The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (57 page)

9. Gilbert Adair, review of
Broadway Danny Rose, Monthly Film Bulletin,
September, 1984, p. 272.

10. David Denby, review of
Broadway Danny Rose, New York,
February 6, 1984, p. 64.

11. The union of Danny and Tina would also confirm the prediction of Tina’s favorite fortune-teller, Angelina, that Tina would marry a Jew. That confirmation might be said to balance somewhat the film’s dramatization of Danny’s ethic so clearly triumphing over her cultural beliefs. That Tina’s culture is largely reduced to “fortune-tellers and meat hooks” is admittedly one of the film’s less pleasing comic strategies.

12. Allen’s decision to have the comedians portray themselves rather than providing them with fictional identities creates a minor fact/fiction tension in the film, reversing the juxtaposition of the fictional Leonard Zelig with actual documentary footage, which was the central rhetorical ploy of
Zelig,
his previous film.

13. Andrew Sarris, review of
Broadway Danny Rose, Village Voice,
February 7, 1984, p. 47.

14. Daphne Merkin, “Comedy on Three Levels,” (review of
Broadway Danny Rose), New Leader,
March 5, 1984, p. 19.

15. Joseph Gelmis, review of
Broadway Danny Rose, Newsday,
January 27,1984, II, p. 3.

16. Jack Kroll, “Woody’s Bow to Broadway” (review of
Broadway Danny Rose), Newsweek
January 30, 1984, p. 69.

17. William K. Zinsser, “Bright New Comic Clowns Toward Success,”
Saturday Evening Post,
September 21, 1963, p. 26.

18. Maurice Yacowar,
Loser Take All: The Comic Art of Woody Allen
(New York: Frederick Unger Inc., 1979), p. 21.

19. In a very grumpy review of the film, Pauline Kael suggests, “Although Woody Allen knows how repulsive Lou Canova’s act is, Danny Rose doesn’t. He isn’t permitted to have either taste or consciousness” (
State of the Art
[New York: E.P. Dutton, 1985], p. 124). Whether Allen’s film is as insistent upon the repulsiveness of Canova’s act as Kael is highly questionable—Nick Apollo Forte’s performances in the film apparently differ little from the stage show he once regularly performed. The value system of
Broadway Danny Rose
is the showbiz ethic of the Carnegie comics and cruise ship lounges and Joe Franklin’s
Memory Lane
television show, and much of the viewer’s pleasure in the playing out of the film’s fable is her/his immersion in that frankly and unapologetically vulgar realm in which singers perform medleys of “crooners who are now deceased.” Consequently, “taste or consciousness” are expressly not what this film is about, except in that Danny has too much of either to sacrifice human beings to the showbiz winner-take-all worship of success. The question Kael might have posed to herself before dismissing the premises of
Broadway Danny Rose
was the one with which she closed her review of
Another Woman:
“How can you embrace life and leave out all the good vulgar trashiness?” (
Movie Love
[New York: E.P. Dutton], 1991, p. 16).

20. Woody Allen,
Zelig, Three Films of Woody Allen,
p. 126.

21. Yacowar, p. 215.

9. The Fine Art of Living Well:
Hannah and Her Sisters

1. Woody Allen,
Hannah and Her Sisters
(New York: Vintage Books, 1987), pp. 96,97–98.

2. Bjorkman, p. 157.

3. Allen’s original, preferred ending, he told Anthony DeCurtis, focused upon Elliot rather than Mickey and Holly. Lee had married again, and Elliot had reunited with Hannah, but he remains in love with Lee, the film never resolving his erotic conflict between sisters. “Woody Allen, The
Rolling Stone
Interview,” p. 49.

4. Mickey’s and Holly’s image in the mirror provides a visual antithesis to an earlier scene in which a mirror figures prominendy: Mickey’s botched suicide attempt results in his blasting the glass out of a mirror in his apartment.

5. The clown in
Shadows and Fog
does repudiate his career as a circus artist in order to be a father to the abandoned child he and Irmy have found, but his commitment is counterpoised with Kleinman’s culminating dedication of his life to assisting in the creation of Irmstedt’s illusions.

6. Mia Farrow,
What Falls Away
(New York: Doubleday, 1997), pp. 195, 227.

7. Walter Isaacson, “The Heart Wants What It Wants” (interview with Woody Allen),
Time Magazine,
August 31, 1992, p. 59.

8. Quoted in Phoebe Hoban, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Woody and Mia (But Were Afraid to Ask),”
New York,
September 21, 1992, p. 39.

9. Quoted in Tim Carroll,
Woody and His Women,
p. 244.

10.
What Falls Away
p. 239.

11.
What Falls Away
p. 228.

12.
What Falls Away
p. 283.

13. Kristi Groteke with Marjorie Rosen,
Mia and Woody: Love and Betrayal
(New York: Carroll and Graf, 1994), p. 68.

14. William Geist’s 1987
Rolling Stone
interview illustrates Allen’s relative equanimity at the time, Allen attributing his good mood in part to the relationship with Farrow (p. 214).

15. With the exception of the Depression-wracked
The Purple Rose of Cairo,
Allen’s films concentrate on characters for whom having sufficient money to live is not a problem. Sandy Bates’s comments to Daisy on this issue seem to reflect Allen’s own preferences in writing screenplays: “But what happens if you’re living in a more, you know, uh, more affluent society. And you’re lucky enough not to have to worry about that. Let’s say you’re surviving…. So, then your problems become, can I fall in love, or why can’t I fall in love, and why do I age and die, and what meaning can my life possibly have?”
(Stardust Memories,
p. 351).

16. Douglas Brode points out the further parallel between
Interiors
and
Hannah and Her Sisters
of the three central sisters: Renata/Hannah, the successful artist whose achievements overshadow and intimidate her sisters; Joey/Holly, who desires to create but lacks the requisite talent, and Flyn/Lee, whose physical beauty is her primary artistic accomplishment.
The Films of Woody Allen,
p. 244.

17. The fact that the minuscule role of Frederick is played by Max Von Sydow, an actor so closely identified with Ingmar Bergman, suggests how little Bergmanian brooding is permitted to infect
Hannah and Her Sisters,
ostensibly one of Allen’s sunniest serious films.

18. Holly’s first play is stitched together from what Lee has told her of Hannah and Elliot’s marital problems, and constitutes an act of revenge upon her more accomplished sister; the second script which she reads to Mickey allows her to avenge herself against April (Carrie Fisher), who took architect David away from her. Mickey’s unwillingness to criticize the draft says more about his romantic designs on Holly than about the virtues of her play.

19. “Intriguingly,” Brode argues, “Allen’s own character Mickey appears to belong to another film from the rest of the characters, who are tightly knitted together. Other than the fact that he was once married to Hannah, he seems to be functioning in an alternative universe” (p. 247).

20.
What Falls Away
p. 226.

21.
What Falls Away
p. 234.

22.
Crimes and Misdemeanors
is the other “novel-on-film.” Lax, p. 274.

23. The original screenplay contained only the opening Thanksgiving celebration. After substantial shooting had been completed, Allen added the Thanksgiving two years later, and then the intervening holiday in which Hannah proclaims “it’s so dark tonight,” Elliot’s affirmation of love for her precipitating the film’s alteration of direction from atomization toward union and resolution. Geist, “The
Rolling Stone
Interview: Woody Allen,” p. 214.

24. Allen wasn’t referring specifically to
Hannah and Her Sisters
when he told Bjorkman that filmmakers “create a world that [they] would like to live in. You like the people you create. You like what they wear, where they live, and it gives you a chance for some months to live in that world. And those people move to beautiful music, and you’re in that world” (p. 51). Nonetheless, this description evokes few scenes of his as compellingly as Hannah’s first Thanksgiving—until, that is, he began shooting the still more idealized world of
Everyone Says I Love You
.

25. Whereas Hannah’s professional life is presented as unexceptionally successful, her career apparently encountering no conflicts between the institutions of the theater and her desire to express herself artistically on the stage, Mickey’s show’s ratings are down, its reviews are “terrible,” the sponsor is consequently hostile, and the writers are bitter about Standards and Practices’ suppression of their sketches, the resultant tensions prompting him (like
Manhattan’s
Isaac Davis) to repudiate television and quit his job.

26. Saul Bellow,
Herzog
(New York: Viking Press, 1964), pp. 92–93.

27. Evidence that Allen has some such cultural polarization in mind in scripting the television production scene, aligning Mickey and the show with Jewish cultural concerns, is provided by the fact that the evening’s show includes a skit in which Christianity’s most celebrated symbol, the Pope, is characterized as a child molester. Another sketch deals with the Palestine Liberation Organization, and when things get too much for him, Mickey looks to the ceiling and invokes the classic Old Testament formulation of divine injustice, echoing Job’s question of “Why me, Lord?” (pp. 30–31). That his assistant is portrayed by Julie Kavner, who would, in Allen’s “Oedipus Wrecks” segment of
New York Stories,
play the first Jewish character with whom an Allen protagonist becomes romantically involved since Carol Kane and Janet Margolin portrayed Alvy Singer’s first two wives in
Annie Hall,
arguably reinforces the elements of Jewish American culture pervading this scene in
Hannah
.

28. Pauline Kael was the most committed of Allen’s critics to finding the WASP/Jewish antinomy at the center of his work. In her review of
Another Woman,
she argued, “You can see in his comedies that he associates messy emotions with Jewishness and foolishness and laughter, but he wants to escape all that and be a serious’ dignified artist, so he sets his dramas in an austere Gentile world. And then what is the protagonist’s tight-nostrilled anguish about? Being repressed. Being a perfectionist. Not being emotional enough. That was the interior-decorator mother’s soul-sickness in
Interiors,
and it’s Marion’s soul-sickness here. Woody Allen is caught in his own Catch-22: his protagonist’s problem is not being Jewish.”
Movie Love
(New York: E.P. Dutton, 1991), p. 15. Kael’s assumption that Woody Allen couldn’t recognize this cultural tension in himself as thoroughly as she did and use it as the dramatic basis for film narratives is this chapter’s primary argument with Kael’s position.

29. Elliot’s final comment on the affair, “Everything that happened between us seems more and more hazy” (p. 176), might be read as Allen’s attempt to minimize its future affect on Elliot and Hannah’s marriage by suggesting the relationship is coming to seem to him like a dream.

30. Bjorkman, p. 55. Elsewhere, Allen called “the romanticized view of Mia” in
Hannah and Her Sisters
“the hardest thing we’ve done. There was so much ambivalence to the character, her goodness, her too-goodness, her niceness to her sisters but her feeling superior to them. In order to be successful, the character had to move in and out of all those feelings throughout the picture.” Sam Rubin and Richard Taylor,
Mia: Flowerchild, Madonna, Muse
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), p. 118.

31. Farrow suggested that the inspiration for the three sisters element of the film was her family, and her mother, Maureen O’Sullivan, concurred. Fox, p. 164.

32. Quoted in Carroll,
Woody and His Women,
p. 237.

33. Farrow’s description of a Las Vegas morning with Frank Sinatra exemplifies her tendency to depict her life as being determined by the decisions of others or of forces beyond her control: “By what series of decisions, I wondered, was I here, now, in Las Vegas, in this golf can, at five in the morning, with a man wearing a shoe box driving full speed toward death by plate glass? Should I have done something differently? No, I decided as we raced toward the window; there was nothing to be done differently, not then or now. All the occurrences of our common time, tender or troubled, were linked as surely as the beads on a rosary” (p. 110).

34.
What Falls Away,
p. 226.

35.
Mia and Woody,
p. 186.

36.Groteke and Rosen, p. 68.

37. Mickey’s suicide attempt and his subsequent affirmation of “being part of the experience” of living may owe something to Henrik’s comic attempt at self-destruction in Bergman’s
Smiles of a Summer Night
. Henrik tries to hang himself, but the rope slips off its tether, the action tripping a bed to appear from the wall. Henrik decides that if the world is sinful, he wants to sin, too, and there in the bed is the perfect occasion for sin—his father’s kept woman, Anne.

38. Allen’s odd association of the Konigsberg family with the Marx Brothers seems to give even his
Duck Soup
epiphany an eccentric element of familial affirmation.

39. Brode, p. 246.

40. Allison and Curry interpret Lee’s complaint that the quarrel between Hannah and Holly is making her dizzy as halting the self-consciously intrusive, circling camera’s movements. “Allen thus allows his women characters to demonstrate seeming insight into and power over the ways in which perception by external mechanisms—such as cameras or patriarchal manipulations—distorts women’s relationships with each other” (p. 131). Their argument that the title characters of the film are consistently framed by male perceptions seems to me completely persuasive.