Assignment 6: Knock on Woody
Posted by Austin Cinephile
Every week, we will be posting a prompt related to cinephilia, and some of our founding members will contribute a short response. Hopefully you, our dear readers, will feel compelled to respond in our comment section as well. This week’s prompt was:
Write about five great Woody Allen films
We actually discussed and divied up the films before hand so that there would be no overlap, although, with the exceptions of Annie Hall, Manhattan, Stardust Memories, and Sleeper, there was almost no conflict. There is a surprising variety in these choices, too. Of the fifty or so Woody Allen movies, here’s the breakdown:
1 from the ’60s
5 from the ’70s
6 from the ’80s
1 from the ’90s
and 2 from the ’00s.
We’ve also decided to order them chronologically rather than by author. If you feel bold, in the comments you can try to guess who wrote which blurbs. Michael, Stephen, and Daniel each wrote five.
Take the Money and Run (1969)
With its mockumentary narrative voiceover, Take the Money and Run, like Zelig, resembles Allen’s New Yorker stories. Unlike Zelig, though, Take the Money does not seem terribly interested in making a point of any kind. Indeed, arguably more so than any of his other pre-Annie Hall films, Take the Money represents the purest comedic genius of Woody’s “earlier, funnier” films. It would not surprise anyone watching this film to learn that, just a few years earlier, Allen had been a writer on “The Sid Caesar Show,” as this film is basically a series of situational sketches tied together by the story of the decidedly untalented criminal Virgil Starkwell, played by Allen. Take, for example, the infamous bank robbery scene, in which Starkwell moseys up to the teller counter and passes the banker a note, informing him that he is being robbed. Unfortunately, the banker struggles to read Starkwell’s handwriting, forcing Starkwell to help an increasingly numerous group of bank employees read the note out loud. As Starkwell tries desperately to assure the bankers that he is pointing a gun, not a “gub,” at them, you realize that what you are watching would fit right into any TV sketch show, no background information necessary. With Take the Money, you see the natural comedic capabilities that initially helped Allen start the career we find ourselves discussing now.
Play it Again, Sam (1972)
The best film Allen starred in and wrote but did not direct, Play it Again, Sam is funny, intellectually poignant and, most of all, represents Allen’s peak as a style icon; his haircut, his tweeds, his cardigans, all show how unique and cool his style really is. In this film, Allen plays Allan, a poor film critic whose wife has recently left him because he was, among other things, a lousy lay. He goes on the prowl, searching for a replacement mate. Great set-up, right? Allen knocks it out of the park in this film, shoveling rice and hurling records like a schlemiel extraordinaire. Seeing Woody fail time and time again is a great play on the traditional protagonist struggling on the dating scene formula, and his defensive one-liners are top notch: “It never would have worked between us. She’s Protestant, I’m Catholic, it’s a great religious abyss.” In this picture, Allen/Allan gets the help of Humphrey Bogart’s ghost, who teaches him how to be himself and keep it cool. Basically, the whole film is an elaborate set up to recreate the climactic scene in Casablanca, and in an age before genre-pastiche and ornamental film-quotations, this picture reigns supreme.
Sleeper (1973)
Sleeper was the first Allen film I ever saw. I was pretty young, maybe about ten or eleven. I didn’t know what to expect. I don’t even remember if I knew who Woody Allen was at the time outside of “that guy who married his adopted daughter.” But, for a pre-teen male, this film had it all: sex, drugs, cryogenic freezing, a Utopian/Dystopian future (depending on who you ask), robot butlers, AN ORGASMATRON! I may not have been familiar with Allen’s work before Sleeper, but this film laid the seeds for what is quickly nearing a twenty year relationship with one of the most talented filmmakers to ever live.
Love and Death (1975)
This underrated Allen film is actually one of the most important, because it represents a transitional work between his two best-loved periods, the early-funny stuff and the artsy stuff. Prior to Love and Death, from 1965-1975, Allen made semi-light comedies like Every Thing You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask and Bananas. These films are great, hilarious, and wonderful, but they lack the brilliance and social/intellectual satire that his later films have. After Love and Death, from 1975-1986, Allen made romantic films that (sometimes) used comedy to a much greater cerebral function. Smack in the middle of these eras is Love and Death, the parody of Napoleonic-Russia that is as wacky as it is intellectually confusing. Great references in this film to Eisenstein and Dostoevsky make this film look forward to his later work, while lowbrow, slapstick and non sequitur humor also refers to his earlier stuff. The film is funny, and offers a great, sexy role for Diane Keaton, who never got to be as funny as in this film.
Annie Hall (1977)
Annie Hall, the film that won Woody his first bald-headed statuette, is the quintessential Woody Allen picture. It plays out like a master’s class of cinematic thumb printing. Allen in the familiar lead role, this time as comedian Alvy Singer, plays a neurotic New York Jew enveloped in a doomed relationship with title character Annie Hall (Diane Keaton). The narrative follows the two from the inception of their relationship through its ultimately irreconcilable end. Allen utilizes every aspect of his filmmaking, relying heavily on the vibrant camera of dp legend Gordon Willis to produce one of the most honest and intimate depictions of relationships ever made. With Willis’ eye and Allen’s brain, the camera is able to take viewers whizzing through the streets of New York in Annie’s yellow convertible VW bug, into the bedroom for some not-so-intimate lovemaking, back into Alvy and Annie’s childhoods and past relationships, and even into their very minds. This film takes us everywhere in order to fully examine this crazy thing called love.
Manhattan (1979)
It doesn’t take a film scholar to point out Woody Allen’s love of New York City, and in Manhattan, his ultimate love letter to the island, he allows himself to work at the highest emotional level. The sweeping Gershwin music, the expert photography of Gordon Willis, the fireworks (really, there are fireworks); this is Allen’s most romantic film and, thus, his most hopeful. Although the ending may be somewhat ambiguous, if you’ve seen other Allen films like Annie Hall, you know that ambiguous is a step in the right direction for those seeking happy closure. This also seems to be the director’s most personal film. After laying down on the couch (engaging in some self therapy) and reciting a list of the things that, for him, make life worth living, Allen’s character runs after the young girl who loves him, worried that she will leave New York City and return a changed woman who is no longer interested in him. When she suggests that he ought “to have a little faith in people,” you sense that Allen is again self-analyzing. He’s telling himself to ease up a little, through his own fictional character. That’s the true measure of a great artist; when he can toss all his own anxieties up there onto the screen and make us believe they are worthy of our time and consideration.
Stardust Memories (1980)
Allen’s homage to Federico Fellini’s masterpiece 8½, Stardust Memories tells the chaotic tale of famed film director Sandy Bates. When I first watched this movie as an undergrad in one of the first film classes I ever took, I was under the impression that only the first few scenes paid homage to the Fellini picture. I had not yet seen 8½, and I wouldn’t find out until nearly a year later that it was nothing less than an Allen adaptation of the sixties classic. Allen’s Sandy Bates steps directly into the kinetic shoes of Marcello Mastroianni’s Guido Anselmi. Like Guido, Sandy is at a crossroads in his life and his art. The two characters reflect on their past loves and films in order to examine what has brought them to their present situations and hopefully to find out something about where they are going. For most of the film, Bates tromps around New York flagged by fans and critics who are often one in the same as suggested by the recurring critique: “I like your earlier, funnier movies.” While embracing the frenetic tone established by Fellini in his picture, Woody manages to weave in his patented auteur touches: a great jazz soundtrack, a divided love interest theme, psychoanalytic-heavy neurotic comedy, etc. In perhaps my favorite scene in the movie, the narrative is interrupted by a scene from one of Bates’ films. A special breaking news bulletin: Sydney Finkelstein’s hostility has escaped. Allen as Sydney leads a tracking team of police officers and hound dogs through a snow covered woods. The team stumbles upon the corpses of Sydney’s schoolteacher, his ex-wife, her alimony lawyer, and his brother Alvin (the one his family used to encourage to speak up). Off in the distance is a dark hairy hulk manhandling Sydney’s mother. If that’s not the embodiment of mommy issues, then I don’t know what is.
Zelig (1983)
In my junior year of high school, Turner Classic Movies had a month-long Woody Allen retrospective. I was home alone on the first night of scheduled programming, no plans to do anything with friends or family, and decided to watch the first film, Annie Hall. I was entranced by the film. However, I felt that Annie Hall was the kind of canonized masterpiece that I was destined to like; seemingly everyone, even those who don’t necessarily call themselves Woody fans, likes Annie Hall. How would I respond to another Allen film? Well, the next one I watched was Zelig, and if Annie Hall was the film that put Woody Allen on my radar, Zelig was the one that made me fall in love. Not only is it a film of remarkable inventiveness, employing some quietly revolutionary filmmaking techniques to insert Woody Allen into old newsreel footage as the cinema’s most intriguing conformist Leonard Zelig, but it also uses these images to send a thoughtful message about developing one’s own individuality. In later years, I would become a fan of Allen’s New Yorker short stories, and, in retrospect, Zelig may be the film that most closely resembles the unique narratives that Allen created in those pages, due in large part to its hilarious documentary voiceover and numerous cultural references. Zelig is much more than just a gimmick; it’s the smartest comedy ever made. And not just because Susan Sontag is in it.
The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)
This film features Mia Farrow’s greatest role in an Allen film, here playing a movie fan named Cecilia who is obsessed with the pictures. Obviously, it speaks to us cinephiles on a very personal level. in this film, something magical happens: the star of a film that Cecilia repeatedly attends jumps out of the screen, trying to create a relationship that spans diegetic spaces. The film is a parable for the cinema’s power of escapism, and the way that movie magic used to be much stronger than it is today. Can’t go wrong with those themes, can you? Allen has often been interested in experimenting with cinema time and space; consider Annie Hall, Deconstructing Harry, Husbands and Wives, Zelig, Melinda and Melinda, etc. This is one of the great, and successful, experiments in his career. The movies come to life in this funny and deep film that also features a strong performance from Jeff Daniels.
Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
As much as I want to privilege Allen’s 1970s films, this picture always comes up as a masterpiece of Allen’s sophistication and insight into womankind. It also features one of the great scenes in Woody’s career as a (secret) optimist. Just as in the great scene in Manhattan where Isaac lists off all of the things that make life worth living (Louis Armstrong’s “Potato Head Blues,” Marlon Brando, Swedish Movies), this film has one of the great life-is-worth-living moments in cinema. At the brink of suicide, depressed beyond belief, Allen’s character Mickey walks into a cinema and what’s playing but the Marx Brothers’ Film Duck Soup. Mickey realizes that although life might be meaningless and empty and godless, at least there’s the Marx Brothers, who are really funny. This is a recurrent theme, basically, in all of his work: life is horrible, miserable, terrible and so on, but it’s all worth because of things like the Marx Brothers. In addition to this great scene, there’s also a pretty good love story featuring a great ensemble cast.
Radio Days (1987)
Radio Days is a cinematic representation of nostalgia that deserves to be mentioned alongside films like Bergman’s Wild Strawberries and Fellini’s Amarcord. Populated with dozens of rich characters, whether they be leads or make only brief appearances, the film uses memories of the once-important medium of radio to reconstruct a bygone era of family togetherness and local community. Essentially, it’s an entire film’s worth of those charming flashback sequences from Annie Hall. The most impressive aspect of the film is how expertly Allen captures the way in which we remember our childhood from a now mature perspective. We recognize the tensions and the passions of the adult world that had eluded our childhood understanding, shedding new light on those experiences, and Allen’s narration achieves that nostalgic experience cinematically. The final scene, in which some of the radio stars of the day congregate on a Manhattan rooftop on New Year’s Eve and wonder aloud if they will be remembered, is one of the most poignant of Allen’s career.
Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)
If you’ve seen Allen’s Interiors, then you’ve seen what it looks like when a director smothers his own genuine talent in a vane attempt to pay tribute to his most beloved filmmaking idols. On the other hand, if you’ve seen Crimes and Misdemeanors, you’ve seen what it looks like for a director to evolve that talent and do something far greater than simply paying homage. With Crimes, Woody Allen took his place alongside idols like Ingmar Bergman with a film made on his own terms. This is a “Bergman-esque” film only in the sense that it confronts issues like religious guilt and moral confusion, as Allen shares with Bergman the profound struggle to come to terms with these problems. But ultimately Crimes is a Woody Allen film through and through, delicately balancing Martin Landau’s moral dilemma involving an increasingly belligerent mistress with Allen’s own struggle to win Mia Farrow’s heart despite being married himself. The film’s conclusion, which sees Landau, after getting away with murder and living happily ever after with his wife, meeting up with Allen, who has committed no such crimes and yet is the more miserable of the two, has a laugh at the moral concept of “living with guilt.” And that’s what makes it a Woody Allen film; in the end, all you can do is laugh.
Sweet and Lowdown (1999)
Wanna go to the dump and shoot some rats? This underrated drama features the best score/soundtrack of any Allen film (and that is a bold statement), with the music of Dick Hymen and guitar work by Howard Alden recreating the beautiful style of Django Reinhardt. Sean Penn plays jazz guitarist Emmett Ray, a performer who is arrogant, tormented, and innocently mean-spirited. He strikes up a relationship with a mute girl, who is played here excellently by Samantha Morton channeling Harpo Marx, but ultimately treats her rottenly. Both performers were nominated for Oscars for their roles. Apparently, the structure of the film was written by Allen all the way back in 1969 and it took him thirty years to realize it and get around to making it. Thus, like Whatever Works, it is a newer film that is, in some ways, of the older style. It also features a brief cameo by John Waters! Those of you who have not seen it don’t realize just how beautiful this movie is. Emmett Ray is a disgusting man who is spiteful, egotistical, selfish, careless, etc. But he plays the guitar so well, and the scenes of his performances are transcendent, demonstrating the strange thing (in life), of how sometimes such ugly people can make such beautiful music. You will be moved by his playing, and sickened by his character.
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)
A warm vibrant color pallet, melodic Catalonian guitar music, a Spanish backdrop? Is this a Woody Allen picture? Yes, yes it is. And, Allen is in top form, as is everyone involved in this production. Javier Bardem follows-up his disturbing performance as the unrelenting, unwavering serial killer Anton Chigurh, in the Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men (I’m choosing to ignore the easily forgettable Love in the Time of Cholera), with the alluring Catalonian painter Juan Antonio. Penélope Cruz turns out the film’s best performance as Juan Antonio’s suicidal, yet oddly still involved ex-wife. Rebecca Hall gives Cruz a run for her money as the American Master’s student Vicky, who is writing her thesis on Catalan identity. Even Scarlett Johansson does a good job as the yin to her best friend Vicky’s yang. As a freewheeling, spontaneous lover of life who doesn’t quite know what it is she’s seeking from it, Cristina is the perfect foil for the grounded and realistic Vicky. As the narrator aptly summarizes: “When it came to the subject of love it would be hard to find two more dissimilar viewpoints.” That is the crux of the narrative. In the hopes of finding whatever it is she’s looking for in love, Cristina explores the love options presented to her in Barcelona, specifically the ménage à trios relationship she forms with Juan Antonio and his no longer-so-ex-wife María Elena. Vicky confronts her unraveling convictions in stability and sensibility after a passionate night with Juan Antonio leaves her desiring more from love. This film is a culmination of nearly eighty years of pondering the intricacies of love and is Allen’s truest film on the subject since Annie Hall.
Whatever Works (2009)
Whatever Works proves that Allen’s filmmaking is aging like a fine wine. Allen returns to the older, cynical Jew meets younger, naive gentile storyline a la Annie Hall and Manhattan. Yet, with the substitution of the traditionally self-cast Allen for Larry David, the lead character Boris is infused with a little extra bite not present in the likes of an Alvy Singer or an Issac. The pairing of Allen and David is comedic gold.
