the reader is unsure of exactly which kind of character I am referring to, I kindly direct them to the 1972 “comedy” entitled Play It Again, Sam.

Written by Woody Allen and directed by Herbert Ross, the film’s plot is simple enough to be followed even by those who think it’s a brilliant piece of work. When his wife suddenly divorces him, film critic Allan (Woody Allen) struggles to get his love life back on track. With the help of married friends Linda (Diane Keaton) and Dick (Tony Roberts), Allan gets set up with a plethora of women, but perpetually fails to impress them and ends up whining about how he’s going to be celibate for the rest of his life. Eventually Allan realizes that the woman he’s really attracted to (shocker: it’s Linda) has been in plain sight the whole time, and wrestles with the dilemma of whether loyalty to a close friend is worth resisting the strong temptation Linda poses.

The pathetic thing about Allen’s career isn’t that he is typecast – it’s that he typecasts himself. It seems as if every lead role he writes is written specifically for him to portray, and while some may see this as the sign of a multi-talented individual, it can also be taken as extreme narcissism. (The lead of Play It Again, Sam is named Allan, after all, a mere one-letter divergence in spelling from the name of its writer.) In fact, this overconfidence stands in complete contrast with the personalities of the aforementioned role, recycled time and time again in Allen’s films: that of an anxious, middle-aged man disgusted with himself and unhappy with his life until he randomly meets up with his soul mate, an equally insecure and neurotic woman usually embodied by Ms. Keaton. The most disconcerting aspect of this character is his creepy sexual overconfidence. While I understand that perhaps Allen and Co. were trying to appeal to the “everyman,” I am never enthusiastic about having to hear some skeevy guy go on and on about how great he is in bed. I just don’t buy it.

While considered a comedy, the film’s humor falls flat. Most of the jokes play off of the fact that Allan knows he’s undesirable, yet is eager to prove it at every opportunity. It’s almost as if he wants to own repugnant as a trait; make it his since it’s the only thing he has. And it’s hard to sympathize with a character who has already resigned himself to that.

The film’s few genuinely funny moments come in the form of Allan’s fantasies, when Humphrey Bogart appears to give him advice on seducing women. Even these rare sequences, however, can’t save Play It Again, Sam from being excruciatingly stale, and for that reason I will not be playing it again.