Looking at you

Play It Again, Sam

(1972)

They're all so young, Woody and Diane and Tony Roberts and Susan Anspach. Allen had directed Take the Money and Run and Bananas and (sort of) What's Up, Tiger Lily?, but he was still best known as a comedian, and was still five years away from his first great film.

This one, directed by fellow Brooklynite Herbert Ross, is far from great, and its message--be yourself--could have come from a fortune cookie. Furthermore, there's one sequence guaranteed to make anyone with an ounce of sensitivity squirm over its 40-years-ago flip treatment of a subject few of us have a sense of humor about anymore, but what it does, it does well: show off Allen's comic chops and Keaton's equally difficult skills as lovely straightwoman.