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Acknowledgements
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(Allen Stewart Konigsberg 1935– ). American actor, writer, and director.
Wrote and directed: The Purple Rose of Cairo (1986); Alice
(1990); Midnight in Paris (2011).
Acted in and wrote: Casino Royale (co-wrote, uncredited, with
Wolf Mankowitz, John Law, Michael Sayers, and other uncredited writers Val
GUEST, Ben HECHT, Joseph Heller,
Terry Southern, Billy Wilder, and Peter
SELLERS) (John Huston, Ken Hughes, Guest, Robert Parrish, and
Joe McGrath 1967); Play It Again, Sam (Herbert Ross 1973).
Acted in: King Lear (Jean-Luc Godard 1987); Antz
(animated; voice) (Eric Darnell and Tim Johnson 1998); Picking Up the Pieces
(Alfonso Arau 2000).
Appeared in documentaries: L'Oeuvre et la Vie de Woody Allen
(Riccardo Aragno 1982); Meeting Woody Allen (short) (Godard 1986); The
Secret World of Antz (1998); Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures
(Jan Harlan 2001); The Magic of Fellini (Carmen Piccini 2002); Woody
Allen: A Life in Film (Richard Schickel 2002).
Films based on his work: Somebody or The Rise and Fall of Philosophy
(short) (Alex Hildebrand 1989); Un Aspirine pour Deux (tv movie)
Patrick Bureau 1995); Count Mercury Goes to the Suburbs (short) (Joel
Bruns 1997); Sdelka (Georgy Lebedev 2009).
No doubt it
would irritate Allen to focus any survey of his film career on its first
decade, when he was still working within the anything-for-a-laugh mode that his
fellow veteran of writing for television comics, Mel BROOKS, never abandoned,
but somebody needs to remember What's Up Tiger Lily?, his hysterically
inaccurate redubbing of a Japanese spy film that stands today as a pioneering
example of the mash-up, ingeniously blending another artist's work with one's
own material to create something new. Before advancing to making his own films,
Allen also acted in, and did some uncredited writing for, the incoherent farce Casino
Royale, another effort that Allen would fight to exclude from any
retrospective celebration of his career. The best of his early films, Take
the Money and Run (1969) and Bananas (1971), are more or less
realistic, but Play It Again, Sam, the only film of this era that he did
not direct, makes brilliant use of Humphrey Bogart to comment on contemporary
sexual mores; Sleeper offers an intermittently amusing take on the
standard futures of science fiction, with an especially funny sequence of Allen
impersonating a doctor about to clone a dictatorial ruler; and two of the
better segments of Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex * But Were
Afraid to Ask were of genre interest: a parody of science fiction films
with John
CARRADINE, demonstrating that there is little
difference between Carradine trying to act well and Carradine trying to act
badly, portraying a mad scientist who creates an enormous rampaging breast, and
a surrealistic depiction of Allen as an anthropomorphic sperm, being dropped
like a paratrooper into a woman's vagina.
But another
segment of that film, a tongue-in-cheek tribute to Michelangelo Antonioni and
Federico FELLINI, hinted that Allen longed to be a Serious Filmmaker, that
these aspirations soon led to the successful Annie Hall and the second
phase of his career, a long series of carefully crafted and well-acted films
that were mostly subdued comedies, with occasional dramas and stylistic
experiments, like the drearily Bergmanesque Interiors (1978) and the
episodic Radio Days (1987). Only two problems afflicted his otherwise
placid progression through annual film projects: his long relationship with Mia
Farrow, requiring him to cast this actress of limited appeal in every single
one of his films, with increasingly dire results—like Alice, Allen's
misguided attempt to improve upon Fellini's
Juliet of the Spirits (1965)—and his messy break-up with Farrow and romance with her adopted daughter
Soon-Yi Previn in the 1990s, which inspired accusations of child abuse that
threatened to derail his career until he doggedly worked his way back into
critical favor. Farrow also contributed to the failure of another of his
fantasy films, The Purple Rose of Cairo, a homage to Buster
KEATON's Sherlock, Jr. pairing the
inadequate Farrow with the even more inadequate Jeff Daniels (a genius at
casting supporting roles, Allen often stumbles in finding suitable lead actors
other than himself). Allen's other departures from realism include Mighty
Aphrodite, an unusual romance with a Greek chorus; Deconstructing Harry,
involving a writer who meets up with some of his own characters; and Scoop,
a posthumous fantasy in which a ghost helps to track down a serial killer.
All of these
films may have their moments, yet there are only two must-see Allen films for
any science fiction fan. The first is Zelig, a masterful
pseudo-documentary about a man who is driven to transform himself to resemble
other people, which represents among other things Allen's only venture into
films requiring special effects and a shrewd commentary on America's forgotten
fascination with the Dionne Quintuplets. And Midnight in Paris, even if
it is not quite as original as my wife imagined, very effectively employs the
trope of time travel to transport a Hollywood screenwriter to Paris in the
1920s, where he befriends the writers he has long admired, Ernest Hemingway,
Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, before he finally resolves to return
to living in the present. Interesting, both of these films feature protagonists
who seem most concerned with impressing other people until they realize that it
is much better to simply relax and be themselves—a lesson that, perhaps,
Allen recognizes that he must keep learning himself. For manifestly, Woody
Allen is at his worst when he is striving to emulate Fellini or Ingmar Bergman,
and at his best when telling his own original stories.
To underline
this insight, then, my suggestion for Allen's next project would be to bring
his career full circle by gathering the surviving members of the cast of Interiors;
then, in the manner of What's Up Tiger Lily?, he could redub the movie
to impose a humorously senseless plot and inane dialogue, and re-release the
film under the title Exteriors. Demonstrating a belated ability to
recognize his own follies, and more forcefully than ever displaying a willingness
to laugh at himself, might be another way to impress later generations of
filmgoers and film critics, who may ultimately decide that Woody Allen, despite
his flaws, was a better filmmaker than all of the auteurs he has
idolized.
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