Pastrami and Tongue on Wry

By RICHARD CORLISS

BROADWAY DANNY ROSE Directed and Written by Woody Allen

To the honor roll of artists who worked in miniature--Vermeer, Webern, Faberge, the medieval philosophers who squeezed a chorus line of angels onto the head of a pin--add Woody Allen's name. In an age when many film makers are enlarging timeworn genres like the gangster movie, the space opera and the weepie into Big Statements, Allen designs Mickey Mouse watches that run with 24-jeweled comic timing. But they don't run very long. Last year in Zelig he recapitulated the history of the documentary film and pointed a waggish finger at the perils of celebrity in 87 minutes. In its way, Broadway Danny Rose is a more daring mechanism. This time Allen has rescued from oblivion the old Damon Runyon-type movie and in the process made his sweetest, most buoyant film comedy.

One lazy afternoon a gaggle of New York comics (Corbett Monica, Will Jordan, Howie Storm) sat at a back table in the Carnegie Delicatessen swapping stories about their favorite small-time talent agent, Danny Rose (Allen). Danny, he was one of life's beautiful losers. You remember his clients--the stuttering ventriloquist, the husband-and-wife balloon-animals team, the blind xylophonist with the parrot that pecked out September Song? Real bottom-of-the-line stuff, but Danny believed in every one of them. Especially Lou Canova (Nick Apollo Forte), an Italian singer who mixed the repertoire of Vic Damone with the sexual charisma of Buddy Hackett. Well, Danny figured Lou could make a big comeback on the nostalgia bandwagon, singing his Great Crooners of the Past Who Are Deceased medley on a Milton Berle TV special. Lou, he believed in Danny too, sure, but he wanted two things even more: a bouffanted, bleached-out tart named Tina (Mia Farrow) and an A-list agent to put him into the big time. But maybe you've heard this one before.

Maybe you have. If the words aren't familiar, the tune should be, from the old guys-and-dolls songbook: sassy, sentimental pictures like Lady for a Day, Little Miss Marker, Angels over Broadway.

Danny Rose & Co. are avatars of the Jewish toughs and Italian bimbos, each one of them angling for an outside chance. In the war years they might have been recruited to provide background congestion for a Preston Sturges farce. But they move through Allen's movie with a modernist twist. The small-talent lounge acts Danny represents are also exponents of the 1970s Post-Funny School of Comedy, in which Steve Martin, Albert Brooks, Andy Kaufman and others impersonated the detritus of show-biz performers who had nothing to offer but a wholly unjustified confidence in their own appeal. The difference here is that Danny Rose is free of the Post-Funny School's hip condescension toward mediocrity. In the melancholy perseverance of these "entertainers," Danny and Woody find something admirable, even lovable. So should the movie audience.

In that autobiographical funk called Stardust Memories (1980), a fan pleaded with the self-absorbed film director to make funnier movies--"like the old ones." This time Woody Allen generously obliged, in part by junking some of the analysand mannerisms that infected him and his female co-stars over the past few pictures. Danny is the least "Woody Allen" of Allen's screen incarnations. As Tina, Lou's nails-tough mistress with a heart of rhinestone. Mia Farrow is a coarse delight; this is her best work since Rosemary's Baby. Bright as the spangled jacket of a has-been crooner, funny as any Broadway comic could dream of being, appetizing as a pastrami-on-wry sandwich at the Carnegie Deli, Danny Rose is almost impossible not to like. Hey, pal, would we lie to you?

--By Richard Corliss