Haven't seen this film in years and rewatching it was a real surprise. The now familiar and still clever idea of having the ghost of Humphrey Bogart return to help the impaired love life of Allen's nebish character still works very well. There is a lot of funny stuff in this film.
Allen "opened up" his stage play and most of those scenes work pretty well. But the big improvement here was setting the film in San Francisco instead of New York, and having Herbert Ross, a fairly decent director of musicals and comedies shoot the film. Ross brings a real professional approach to the film with none of the primitive technique that Allen had as he coped with learning how to make films in his early features.
The cast which includes Allen's old crony Tony Roberts and his one time girlfriend Diane Keaton works very well with Woody they were in the original Broadway production, so they certainly knew their characters. Also, this Woody Allen early in his career and his "nervous Nellie" neurotic Jew shtick was still pretty fresh and even watching it today very funny.
85 minutes
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