The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (33 page)

In the same early draft of the script, Shayne, on the verge of abandoning playwriting and fleeing to Pittsburgh with Ellen, admits to Helen that, “My work was weak and tentative—I was lucky to find a writer who made me look like a hero.”
¹⁰
In this lighthearted comedy with a bleak soul, Shayne’s depressingly egotistical construal of
God of Our Father’s
is probably the most complimentary thing that’s said about artists and the artistic vocation. If the point of creating art isn’t that it increases the artist’s capacity to rationalize endlessly promiscuous sexual activity or affords an ethic through which s/he can justify trampling on other people, then it’s valuable because—assuming the creator finds a great ghostwriter whose work he can claim as his own—it may make him “look like a hero.”
¹¹
The film leaves little doubt as to how deceptive that perception would be, or how far it is from Shayne’s apparently ideal formulation from the opening of the play: “The theater’s duty is not just to entertain but to transform men’s souls.”
¹²
On the evidence of
Bullets Over Broadway,
involvement in the theater
does
transform mens souls—for the worst.

Of course, it is impossible to account in any certain terms for the heightened negativism toward art dramatized by
Bullets Over Broadway
Shayne’s repudiation of his vocation in the film’s final lines (“I’m not an artist. There, I’ve said it and I feel free. I’m not an artist”) represents Allen’s films’ most unequivocally condemnatory concluding judgment on art and artists before
Deconstructing Harrys
denouement surpassed it. Imputing the cynicism reflected in the film to Allen’s notorious troubles in the early ‘90s is risky, especially since
Husbands and Wives
is generally recognized as the more obvious cinematic expression of Allen’s publicly aired private life nightmare. Cheech’s final revision, however, invites comparisons between his absolutist aesthetic credo and that of the filmmaker who created him.
¹³
Unconvinced by Cheech’s explanations of what he was doing the night Olive was murdered, Valenti sends his goons after him, gunning him down in the Belasco Theater during the final act of
God of Our Father’s
opening night. (Even in death Cheech contributes revisions to the play, the gunshots ending his life construed by a reviewer as the lieutenant’s experience of a combat flashback and thus becoming a sound effect in subsequent performances.) As Shayne cradles the dying Cheech in his arms, the gangster offers one final rewrite before expiring: “The last line in the play … tell Sylvia Posten to say she’s pregnant. It’ll be a great finish.”

Allen didn’t think that having Holly tell Mickey Sachs that she is pregnant with their child made a “great finish” for
Hannah and Her Sisters,
acknowledging to Eric Lax that the result of that choice was to make
Hannah
“a movie that ended like almost every movie, with happy endings all around.” Having Mickey’s sterility suddenly resolved by Holly’s concluding announcement “was too neat and tidy an ending,” Allen explained: “Life is more ambiguous and unpleasant than that.”
¹⁴
Allen’s comic indictment of the Mafia hit man so monomaniacally committed to his art as to be indifferent to the moral consequences of his acts may well have contained an element of oblique self-incrimination.

“That’s so great—” is Shayne’s response to Cheech’s final revision of
God of Our Father’s,
but Cheech cuts him off: “No, don’t speak, don’t speak,” he says with his last breath. Cheech’s dying admonition echoes Helen Sinclair’s incessant exhortations to Shayne to leave their passion unspoken, the two champions of art-at-any-cost being identified at the end of the film as sharing a desire not to foster sincere emotion but to silence it. An egotistical Broadway legend for whom art is nothing more than a medium for self-dramatization and self-glorification; a proletarian dramatist whose professional executionary tactics seem an acceptable means of protecting his play against inaesthetic corruption; an unpublished and unproduced playwright whose status as an artist is nothing more than a pretense rationalizing his “creating his own moral universe”—these are the exemplars of the aesthetic in
Bullets Over Broadway
. Only a triumvirate of characters possessed of artistically in spired rapaciousness of this magnitude could prompt Woody Allen to allow his protagonist to embrace enthusiastically an art-repudiating self-exile to Pittsburgh.

If the artists populating
Bullets Over Broadway
are a sorry census of the superiority of aesthetic sensibility, the work of art whose evolution the film delineates is analogously dubious. The reviewers of the opening night performance of
God of Our Father’s
summon up their favorite expressions of Modernist artistic transcendence in lauding the play as “a masterpiece,” “a theatrical stunner,” and “a work of art of the highest quality.” However, Allen’s film prompts his audience to see Shayne’s play in distinctly less elevated terms. The
God of Our Father’s
whose evolution we’ve watched is a pretentious pastiche of Maxwell Anderson and Eugene O’Neill riddled with artistic compromises: its financial backing is supplied by a brutal mobster in exchange for his incompetent moll getting a role in the play, and the tragic plot is endlessly manipulated to stroke the vanity of an egomaniacal Broadway diva with whom the playwright/director is erotically involved. Cheech’s script doctoring, initially implemented to eliminate the drama’s pomposities, becomes grounds for his gangland elimination of Olive: because “she’s killing my words,” Cheech feels justified in killing her. In the end,
God of Our Father’s
is implicated in two deaths (Olive and Cheech) while engendering three adulterous relationships (Shayne and Sinclair, Olive and Warner Purcell, Ellen and Flender); if Flender is right in asserting that that an artwork “is not an inanimate object” but “art is life, it lives,” the life lived by
God of Our Father’s
is thoroughly corrupt.

While Sinclair and Marx at a post-theater party are reading in the play’s notices that dramatist/director Shayne “is the find of the decade,” he has fled the Great White Way he’s conquered for the Village in hopes of reconciling with Ellen, asking her to marry him and carrying her off to Pennsylvania. “I’m not an artist,” Shayne exults to Ellen in the movie’s final lines, “There, I’ve said it and I feel free. I’m not an artist.” It is characteristic of Allen’s attitude in the mid-1990s that the exquisitely lit, elaborately staged, and beautifully photographed
Bullets Over Broadway
so emphatically and unequivocally condemns the art of which it is so generously possessed.

13

Let’s Just Live It

Woody Allen in the 1990s

HARRY: I’m no good at life.

RICHARD: But you write well.

HARRY: I write well, but that’s a different story because I can manipulate the characters.

RICHARD: You create your own universe, which is much nicer than the one we have, I think.

—Harry Block and Richard in
Deconstructing Harry

Let
Bullets Over Broadway
exemplify the ambivalence of Woody Allen’s attitude toward art in the 1990s. The movie enacts David Shayne’s realization that his only hope of redemption from the corruptions to which artistic ambition is heir necessitates renouncing the theater and fleeing with Ellen to Pittsburgh to become a family man. However, the cinematic vehicle of that dramatic message embodies a contrary judgment. The contradiction is implicit in Julian Fox’s fine description of the cinematic art of
Bullets Over Broadway:
“The film is a visual feast, from its Times Square opening—actually a black-and-white cut from the period which was digitally colorized to match—to the art deco apartments and hallways, the artily-lit street scenes, speakeasies and news stands, vivid backstage milieu and darkly comic waterfront shoot-outs. It is a highly romanticized recreation of a vanished age, bathed in a deep red, sepia and yellow glow by cameraman Carlo Di Palma, designed and costumed to the nines, the soundtrack awash with the kind of insouciant golden standards which nostalgia buffs adore.”
¹

As Fox’s generously detailed summary attests,
Bullets Over Broadway
gives no impression of being a film made by a filmmaker bearing a grudge against his medium; it was Allen’s most expensive production to date, as lushly exacting in its evocation of 1920s Manhattan as
Radio Days
—Allen’s previous period piece bank breaker—was of New York in the middle 1940s.
²
Bullets Over Broadway
epitomizes Allen’s cinematic craft in its stability of framing, in the linear nature of its narrative and in its devotion to precise realistic depiction; the film’s formal symmetries and clarity of focus consistently contrast with the moral myopia of the characters’ beatification of art and glorifications of themselves as artists. The distinctive formal coherence of Allen’s work provides its own testimony in favor of artistic craftsmanship as part of the dialectic of those movies, then, even as the content of the film becomes increasingly skeptical about the promises and premises of an artistic vocation. Before proceeding to consider the two films—
Husbands and Wives
and
Manhattan Murder Mystery
—which deliberately violate Allen’s characteristic cinematic formal coherence (and which, consequently, were typically interpreted as reflecting the emotional turmoil of the Allen/Farrow dissolution), we will look at something of a synopsis of the complex issue of Allen’s ambivalent position toward artists and his own cinematic art going into the production of the watershed movie,
Husbands and Wives
.

Allen’s misgivings about art (and about similarly abstract or metaphoric conceptualizations of human experience) are expressed in his films not only through the unfolding of plots, but also through the presence of a number of characters whose primary trait is unrelenting skepticism and whose dramatic role it is to goad the movies’ more visionary protagonists—usually, but not exclusively played by Allen—into questioning the grounds of whatever idealism they possess. The rationalist philosopher, Leopold, of
A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy;
streetsmart Tina Vitale of
Broadway Danny Rose;
Cecilia’s brutal husband, Monk, in
The Purple Rose of Cairo;
Mickey Sachs’s father in
Hannah and Her Sisters;
Diane’s physicist husband, Lloyd, in
September;
Judah Rosenthal’s outlaw brother, Jack, and his Aunt May in
Crimes and Misdemeanors;
Felice, the brothel madam of
Shadows and Fog;
David Shayne’s bottom-line heeding agent, Julian Marx, and Cheech in
Bullets Over Broadway
are just some of the varyingly sympathetic characters who preach the doctrine of hard-boiled practicality and realism in Allen’s films. Each character in his or her own way suggests what Judah’s brother Jack repeatedly refers to as the “real world” as the standard according to which everything in life must be judged.
³
That Allen is attracted to such tough-minded pragmatism is reflected in the regularity with which it gets voiced in his movies and interviews, and also in the tendency of Allen’s protagonists to occasionally articulate analogous sentiments.

While walking through the town together in
Shadows and Fog
Kleinman and Irmy pause to look at the night sky through a brief opening in the fog, and when Irmy tells him that the star they’re seeing may have ceased to exist a million years ago, Kleinman finds the thought deeply disquieting. “When I see something with my own eyes, I like to know that it’s really there, because otherwise a person could sit down in a chair and break his neck.”
⁴
The problem with art, many of the skeptics in Allen’s films would argue, is that it’s not “really there” in this sense: it lies, it projects stars where they no longer are or where they may never have been, creating “Stardust memories” out of airy nothingness. It’s this pragmatic impulse, of course, which prompts Kleinman initially to decline joining the circus as Irmstedt’s assistant because “I have to go back to town and, you know, join real life.”