Home \ Signature Roles \ Play It Again, Sam (1972) — Diane Keaton
DIANE KEATON · 1972 · SIGNATURE ROLES
Linda Christie is the woman Allan Felix, a film critic obsessed with Casablanca, falls for — and she is also, inconveniently, the wife of his best friend.
Linda Christie is the woman Allan Felix, a film critic obsessed with Casablanca, falls for — and she is also, inconveniently, the wife of his best friend. Diane Keaton plays Linda as a woman who is funny, kind, and genuinely torn, and her chemistry with Woody Allen, carried over from the Broadway production, is the film’s engine.
Keaton’s gift here is naturalness: she laughs at Allen’s jokes as if hearing them for the first time, she hesitates in the way real people hesitate, and she makes a farcical premise — a man taking dating advice from Humphrey Bogart’s ghost — feel like a real romance. It was her first major film role, and it announced an actor who would change what a leading lady could sound like.
