Even such a lightweight airy number by Woody Allen achieves a heft ordinary auteurs would strain to achieve.
In this delightful comedy Allen exercises his love for 1940s crowd pleasers. The film mixes screwball comedy and gumshoe thriller. The script hits a Billy Wilder pace. The music, settings and stock characters recall Howard Hawks at his best.
Allen's performance as the insurance investigator is arguably his clearest homage to Bob Hope. "She graduated from Vassar and I went to driving school. " The woman with a body that won't quit? "Quit? It won't take five minutes off for a coffee break." Does he want to see the siren's strawberry birthmark on her thigh? "Sure, when can I take the full tour?" And of course: "I may be a scummy vermin but I'm an honest scummy vermin."
Lengthening the tradition - the Allen and Helen Hunt characters are a modern Beatrice and Benedick as they wallow in an articulate antagonism that could only belie their essential love. In the fireworks kissing scene Allen exuberantly explodes the perennial cliche.
The film may lack the obvious philosophic underpinning of Allen's later work but it's cut from the same cloth.
As in The Purple Rose of Cairo, Alice, his New York Stories episode and the later Magic in the Moonlight, etc., Allen uses variations on magic to shift his characters into another mode of experience. Here hypnosis is ambivalent in its purposes. In the stage act it moves CW and Sally Ann into their antithetical relationship, love supplanting their antagonism. But as every opening brings vulnerability, the two also serve the jewel thief hypnotist's criminal purposes.
Hypnotism here serves as magic and art work for Allen elsewhere. It provides an escape from the "scummy...grungy" existence Allen always envisions the human condition to be, hungry for any possible escape or respite. The curse turns out to be a blessing.
Indeed this idea may animate all of Allen's compulsive returns to the music and film genres of the past. We're cursed with mortality. What healthier insouciance than to ensure the immortality of the genres by which we used to connect?
