The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (56 page)

11. Bjorkman, p. 242.

12. Quoted in Maurice Yacowar,
Loser Take All,
p. 183.

13. Michiko Kakutani, “Woody Allen: The Art of Humor I,”
The Paris Review,
136 (Fall, 1996), p. 216.

14. Lax, p. 373.

15. Woody Allen, “Through a Life Darkly” (review of Ingmar Bergman’s
The Magic Lantern), The New York Times Book Review,
September 18, 1988, p. 30.

16. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Ice Palace,” in
Babylon Revisited and Other Stories
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960), p. 14.

17. Lax, p. 342.

18. In the final appearance of the window motif which takes place at the celebration following the wedding, Pearl, dancing with Arthur, waves at Joey who stands on the other side of a door of glass panes, seeming to be on the outside of a window looking in. One of the working titles of
Interiors,
Allen acknowledged, was
Windows
(Bjorkman, p. 96).

19. Another implicidy parental link between Joey and Pearl is suggested by the fact that Pearls son supports himself selling paintings on velvet of clowns.

20. Jack Kroll criticized Allen for creating in
Interiors
“a blatantly simple cleavage between ‘art’ and ‘life’” in the two women (“The Inner Woody” [rev. of
Interiors], Newsweek,
August 7,1978, p. 83). Nancy Pogel’s chapter on the film offers a particularly careful analysis of the ways in which the three daughters’ interrelationships with each other and with these mother figures throw nuancing crosslights upon the film’s dominant allegory.
Woody Allen
(Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), pp. 99–116.

21. David Edelstein, rev. of
Radio Days
in
The Village Voice,
February 3, 1987, p. 53.

22. Lax, p. 179.

23. Diane Jacobs argues persuasively that Joey’s comment, “I felt compelled to write these thoughts down. They seemed very powerful to me,” reflects her realization that her interior life has value for her without its being communicated to a wider audience through art. …
but we need the eggs: The Magic of Woody Allen
(New York: St, Martin’s Press, 1982), p. 126.

24. Bjorkman, p. 99.

25. See Alan Wilde,
Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism and the Ironic Imagination
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 46–47.

26. Jacobs, p. 126.

27. The omission of these elements of Pearl’s character undermines for me Mary P. Nichols’
Reconstructing Woody
argument that Pearl is an unambiguously positive figure in the movie, solely “a force that foils the self-contained interiors that constitute the life of [the family] members and that isolate them from the world” (p. 63).

28. Allen’s explanation of the
Love and Death
use of the
Persona
image: “Sure, we just used anything we wanted to in those days. We took Russian books and Swedish films and French films and Kafka and French existentialists. Whatever gave us an amusing time, we used.” Bjorkman, p. 74. The content of the image in
Persona
to which Allen’s closing scene clearly alludes seems, in fact, utterly unrelated to anything going on at the end of
Interiors:
the three sisters of Allen’s film are in no sense psychically intersecting with one another as Sister Alma and Lisabeth Vogler are in the pivotal
Persona
image.

29. Pauline Kael, “Fear of Movies,” in
For Keeps: Thirty Years in the Movies
(New York: E.P. Dutton, 1994), p. 786.

30. Bjorkman, p. 210.

31. Bjorkman, p. 80.

7. In the Stardust of a Song:
Stardust Memories

1. Frank Rich, “An Interview with Woody,”
Time,
April 30, 1979, p. 69.

2. Carlos Baker, ed.,
The Selected Prose and Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley
(New York: Modern Library, 1951), p. 375.

3. If challenged to defend my critical insistence upon linking
Annie Hall
and
Stardust Memories
, I’d cite Allen’s comment about the deliberate subjectivity of both films: “The one film I finally got into the mind completely was
Stardust Memories
. That was all taking place in the mind, so anything could happen. But in
Annie Hall
I was trying this for the first time.” Bjorkman, p. 88.

4. Kakutani, “The Art of Humor,” p. 203.

5. Lax, p. 285.

6. In subsequent scenes in Bates’s apartment, the wall similarly reflects the protagonist’s mental state. A happy period with Dorrie is projected through the image of a grinning Groucho Marx embracing
a
lady friend; a more stressful episode of their relationship in which Dorrie accuses him of being interested in her teenage cousin getting epitomized by fragmentary newspaper headlines, “Against Mom” and “Incest Between Fathers and….”

7. Bjorkman, p. 124.

8. Pauline Kael’s annihilating review of the film, which assumed that Bates is “the most undisguised of [Allen’s] dodgy mock-autobiographical fantasies,” includes judgments such as “Woody Allen has often been cruel to himself in physical terms—now he’s doing it to his fans,” and “Allen sees his public as Jews trying to shove him down into the Jewish clowns’ club … he’s angry with the public, with us—as if we were forcing him to embody the Jewish joke, the loser, the deprived outsider forever”
(For Keeps
[New York: E.P. Dutton, 1994], pp. 863, 864, 866).

9. Jacobs, p. 147; Lax, p. 276.

10. Bjorkman, p. 123.

11. Tennessee Williams,
The Glass Menagerie
(New York: New Directions, 1966), p. 3.

12. One minor mystery of Allen’s films concerns the intertextual references to Nat Bernstein. In
Stardust Memories
, his sudden death seems to have precipitated Bates’s spiritual crisis; in
Radio Days
he is similarly no more than a name, about whom Tess, Little Joe’s mother, asks the question, “What was wrong with Nat Bernstein?” Aunt Bea’s answer is that Bernstein was not a serious suitor for her because he wore white socks with a tuxedo.

13. McCann, p. 209.

14. Many of
Stardust Memories
reviewers—Pauline Kael primary among them—inter preted its ending as being consistent with what they perceived as the movie’s overall attack on the filmgoing audience, its unflattering depiction of Sandy Bates’s most dedicated admirers and most sympathetic critics having proven very easy to translate into Allen’s onslaught against
his
audience. My
Radio Days
chapter attempted to address the persistent problem of viewers’ and critics’—and, sometimes, Allen’s own—confusion of Allen with his protagonists.
Stardust Memories
hardly presents a Frank Capraesque affirmation of the American film audience, certainly, but what Bates stares at before walking out of the theater is not filmgoers but the screen on which his film appeared, and Allen clearly devotes more energy in his movie to signaling the confused artistic impulses underlying Bates’s film than he does to establishing its audience’s deficiencies. The failure of Bates’s happy ending to have the cheering affect on the audience he assumedly intends it to have says as much about Bates and the limits of cinematic art as it does about the audience’s responsive inadequacies, the lapse in communication having sources on both sides of the screen. It’s the relationship between Bates and the film that is his self-projection which interests Allen in this movie far more than satirizing his fans, I would argue; dramatizing the difference between Bates’s ending and his own constitutes a primary motivation for Allen’s having made the film.

15. Nancy Pogel reads the last half hour or so of
Stardust Memories
as offering a number of alternative endings: Bates’s declaration of his refusal to marry Isobel, his murder, his proposal of marriage on the train, etc.
Woody Allen,
pp. 146–49.

16. Pauline Kael’s review of
Sleeper
constituted the annunciation of the arrival of a major comic filmmaker, her essay generously and sympathetically celebrating Allen’s comedic gifts while defining, with striking prescience, the obstacles of temperament and disposition which could interfere with his achieving the comedic heights she projected for him. “The running war between the tame and the surreal,” she wrote in 1973, “—between Woody Allen the frightened nice guy trying to keep the peace and Woody Allen the wiseacre whose subversive fantasies keep jumping out of his mouth—has been the source of the comedy in his films. Messy, tasteless, and crazily uneven (as the best talking comedies have often been), the last two pictures he directed—
Bananas
and
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex
—had wild highs that suggested an erratic comic genius.” The major threat to the fulfillment of his promise, Kael suggested, was that “he overvalues normality”
(For Keeps,
p. 535). That Allen gradually turned away from the “loose, manic highs” of those films was a primary cause of Kael’s increasing captiousness toward his films,
Sleeper
itself already prefiguring what would become Allen’s career trajectory in that “it doesn’t unhinge us, we never feel our reason is being shredded.” The Kael reviews of Allen films which followed this one regularly decry their abandonment of the early films’ “vulgar vibrancy,” their rambunctiousness, playfulness, raucousness, their “hostility … and freak lyricism,” their “organic untidiness” and general air of deliberate comedic subversion. When she wrote in her take-no-prisoners review of
Stardust Memories,
“From the tone of this film, you would think that vulgarians were putting guns to Woody Allen’s head and forcing him to make comedies,” the judgment carried its own tonality of personal betrayal, one never completely absent from Kael’s subsequent reviews of his films.

17. Again Mary P. Nichols and I draw diametrically opposed conclusions: “I agree that Allen’s films address these modern—or postmodern—positions,” she argued. “But Allen’s films do not celebrate this lack of moral or intellectual coherence or give birth to myriad and contradictory interpretations that cannot be resolved.”
Reconstructing Woody
p. xiii.

18. Quoted in McCann, p. 208.

19. Frederico Fellini,
8½
.

20. The identification of this suddenly ambiguous figure with Allen is probably obviated by a trivial fact Lax records: Allen’s “unwillingness to have his vision interfered with extends to not wearing sunglasses because of the alterations they make in color and light” (p. 233).

21. A seminal difference between Mary P. Nichols’
Reconstructing Woody
perception of Allen’s view of art and mine is that she insists upon a distinction between Allen’s art and that of his characters. Nichols maintains that neither Bates nor Cliff of
Crimes and Misdemeanors
is the artist Allen is, the disparity containing for her the difference between the art Allen satirizes and the more substantial art he creates and thus affirms. Although I’d agree that the quality of Allen’s work is greater than that of his artist protagonists, I’m not at all convinced that the dubious attitude toward the artistic enterprise dramatized in his films and voiced by his protagonists is completely ironized in such a way as to elevate Allen’s own work above the critique. Nichols contends that Allen’s art transcends its own critique of art in the same way, say, that Joyce’s
Portrait
transcends the art of the young artist it depicts; my dissenting argument is that, because of his very real dubiety about the claims of aesthetic transformation, Allen’s art consistently accuses and indicts itself.

8. Woody’s Mild Jewish Rose:
Broadway Danny Rose

1. The contrast between the highly sympathetic depiction of the world of Jewish-American comedy and the much more negative vision of Hollywood in Allen’s next film,
The Purple Rose of Cairo,
isn’t surprising, given Allen’s career choices, but it is nonetheless instructive. The Hollywood film within
Purple Rose
presents nothing but illusions belied by the actions and characters of the actors who appear in the movie, but which the hopeless economic straits of the audience compel them desperately to embrace; the comedians are aware of and sensitive to their audience, enjoying each other at the Carnegie Deli as if they
are
that audience.

2. Woody Allen,
Broadway Danny Rose,
in
Three Films of Woody Allen
(New York: Vintage Books, 1987), p. 255.

3. Jonathan Baumbach, “The Comedians” (review of
Broadway Danny Rose), Commonweal,
March 23, 1984, p. 182.

4. Another small consonance between beginnings and endings in the Danny Rose fable: when Danny arrives at Tina’s apartment to meet her for the first time, she’s talking to Lou on the telephone; when she arrives at Danny’s apartment on Thanksgiving to make up with him, he’s talking on the telephone.

5. John Pym, review of
Broadway Danny Rose, Sight and Sound,
Autumn, 1984, p. 300.

6. Baumbach, p. 182.

7. The comedians are not the only ones being nostalgic in
Broadway Danny Rose
. Weinstein’s Majestic Bungalow Colony, a Catskills resort where Danny is pictured pumping his acts, is where Allen’s performing career had its start, the sixteen-year-old Allan Konigsberg having performed magic tricks there. Recent Allen biographies have also established that the Danny Rose character was inspired in part by Harvey Meltzer, the agent Allen had before signing on with Charles Joffe and Jack Rollins. Meltzer is said to have used phrases similar to Danny’s signature expression, “Might I interject a concept at this juncture?” Fox, p. 151.

8. Vincent Canby, “‘Danny Rose’: Runyonesque, But Pure Woody Allen” (review of
Broadway Danny Rose), The New York Times,
January 29, 1984, II, 13, p. 1.