The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (5 page)

She had been closely associated with Chicago’s Steppenwolf Company, and her movies amount to a textbook for acting classes:
Compromising Positions
(85, Frank Perry); the blind woman, superb in the scene with the tiger, in
Manhunter
(86, Michael Mann);
Peggy Sue Got Married
(86, Francis Coppola);
Tucker
(88, Coppola);
In Country
(89, Norman Jewison); a classic supportive wife, with Beau Bridges, in
Without Warning: The James Brady Story
(91, Michael Toshiyuki Uno);
Ethan Frome
(93, John Madden);
Searching for Bobby Fischer
(93, Steven Zaillian);
Mad Love
(95, Antonia Bird); so good as Pat in
Nixon
(95, Oliver Stone) that she effortlessly revived our sense of those years and the emotion of newsreel, but thereby left Anthony Hopkins seeming all the more of an imposter; outstanding again in
The Crucible
(96, Nicholas Hytner);
Face/Off
(97, John Woo);
The Ice Storm
(97, Ang Lee);
Pleasantville
(98, Gary Ross);
All the Rage
(99, James D. Stein); Irish in
When the Sky Falls
(99, John Mackenzie).

She had a big part, and a nomination, in
The Contender
(00, Rod Lurie), but that horribly rigged film left her whiny, prim, overly “nice” and archaic. She was Morgause, the femme fatale, in TV’s
The Mists of Avalon
(01, Uli Edel)—and she began to seem past prime;
Off the Map
(03, Campbell Scott);
The Notebook
(04, Nick Cassavetes).

She got a thankless running part in the
Bourne
pictures (04 and 07, Paul Greengrass), and she was in
Yes
(04, Sally Potter);
The Upside of Anger
(05, Mike Binder);
Bonneville
(06, Christopher N. Rowley);
Death Race
(08, Paul W. S. Anderson);
Hachiko: A Dog’s Story
(09, Lasse Hallstrom); and sadly genteel as
Georgia O’Keeffe
(09, Bob Balaban).

Woody Allen
(Allen Stewart Konigsberg), b. New York, 1935
1969:
Take the Money and Run
. 1971:
Bananas
. 1972:
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask
. 1973:
Sleeper
. 1975:
Love and Death
. 1977:
Annie Hall
. 1978:
Interiors
. 1979:
Manhattan
. 1980:
Stardust Memories
. 1982:
A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy
. 1983:
Zelig
. 1984:
Broadway Danny Rose
. 1985:
The Purple Rose of Cairo
. 1986:
Hannah and Her Sisters
. 1987:
Radio Days; September
. 1988:
Another Woman
. 1989:
Crimes and Misdemeanors;
“Oedipus Wrecks,” an episode from
New York Stories
. 1990:
Alice
. 1991:
Shadows and Fog
. 1992:
Husbands and Wives
. 1993:
Manhattan Murder Mystery
. 1994:
Bullets over Broadway;
Don’t Drink the Water
(TV). 1995:
Mighty Aphrodite
. 1996:
Everyone Says I Love You
. 1997:
Deconstructing Harry
. 1998:
Celebrity
. 1999:
Sweet and Lowdown
. 2000:
Small Time Crooks
. 2001:
The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
. 2002:
Hollywood Ending
. 2003:
Anything Else
. 2004:
Melinda and Melinda
. 2005:
Match Point
. 2006:
Scoop
. 2008:
Cassandra’s Dream; Vicky Cristina Barcelona
. 2009:
Whatever Works
. 2010:
You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger
.

“Woody” was the most famous film director in America from the late 1970s onwards, and then a reluctant household name as his famed soul-searching took a banana-skin skid into public scandal. Can he maintain his way of working? Is there funding for films whose budgets have steadily risen, and whose audience has never been large? Can he be merely amusing when he has drawn so melodramatic a trail through the courts and the public prints? More important, can he develop as an artist? Has he ever shown that unmistakable promise?

I am skeptical. In his films he seems so averse to acting yet so skittish about real confession that he risks dealing in self-glorification by neurosis. As an actor he stills momentum and betrays his films’ reach for reality. Moreover, some of his films are so inconsequential, so much a matter of habit, that they make his productivity seem artificial.

But his sense of movie theatre and narrative intricacy soared in the eighties (along with the budgets and the photographic quality), and there are two films that even this sour spectator adores—
The Purple Rose of Cairo
and
Radio Days
. In neither does Allen figure as an actor (he
is
the narrator of
Radio Days
). The first is a wonderfully clever, blithely light comedy about movies and dogged real life, while the latter is a new kind of film, a sort of imagined documentary montage, or a notebook of memories and scenes, utterly consistent in tone, a true portrait of a time. Yet
Radio Days
has not been a seed. Instead, it looks like a random brainwave in the night.

Can he break out of the claustrophobic self-regard that has always threatened to make yet more “Woody Allen” films? Can he hold his small but influential following, when they are the group most quickly (or automatically?) offended by reports of “incorrectness” in an idol? Part of Allen’s problem was only sharpened by the very messy battle with Mia Farrow and his own undeniable humiliation. For he always insisted on making movies about his own angst as a cunning diversion from true self-examination. For years, there had been an air of dissociation in his work that now seems fulfilled by some of his remarks during the year of public scandal. Has this authority on sensitivity ever trusted his own feelings or been their authentic victim?

Despite the fun of
Sleeper
and
Bananas
, Allen has never made a film free from his own panic. He has been a Chaplin hero for the chattering classes, yet he is trapped by something like Chaplin’s neurotic vanity. No director works so hard to appear at a loss. The thought of his making a Bergman movie (and the thought runs from
Interiors
to
Shadows and Fog
) is grotesque. He is so near to Bergman already, yet so timid about the Swede’s strength of commitment.

Allen is beset by certain death, elusive sex, the farfetched theory of romance, the immorality of pleasure, and the fracturing of cultural and personal ties that are replaced with chains. It sounds like respectable angst, but perhaps the ideals and the dismay were always precious and adolescent. The note of complaint in Allen’s work is shrill and even frivolous because it prefers the quick flash of one-liners and mocked stereotypes. Woody is so jumpy he has no patience with developed humor. Though his films have gained in polish and visual depth, the humor remains in the words and the meetings. There is very little sense of purpose, principle, or character in Allen’s way of looking at the worlds he creates. Thus we cannot escape the feeling of being trapped in an elevator with people who talk too much. (The idea of a blind director—treated in
Hollywood Ending
—was there years earlier.) Human failure is Allen’s faith, and we all seem to know about his awkward childhood (though
Radio Days
glows with humdrum happiness). He was a dropout from New York University and City College. Since then, most ventures have prospered except marriage and family—his second wife, Louise Lasser, acted in some of his early films and went on to be
Mary Hartman
after their split. (It is as a parent, and as an influence on the young, that the real Allen has most alarmed his loyalist supporters—and surely that could be a pressing future subject for him.) Allen wrote jokes to order and was hired by Sid Caesar for his TV show. A great admirer of Mort Sahl, Allen moved into live routines in nightclubs, and by the late sixties he was a dramatist and a screenwriter:
What’s New Pussycat?
(65, Clive Donner);
Casino Royale
(67, Ken Hughes et al.); and
Play It Again, Sam
(72, Herbert Ross), taken from an Allen play. His club routines were brilliant: his verbal dexterity had a higher energy level than we know from his films. He could assume, if briefly, the aggressiveness of a Groucho. But as he began a movie career, so his persona receded, and he acquired the security systems of being a victim. It took a long time—in life and on the screen—for the possibility to emerge that the “victim” might be tough, tyrannical company.

On Oscars night 1978, Allen was studiously playing Dixieland clarinet in a New York pub. Three thousand miles away Hollywood conceded the year to him: he won three Oscars (for script, direction, best picture) and Diane Keaton—his Isolde and his Nancy Drew then, as well as his girl—picked up the best actress prize. He avoided the awards night for reasons that could make an Allen movie—he might lose? he might win? it might look as if he expected to win? he preferred privacy to the cultivation of personality? or he preferred to nurture his persona in private? He claimed shyness, and nobody remarked on how oddly that sat with a film that revolves around its maker’s insecurities and uses its actress’s real name in the title
—Annie Hall
.

The film that followed,
Interiors
, seemed sculpted in Bergman’s cold elegant bone. Yet it was only porcelain or plastic, a model from medical school, not a piece of a body.
Manhattan
was a love song to New York—and by now we can see that Allen’s richest interest may be his city, for it is too vast and diverse to permit his glibness.
Manhattan
had a fine performance from Mariel Hemingway that was maybe the first piece of pure acting in Allen’s work, as well as the debut of a tenderness toward dangerously young women. But the cuteness in
Manhattan
—in lines, compositions, and in its escapes from scenes that needed more—showed the embarrassment Allen felt about his own assigned challenge: “serious” pictures.

Allen’s development in the eighties, his rate of work, and the sophistication of narrative were all seemingly devoted to ideas and attitudes against the grain of that decade. Yet Allen’s audience relied on urban yuppies, and his films only fostered that group’s self-satisfaction. He has tried darker views—in
Stardust Memories
and
Crimes and Misdemeanors
—and he has become very skilled with extensive, seething social contexts in which one piece of behavior is made more complex by the doings of others. He has fascinating ideas and ambitions as a screenwriter. Yet which Allen film challenges or threatens us, or burns into our memories? The films may run together—are we certain where that joke or this meeting occurred? Sometimes the context is so large as to be blurred; escape and slipperiness become more facile. There is something in Allen that always makes fun of ego, privacy, and obsession, and so with all his proclaimed inwardness he seems fearful of letting characters possess large inner lives. He makes many cameos of loneliness, but these are too often cute snapshots rather than tributes to an intractable condition.

But who else in American film provokes such arguments? And if Allen faces a crisis because of his own behavior, we should recollect how smart and resourceful he is. Perhaps his indefatigable unconscious mind knew he needed trouble and disruption. That does not seek to excuse any damage he has done. But suppose real damage could become his subject—as opposed to wisecracks about it? If Allen could be persuaded to quit his own films as actor and to work more sparingly, with unmistakable lead actors (as opposed to a stock company of guest shots), then there is still a chance that he could create something close to gravity. For he is the most inquiring dramatist at work in American film. He could yet be the kind of writer desperately needed by Coppola, Scorsese, and so many others.

By the end of the twentieth century, it was clear that Allen’s fecundity was chronic—though economics and his break with producer Jean Doumanian were further threats to the automatic one-film-a-year routine. Or was it that the routine, the momentum, kept Allen from proper examination of his work? Had habit overwhelmed the chance of art? It seemed to me that there was a wave of restored excellence—
Everyone, Harry
, and
Celebrity
—which came close to a really novel and brave scrutiny of modern reputation. But then Woody darted away into his own cuteness.

In the new century, he took off for England and seemed to relish the classy nastiness.
Match Point
could be Hitchcock and seemed a very promising departure, but by the time of
Vicky …
it was clear that Allen was wasting his own lively players.

So there’s too much—or too little reflection. Still, there are
Annie Hall, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Radio Days, Deconstructing Harry
. That’s four brilliant films that no one else could have dreamed of. And that’s what it’s about.

June Allyson
(Ella Geisman) (1917–2006), b. Bronx, New York
Trained as a dancer, she was a chorus girl while still at school, and went on to play in Broadway musicals. Her film debut was in
Best Foot Forward
(43, Edward Buzzell), which repeated a stage role. She was put under contract by MGM—as the sort of girl men overseas might like to come home to—for
Girl Crazy
(43, Norman Taurog);
Thousands Cheer
(43, George Sidney);
Two Girls and a Sailor
(44, Richard Thorpe); and
Music for Millions
(44, Henry Koster). Her petite, sore-throated charm was perfected in
Till the Clouds Roll By
(46, Richard Whorf);
Good News
(47, Charles Walters);
Words and Music
(48, Taurog); as Jo in
Little Women
(49, Mervyn Le Roy); with her husband, Dick Powell, in
The Reformer and the Redhead
(50, Melvin Frank and Norman Panama); and
Too Young to Know
(51, Robert Z. Leonard). Her image of cheerful wholesomeness found its apotheosis in the wife and, supremely, the widow in
The Glenn Miller Story
(53, Anthony Mann). With that experience of tears, she took on more dramatic roles, with little success:
Battle Circus
(53, Richard Brooks), incredibly as the object of Bogart’s affections;
Executive Suite
(54, Robert Wise); was surprisingly good (and nasty) in
The Shrike
(55, José Ferrer) and
Strategic Air Command
(55, Mann), in which she was forever looking for James Stewart in the sky. Thereafter she dwindled into romances and tame comedies:
You Can’t Run Away From It
(56), produced and directed by Dick Powell and allegedly a remake of
It Happened One Night; The Opposite Sex
(56, David Miller), legally a remake of
The Women; My Man Godfrey
(57, Koster), so removed in tone and effect that it made the term “remake” null;
Interlude
(57, Douglas Sirk); and
A Stranger in My Arms
(58, Helmut Kautner). She moved briefly into TV, but retired when Powell died in 1963. More recently, she was the murderess in
They Only Kill Their Masters
(72, James Goldstone).