The White Mountain Jewish Film Festival screened the Jewish humor classic “Broadway Danny Rose,” with Woody Allen, Mia Farrow and the only film appearance of Broadway star Nick Apollo Forte. Bonnie Michaels and Michael Seev graciously hosted the patio party, with bar support from Sharon Heyman and Barry Zitser. Photos, below, by Martin Kessel.

Guest speaker Rick Wilson offered this analysis of the film:

"Broadway Danny Rose" was among the films dating from something like a "golden age" for Woody Allen: it came out amid a string of hits including "Purple Rose of Cairo," "Zelig," "Radio Days," and "Hannah and Her Sisters." All of those films starred Mia Farrow, and one audience commented on the challenge of watching these humorous, imaginative and sometimes poignant films with the knowledge of their eventual messy breakup in 1992. In this particular film, Woody Allen revisited the show-business milieu of his early days as a stand-up comic, and it was a brilliant creative choice to have the film narrated by a group of (real) comedians reminiscing around a table at New York's famed Carnegie Deli.

Andrew Pulver, writing in the Guardian, said, "It's ultimately impossible to fully understand 'Broadway Danny Rose' without coming to grips with its innate Jewishness. I remember emerging from the cinema back in 1984 suffused with an odd sense of ethnic pride: what other culture would see the heroism in such an apparently inconsequential failure of a human being? Danny Rose is useless in a fight, can barely run up a hill without being sick, is a loser in business, is deserted by all except those even more troubled than him. But he is unquestionably a beacon of hope in a moral wasteland." This element of a comic but ultimately moving film was the starting point for an excellent discussion last Thursday.