How come you never get the earlier, funnier Woody Allen movies on TV anymore?

I just plucked out my tape of Jane Eyre* and rewound past the start of the film, instead catching the end of Play It Again Sam, Allen's homage to Casablanca. It's not my favourite Allen cineste films, that has to go to Purple Rose of Cairo, but it is one of those great films which assumes a cine-literate audience. You're expected to read Play It Again Sam as the farce to Casablanca's tragedy. So either I'm not reading listings properly any more, or these lesser films - these films that allow you to learn about cinema history - don't appear on terrestrial channels any more.


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*1944 version, directed by Robert Stevenson and starring Orson Welles as the perfect Rochester. And a young Elizabeth Taylor as Helen, the orphan who dies early on. A film which provoked both my mother and I to mutter about how rubbish Joan Fountaine, who played Jane, was. She seemed to specialise in passive blonde girls who don't so much triumph over adversity as let it trample all over them and win the day simply by long suffering smiling (see also Rebecca). At least my mother thought all this in 1944 in a cinema whilst all I got to be was a 1980s superior quasi-feminist about it. I'm watching the film now - it opens with a shot of a leather bound book, which made me think of Law's post this morning. I really should stop before I go off into a long ramble about Jane Eyre...that Dr Rivers looks a bit sus nowadays doesn't he? Like he's grooming young Jane...

I've just discovered Joan Fontaine is still alive...