We'll Always Have Bogart: Allusion, Nostalgia, and Critique in Play It Again, Sam

In a seminal essay, Noel Carroll posits two broad “uses of allusion” in postclassical American filmmaking. Although some films of the 1970s and 1980s cited earlier texts to critique the genres and ideologies of old Hollywood, Carroll suggests, others used intertextual allusion in a nostalgic, memorializing fashion. This article seeks to build on and complicate Carroll's conceptualization of intertextuality in American films of this era, analyzing Woody Allen and Herbert Ross's Play It Again, Sam (1972) to demonstrate that intertextual allusion, in some cases, might be at once deconstructive and nostalgic. Furthermore, this analysis leads to a consideration of the Humphrey Bogart star-persona as a figure of frequent postclassical citation.