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Acknowledgements
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(Allen Stewart Konigsberg 1935– ). American actor, writer, and director.
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 even if he had
stopped making films in 1975, there would still be good reasons to celebrate
his talents. There is, first of all, What's Up Tiger Lily?, (1966), 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, and while it is routinely
eviscerated by individuals who have never seen it, Casino Royale (1967),
the episodic farce that he acted in and did some uncredited writing for, is not
as awful as one might imagine. The best of his early films, Take the Money
and Run (1969) and Bananas (1971), are more or less realistic, but
Allen's script for Play It Again, Sam (1972), the only film of this era
that he did not direct, makes brilliant use of ethereal visits from 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) (1972) 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, as 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 very successful Annie Hall (1977) 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). During this era, only two problems
afflicted his otherwise placid progression through annual film projects: his
long relationship with Mia Farrow, requiring him to cast that actress of
limited appeal in every single one of his films, with increasingly dire
results—like Alice (1990), 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 (though denunciations of
his alleged pedophilia keep resurfacing whenever he seems poised to win an
award). Farrow also contributed to the failure of another of his fantasy films,
The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), a homage to Buster
KEATON's Sherlock, Jr.(1924) 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 (1995), an unusual romance with a Greek chorus; Deconstructing
Harry (1997), involving a writer who meets up with some of his own
characters; and Scoop (2006), 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 (1983), 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 (2011), even
if it is not quite as original as my wife imagined, very effectively employs
the trope of time travel to comment on the dangers of nostalgia, as a Hollywood
screenwriter is mysteriously transported to Paris in the 1920s, where he
befriends the writers he has long admired, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein,
and F. Scott Fitzgerald, before finally resolving 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 upon it conveyed by 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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