Subtitles:

English (SDH), none

Extras:

In soft, pale turn-of-the-century costumes, the six principals of Mr. Allen's story converge at an invitingly old-fashioned summer house. The hosts are Andrew (Mr. Allen), a Wall Street broker who has invented the flying bicycle in his spare time, and Adrian (Mary Steenburgen), the wife who (this wouldn't be a Woody Allen film otherwise) has sexual problems with her husband; Adrian has been claiming to have a headache for six months. Adrian and Andrew are the hosts of a wedding party for Ariel (Mia Farrow) and Leopold (Jose Ferrer), a noted academic who is Adrian's triumphantly pompous cousin. After the wedding, Leopold plans to take his bride to London, which will afford him ''a long-awaited opportunity to show her Thomas Carlyle's grave.''

The action all takes place on the day before the wedding, with the other two guests Andrew's lady-killing friend Maxwell (Tony Roberts), who is a doctor, and Dulcy (Julie Hagerty), a deliciously dim nurse who is Maxwell's date. ''Do you know I've been watching you for two weeks?'' Maxwell asks seductively, speaking from behind a diagram of the spinal column (much as Mr. Allen and Michael Murphy argued beside an anatomy-lab skeleton in ''Manhattan''). ''I've only been working here for five days,'' Dulcy points out, but she agrees to accompany him anyway.

Monogamous at heart, Allen has ended his brief affair with Fellini (Stardust Memories out of 8 1/2) and gone back to his first love Bergman. Allen's version of Smiles of a Summer Night keeps the period country house setting but reduces the characters to six: two medical swingers, an elderly academic and his much younger fiancée, and a long-married couple whose sex-life has ground to a halt. Allen, of course, plays the frustrated husband (he redirects his energies towards inventing flying bicycles, astral lamps and the like), and gives himself nearly all the funny lines. He spends the rest of the movie satirising the men and adoring the changing moods of the women. His best invention remains his own screen persona, and the Bergman borrowings here provide it with a warm, romantic and old-fashioned setting.

Gary Tooze

November 24th, 2016

Also available in Arrow Academy's Woody Allen: Six Films - 1979-1985 [Blu-ray] which contains Manhattan, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Stardust Memories, A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, Zelig, and Broadway Danny Rose