The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (55 page)

13. That such a notion was on Allen’s mind in scripting the film is suggested by a line he and Marshall Brickman wrote for Mary Wilke: “Don’t you guys see that [the ‘silence of God’ in Bergman’s films] is the dignifying of one’s own psychological and sexual hangups by attaching them to these grandiose philosophical issues?”
(Manhattan,
pp. 194–95).

14. In
Play It Again, Sam
Alan Felix explains that “I can’t drink—my body will not tolerate alcohol,” which poses a dilemma since his Bogart projection has counseled him that heartbreak “is nothing a little bourbon and water won’t fix.” The first sign that Harry Block of
Deconstructing Harry
is an unsympathetic character is the fact that he so ostentatiously brandishes a bottle of booze in the first scene in which he appears.

15. Were there any doubt that Joey is the only heroic character in
Interiors,
it’s dispelled by the fact that she passes Isaac’s test of courage by diving into the ocean in an attempt to save her mother from drowning in the film’s dramatic climax.

16. One of the critical cruxes of
Manhattan
arises from the belated introduction of the issue of Isaac Davis’s moralism, what Yale refers to as his tendency to be “self-righteous” and to “think you’re God” by holding others to impossible moral standards. Those reviewers and critics who have accepted what is basically Isaac’s self-serving perception of himself neglect to notice the considerable inconsistencies in his behavior in the film. When Yale confesses his adulterous relationship with Mary, Isaac never rebukes him for it, and his own casual relationship with seventeen-year-old Tracy, as Kael suggests, doesn’t exemplify moral probity. Although Isaac does wait until Yale and Mary have parted to begin actively pursuing her, explaining that he would “never in a million years” betray his friend, the fact that his involvement with Mary is well along before he breaks off with Tracy makes him a highly dubious nominee for saint among narcissist sinners. Isaac’s complete reversal, after Mary has left him for Yale, of his earlier enthusiastic advocacy of Tracy’s attending London’s Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in London reflects a similarly situational and self-serving ethic. “Woody could have made a safer picture, like
Annie Hall,
” Michael Murphy, who played Yale Pollock, said. “This film is a lot tougher, harder-edged. And it was a bold step for Woody not to be a hero” (p. 65). Quoted in Richard Schickel, “Woody Allen Comes of Age,” p. 65.

17. Those critics who failed to notice that development in the evolution of the Allen protagonist tended to overlook it as well in
Stardust Memories
and
Crimes and Misdemeanors,
two other films in which the familiar and likable Allen mannerisms deceived viewers into feeling a sympathy for Sandy Bates and Clifford Stern greater than their screenwriter seems to feel.

18. Mary’s egotistical comment on her own attractiveness provides an important corrective to Isaac’s worship of feminine beauty: “Uh, you’ll never believe this, but I never thought I was pretty. Oh, what is pretty anyway? I mean, I hate being pretty. It’s all so subjective anyway” (p. 208).

19. Yale’s objection to Isaac that “you just can’t live the way you live. It’s all too perfect,” suggests that Allen was imbuing Isaac with the tendencies toward self-righteousness and insularity which are Eve’s chief characteristics in
Interiors
. Nothing in Isaac’s character supports Yale’s description.

20. Fox, p. 108.

21. Fox, p. 114.

22. Lax, p. 276.

23. Fox, p. 110. It’s difficult not to read as a parable expressing Allen’s conviction of beauty’s mutability the fact that, sixteen years after
Manhattan,
Allen cast Mariel Hemingway in
Deconstructing Harry
not as “the most beautiful woman the world has seen,” but as a self-righteous mother endlessly harassing Harry about his fatherly responsibilities to his son.

24. Bjorkman, p. 108.

25. Diane Jacobs was the first of Allen’s critics to compare the close-up of Isaac’s face closing the film to the final close-up of the little tramp in
City Lights
(which Allen has designated “Chaplin’s best—and probably anybody’s best—comedy” [Guthrie,
Woody Allen: A Biography,
p. 123]). That these two directors of primarily comic films use close-ups so sparingly is perhaps one reason that the two scenes invite comparison. The closing shot of
City Lights
focuses on the tramp’s nervously smiling face as he desperately awaits the flower girl’s reaction to his revelation that it was he and not, as she believed, a rich man who financed the operation which restored her sight. In both films, the audience must interpret the facial expression of the protagonist to move from a feeling of irresolution to a sense of closure, though the disparity between Charlie’s look of intensely desperate hopefulness and Isaac’s smirk of ironic resignation is so great as to seem to epitomize the trajectory of American innocence over the half century separating the production of the two films.

5. Strictly the Movies II: How
Radio Days
Generated Nights at the Movies

1. The jokes which comprised his routine were what Allen referred to as “verbal cartoons”: “They have a surreal, fantastic quality to them,” Eric Lax argued, “but even so they are somehow believable, when Woody describes them, as events that could happen, if only to him; his jokes work so well because he delivers them as if they were problems in his life.” Lax, p. 129.

2. Lax, p. 159.

3. One collection of Allen’s stand-up routines from the 1960s is
Woody Allen: Standup Comic
, Casablanca Records, 1978, which includes three of the jokes Alvy Singer tells. A more recent anthology is
Woody Allen: Standup Comic, 1964–68
(Rhino Records, 1999). The monologue Allen drew from for
Annie Hall
is reproduced in Linda Sunshine,
The Illustrated Woody Allen Reader
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), pp. 9–11.

4. Recall Allen’s comment, cited in the
Annie Hall
chapter, that the original draft of the script “was originally a picture about me exclusively, not about a relationship. It was about me, my life, my thoughts, my ideas, my background, and the relationship was one major part of it.” Rosenblum and Karen, p. 283.

5. Tim Carroll,
Woody and His Women
(London: Warner Books, 1994), p. 311. One of the explanations offered for Leonard Zelig’s eccentric psychological behavior is a brain tumor, but it’s the doctor who hypothesizes this diagnosis, not Zelig, who dies from one.

6. Carroll, pp. 168–69.

7. Fox, p. 111.

8. Fox, p. 102.

9. Lax, p. 179.

10. The link between
Annie Hall
and
Manhattan Murder Mystery
is by no means mere appearance. The murder mystery plot of the latter film, Allen has admitted, was originally an element of the original
Annie Hall s
cript. Bjorkman, p. 225.

11. Lax, p. 179.

12. Carroll, p. 137.

13. Allen’s description of Bates quoted in Lax, p. 273.

14. One of Allen’s habits which doesn’t fit at all with the personalities of his protagonists (except, perhaps, in its obsessiveness) is his preparation for elevator rides, his need to have a problem to work through on the elevator so that the time expired during the ride won’t be wasted. John Lahr, “The Imperfectionist,”
The New Yorker,
December 9, 1996, p. 82.

15. Lax, p. 28.

16. Carroll, p. 137.

17. Woody Allen,
Radio Days
(Orion Pictures, 1987).

18. Richard Schickel,
Time,
February 2, 1987, p. 73.

19. Allen provides a more extensive catalogue of elements of his childhood which he gave the protagonist of
Radio
Days in Bjorkman, p. 158.

20. Bjorkman, p. 162.

21. The film’s ambivalence about its autobiographical roots seems signaled by its very deliberate omission of the name “Joe.” The one point where the use of his name seems unavoidable, his Aunt Bea tells his mother, “We’re going to take your son to the city with us.”

22. Thierry de Navacelle,
Woody Allen on Location
(New York: William Morrow, 1987), passim.

23. At $16 million,
Radio Days
was Allen’s most expensive production before
Bullets Over Broadway,
the estimated negative cost of which was $20 million (Fox, pp. 226, 269).

24. In Eric Lax’s biography, Allen recalled a similar experience of the power of radio—one that he and Dick Cavett experienced during a visit to Los Angeles in the early 1960s. “As they passed by [Jack Benny’s house] they imagined Benny and his wife, Mary Livingston, and Eddie Anderson, who played Rochester, putting together the night’s show,” Lax explained. “They knew that wasn’t really happening, but years of listening to the show on the radio had given them a mental picture of Beverly Hills and the Benny household that in many ways was more real than what they were seeing” (p. 178).

25. Woody Allen,
Radio Days
(Hollywood: Hollywood Scripts, n.d.), p. 9.

26. In the early script, the failed Polly Phelps rescue was clearly intended as a thematic counterpoint to the original opening radio broadcast, subsequently deleted, in which a magician named Tonino successfully escapes from a milk can submerged off the Jersey Coast, the contrast dramatizing the disparity between radio as a repository of entertainment spectacle and grim news. In the released film, the Phelps episode constitutes a reversal of the new opening: whereas a burglary attempt at the Needlemans’ apartment turns into a windfall through the intervention of radio when the thieves identify correctly the three songs being played on
Guess that Tune
, radio’s presence is powerless to transform the Polly Phelps drama into felicity. As David Edelstein suggested in a review of the film, radio “can bind the nation together … but cannot conquer death.”
The Village Voice,
February 3, 1987, p. 53.

27. Allen informed Bjorkman (pp. 168–69) that he remembered the broadcast of an incident resembling Polly Phelps’s death in the film, though he was a teenager, not Polly’s age—eight—when he listened to it.

28. Woody Allen,
Crimes and Misdemeanors
(Orion Pictures, 1989).

29. Richard Combs, (review of
Radio Days), Monthly Film Bulletin,
July, 1987, p. 212.

30. Even here, however, the possibility of betrayal lurks: this image from
The Philadelphia Story
constitutes a false consummation, no “big finish” at all, since Hepburn in the film’s conclusion is romantically united not with Stewart but with Cary Grant.

31. A bleaker construing of radio’s affect on the family seems to be manifested through Little Joe’s cousin Ruthie (Joy Newman), whose sole character trait is that she constantly listens in on the Waldbaums’ party line. Vicarious eavesdropping on others’ realities as compensation for a want of a life of one’s own would be a cynic’s summation of the family’s dependency on radio.

32. Julian Fox (p. 180) points out that an earlier cinematographic conception of the film distinguished more categorically between Rockaway home and radio worlds: it was Allen’s original intention to make the warm colors of the family scenes consistently contrast with the coldly art deco aura of the radio studio scenes.

33. Woody Allen,
The Purple Rose of Cairo,
in
Three Films of Woody Allen
(New York: Vintage Books, 1987), p. 395.

6. Life Stand Still Here:
Interiors
Dialogue

1. Bjorkman, p. 120.

2. The psychoanalytically minded might argue that Sachs’s affirmation of
Duck Soup
involves more than a love of funny movies. Allen has repeatedly associated his family—toward whom he has expressed ambivalent feelings—with the Marx Brothers, explaining that in his home, “relatives were always running in and out of rooms. It was like living in a Marx Brothers movie.” “I’m obsessed by the fact that my mother genuinely resembles Groucho Marx,” he suggested elsewhere, and in
Take the Money and Run,
he seems to be making the same association in having Virgil’s parents, who are ashamed of their son’s life of crime, disguise themselves in Groucho masks for their interview. Tim Carroll,
Woody and His Women
(London: Warner Books, 1994), pp. 14, 20. Allen’s response to meeting Groucho, Eric Lax suggests, was “He seemed like one of my Jewish uncles” (p. 171).

3. Lee Guthrie,
Woody Allen: A Biography
p. 171.

4. Virginia Woolf,
To the Lighthouse
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955), p. 241.

5. Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West,” in
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954), p. 129.

6. Quoted in John Updike, “The Heaven of an Old Home” (review of
Souvenirs and Prophecies: The Young Wallace Stevens,
by Holly Stevens), in
Hugging the Shore
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), p. 610.

7. Woody Allen,
Another Woman
(Orion Pictures, 1988).

8. Marion “discovers more truth about herself in novels, plays and poetry than from people,” Richard A. Blake argued. “Art bears more meaning for her than life, and more than the German Idealism she has immersed herself in for so many years.”
Woody Allen: Sacred and Profane
(Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1995), p. 162.

9. Woody Allen,
Bullets Over Broadway
(Miramax Films, 1995).

10. That Frederick, the quintessential Modernist-artist-in-withdrawal, is played by Max Von Sydow, an actor best known in America for his roles in Bergman’s films, reinforces a point pervading this chapter: that, in Allen’s mind, the ambition to create serious art and the Modernist inflation of the aesthetic are inextricably linked with Ingmar Bergman.