听 After being dumped, film critic Allan (Woody Allen) turns for help to his closest friends and an apparition of Humphrey Bogart (Jerry Lacey). The two more corporeal friends are a couple, Linda (Diane Keaton) and Dick (Tony Roberts) and as Linda fixes Allan up on date after date, he and she begin to fall for one another.
It's an excuse for some exceptionally funny sequences, a whole slew of awful dates for Allan and then the terrible subterfuge and risk in his relationship with Linda.
This is very much one of Allen's earlier, funnier films. While he's the star and he wrote the script from his own stage play, it's Herbert Ross who directs. This, then, is an unusual early Allen film in that it has an accomplished feel to the direction that Allen himself would not really have until "Annie Hall" five years later.
For all the brilliant dialogue, too, it's the visuals of this film that stay with you: the opening shot of Allen agog at "Casablanca", mouthing the familiar dialogue and curling his lip, pretending to be Bogart; the painful attempt to appear suave that sends his record collection flying; and the closing pastiche of "Casablanca" itself.
Nearly 30 years on, it's sometimes hard to take Allen's screen persona of the nervy but clever wimp because we've seen it in so many of his films since. But here the persona is at its best with enough of a balance between nerd and everyman that we can laugh uproariously and squirm at the same time.
