The most essential addition to the Woody Allen filmography in the Nineties — a film not directed by Woody Allen. Taking its name from a Louis Armstrong tune, it chronicles the twenty-three-day, eighteen-city European tour of Allen as a member of a seven-piece jazz band — New Orleans traditional in style — in the Spring of 1996. Reportedly, Allen did consider directing it himself. But quite apart from the practical concern of having his hands full already with his clarinet and his then companion and later wife, Soon-Yi Previn, it was a smart diplomatic decision, to say nothing of a smart artistic one, to turn over the task to the expert documentarist Barbara Kopple. If it was going to have the credible illusion of capturing the private man with his guard down, it needed to put the camera under the command of a neutral party. How much of it is, after all, illusion, is open to question, and it would be a perfectly natural suspicion to see the movie as something of a P.R. move: as damage control, as reputation repair, as, in a word, propaganda. The best answer to that, since we cannot read minds as to intention, is that if it is in fact propaganda, it is excellent propaganda, compelling propaganda, persuasive propaganda. Allen's companion — introduced by him to strangers at a post-concert soirée as "the notorious Soon-Yi Previn" — comes across here as very much her own person, and the two of them, on the evidence, have a bona fide relationship, a way of interacting, a good-humored give-and-take, with Soon-Yi called upon to do the requisite mothering of the textbook Jewish overgrown baby, helping him to fill out a legible laundry-request slip at their hotel ("Remember you're not signing an autograph") or providing the calming influence when their Venetian water taxi is rocked by backwash. The main focus of interest at all times, whether as part of a couple or part of a jazz ensemble, is inevitably Allen himself, Allen alone. And of course we are able to feel we are getting closer to him without the intervention, the smokescreen, of a fictional character. Closer, but not inside. Allen the trad clarinetist, Allen the touring musician, is, in effect, a new character, albeit nonfictional, and the novelty of it throws up its own sort of smokescreen. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.