Bullets over Broadway ***** (1994, John Cusack, Dianne Wiest, Jennifer Tilly) – Classic Movie Review 347

This glittering old-style comedy from an on-form writer-director Woody Allen dazzled us in 1994. Unfortunately he doesn’t appear this time, but he’s ensured that a great ensemble cast does.

The story takes place in 1920s New York, where struggling young budding playwright David Shayne (John Cusack) is suffering the joys of his latest pretentious opus is being staged on Broadway. But that’s only thanks to selling out to backing from mobster Nick Valenti (Joe Viterelli), who insists on casting his non-acting chorus-girl moll Olive Neal (Jennifer Tilly) in an important part as the psychiatrist.

The reluctant, idealistic Cusack and his cynical agent Julian Marx (Jack Warden) secure the services of fading star Helen Sinclair (Dianne Wiest), as well as British thespian and compulsive over-eater Warner Purcell (Jim Broadbent), and Tracey Ullman as Eden Brent, the ‘other woman’.

They all want changes in the play’s text. Tilly is chaperoned by her dumb-seeming mob minder Cheech (Chazz Palminteri), who unexpectedly has a few ideas of his own how Cusack’s play should be.

Allen has conjured up a witty, beautifully written script (co-authored with Douglas McGrath). Relaxed yet razor-sharp; it’s sometimes literate and sometimes silly, but it’s always smart, pacy, observant and above all hilarious.

Unusually, and magically, the film has no dips or empty spaces in its entire hour and three quarters. Allen (thanks goodness abandoning his then recent hand-held camera methods) directs in his former formally elegant style, with dark-toned colours and handsome compositions and set-ups. The 1920s Broadway theatre district look is perfect, thanks to an exquisite production, with marvellous period costumes, artefacts and backdrops.

It helps enormously that there’s marvellous Best Art Direction-Set Decoration by Santo Loquasto and Susan Bode that should be rights have won the Oscar it was nominated for. The Manhattan Roaring Twenties are all here, their spirit captured delightfully, and none of the copious detail is a single bit laid on or forced.

An extremely talented group of actors, looking eternally grateful, as they should be, for the perfect script, spits out the lines with grace, charm and perfect timing. Cusack keeps calm and commendably straight in the young Woody Allen part, doing well to hold his own against three exuberant Oscar-nominated turns.

Wiest (who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar) is a firecracker as the blowsy old theatre ham (or should that be hamlette?), booming voice, overblown clichés and absurd pretensions (‘Don’t speak!’ she cries foolishly). Tilly cheerfully chews up the tart without a heart or a brain role, and Palminteri has a field day, scoring a major hit as the hitman with a way with words.

Those evergreen 1920s popular jazz tunes spray the soundtrack as ever in a Woody movie, usually ironically accompanying a death (for example Al Jolson’s ‘Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye’ from The Jazz Singer). Harvey Fierstein, Rob Reiner and Mary-Louise Parker also star.

An absolutely fabulous, smashing entertainment. Thanks, Woody!

There were seven Oscar nominations, but only the one win.

© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 347

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