The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (58 page)

10. If You Want a Hollywood Ending:
Crimes and Misdemeanors

1. In recognition of the film’s moral seriousness, the
New York Times
invited three theologically inclined professors to respond to the ethical issues raised by
Crimes and Misdemeanors:
James Nuecterlein saw it as epitomizing the fate of contemporary intellectuals who seek to believe but fail to achieve belief; Rabbi Eugene Borowitz argued that the film’s depiction of Rabbi Ben “uniquely displays the truth of faith, at least my Jewish faith”; while Mary Erler read the ending as demonstrating that “not only do moral questions not have answers, even asking them is pointless.” “Woody Allen Counts the Wages of Sin,” October 15, 1979, Section III, pp. 15, 20, 22.

2. After seeing the first rough cut of the movie, Allen saw the disparity between the two plots—Judah’s crime and Cliff’s misdemeanor—as a failure of balance. “In comparison to Judah’s story,” he told Sandy Morse in a conference recorded by Eric Lax, “I’m not getting big enough things happening [with Cliff and Halley].” My critical contention is that, in the final version, that disparity becomes very much what
Crimes and Misdemeanors
is about. My pretensions to penetrating Allen’s ultimate intentions in the film notwithstanding, Lax’s extended recording of Allen’s debate with Sandy Morse over the narrative
of Crimes and Misdemeanors
(pp. 362–66) provides an excellent corrective, supplementing Ralph Rosenblum’s essay and Navacelle’s
Woody on Location,
to any notion that Woody Allen’s scripts arrive in the form of full-bodied, coherent, thematically consistent plots requiring no revision.

3. Although in both name and biographical details Louis Levy resembles Primo Levi, author of
Survival at Auschwitz, The Drowned and the Saved,
and other works describing his experience in the Nazi Holocaust, Allen insists that his
Crimes and Misdemeanors
philosopher wasn’t modeled on Levi but derives from the murdered professor plot originally included in the
Annie Hall
script. Fox, pp. 204–5.

4. The two plots of
Crimes and Misdemeanors
remain separate until the meeting of Judah and Cliff in the film’s concluding scene, but Allen’s screenplay carefully establishes links between the Cliff and Judah plots: one of the threats Dolores makes to Judah in hopes of forcing him to leave Miriam for her is that if they’re not together, “I don’t know what I’ll do, Judah—I’ll jump out the window, I swear.”

5. There is significant evidence in the film that Halley is another character deluded by love, that she too is choosing “the wrong person” in her engagement to Lester. She loved her first husband “at first sight,” but, by her own admission, she “should have looked again,” her comment suggesting that she’s prone to error in love relations. The film’s characterization of Lester never fully contradicts Cliff’s negative perception of him as an egotist who exploits others by appealing to their fascination with his wealth and success, which is Cliff s explanation for Halley’s agreeing to marry him. Although she tells Cliff that she’s “professionally ambitious,” in both love relationships Halley has allowed romance to take precedence over her professional aspirations, abandoning her legal career following her first marriage, going to London to produce films and apparently spending much of her time there securing a fiancé instead.

6. Using Allen’s review of Ingmar Bergman’s autobiography,
The Magic Lantern,
for context, Sam B. Girgus persuasively argues that the vision/blindness motifs of the film find subtextual reinforcement in the film’s Bergmanesque attempt to make visible “the soul’s landscape.” “‘The eyes of God,’ a phrase from
Crimes and Misdemeanors,
” Girgus explains, “describes precisely how [Allen] wants the camera and his filmmaking to look within and bring out that world for art.”
The Films of Woody Allen,
p. 116.

7. One of the moral issues glossed over by this film so focused upon ethics, Pauline Kael argued, is the consequence of Judah’s decision for its victim. “We aren’t asked to have any feeling for [Dolores],” Kael asserted; “We see the situation strictly in terms of her threats to break up [Judah’s] marriage and expose his financial manipulations…. The film’s emphasis is confusing: the spectator has more anxiety about the doctor’s possibly revealing his crime to the authorities than about what he does to her.”
Movie Love,
pp. 199, 203.

8. Ironically, Allen considered ending
Crimes and Misdemeanors
with a scene from a Hollywood movie—an Esther Williams film, or
Yankee Doodle Dandy,
or
It’s a Wonderful Life—
as a way of dramatizing that, despite his rejection by Halley, Cliff is getting on with his life. Lax, p. 362.

9. David Denby judged
Crimes and Misdemeanors
as “Allen’s most ambitious and completely organized film yet”
(New York,
October 29,1983, p. 124); Mike McGrady said,“Woody is Woody, and he has done it once again—provoked, excited, amused, entertained, and made one of the years best movies”
(Newsday,
October 13, 1989, Part III, p. 3); Jack Kroll described the film as “one of his most affecting movies and perhaps his most disquieting portrait of the urban psyche-scape”
(Newsweek,
October 16, 1989, p. 67); for Richard Schickel, the film’s mood swings “stir us from our comfortable stupor and vivify a true, moral, always acute and often hilarious meditation on the psychological economy of the Reagan years” (
Time,
October 16, 1989, p. 82); J. Hoberman saw the film as “a smart, absorbing, inventive movie, with startling intimations of greatness. Woody Allen hasn’t simply caught up to his ambition, in some ways he has run past it”
(Village Voice,
October 17, 1989, p. 87).

10. Consistent with her
Reconstructing Woody
project, Mary P. Nichols argues that Judah’s closing monologue contains manifestations of lingering guilt, proof that he’s deluding himself in declaring himself “home free.” In support of her moral ameliorist reading of Allen’s films, Nichols cites Sander Lee’s argument that Judah’s need to disburden himself to others of his “murder story with a very strange twist” will ultimately lead to his arrest for murder. Nichols, pp. 158–59, 239.

11. It’s worth noticing that the contemporary Manhattan of
Crimes and Misdemeanors
is not the “expressionistic New York,” the idealized city of
Manhattan, Manhattan Murder Mystery
or
Everyone Says I Love You
. Sven Nykvist’s camera visualizes it as a dark, if relatively clean, urban assemblage of apartments, never for a moment pausing to offer a composed image of the cityscape.

12. Wendy’s indictment of her husband sounds very much like Sandy Bates’s indictment of his “stupid little films” in
Stardust Memories,
the two movies dramatizing a dismissive attitude toward comedy which gets reversed in the earlier work but not in
Crimes and Misdemeanors
.

13. William Buder Yeats, “The Second Coming,”
Selected Poems and Two Plays of William Butler Yeats,
M.L. Rosenthal, ed. (New York: Collier Books, 1962), p. 91.

14. Blake,
Woody Allen: Sacred and Profane,
pp. 183–84.

15. Girgus, p. 124.

16. In his characterization of Cliff, “Woody Allen is tweaking his own highmindedness,” Pauline Kael argued, “yet he also appears to be revealing himself more nakedly than in his other movies. He appears to be saying, ‘This is who I am’”
(Movie Love,
p. 202). David Denby described Cliff as “a witty man yet also one of the bitterest studies of failure ever put on film” (p. 124).

17. Lester’s popularity with the public epitomizes an attitude Allen has consistently expressed about popular reaction to his own films. “The best film I ever did, really,” he told Tom Shales, “was
Stardust Memories
. It was my least popular film. That may automatically mean it was my best film.” Tom Shales, “Woody Allen: The First 50 Years,”
Esquire,
April, 1987, p. 95.

11. Everyone Loves Her/His Illusions:
The Purple Rose of Cairo
and
Shadows and Fog

Epigraph quoted in
The Purple Rose of Cairo,
p. 373.

1. Michiko Kakutani, “Woody Allen: The Art of Humor,” p. 221.

2. Allen got stalled in writing the screenplay of
The Purple Rose of Cairo,
the solution being the introduction of Gil Shepherd, the actor who plays Baxter, into the plot. Bjorkman, p. 148.

3. Sam B. Girgus sees the movie characters’ fate as partaking of the film’s concern with freedom of choice: “Allen’s way of resolving the extended joke about the escaped character dramatizes the deeper point regarding the moral dimension of narrative that must include responsibility for endings. Unable to participate in the writing of their own stories, the characters are fated to either slavery or destruction.”
The Films of Woody Allen,
p. 86.

4. Monk’s incessant crapshooting with his friends suggests that he is seeking remedy for his condition through the very cause of that condition—gambling with money in a game of chance which will ultimately wipe out all of the players.

5. Lax, p. 27.

6. Graham McCann’s description of Cecilia’s habitual posture staring up at movie screens very effectively summarizes her character: “Cecilia’s face seems to have become fixed in this position, gazing up at people and things: she lives in a state of suspense engendered by an obsession with other people’s stories. Her days are spent waiting—for her husband to assault her, for her employer to fire her, for Ginger to dance with Fred.”
Woody Alien: New Yorker,
p. 214.

7. Christopher Ames,
Movies About the Movies
(Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1997), pp. 116, 119.

8. Arnold Preussner, “Woody Allen’s
The Purple Rose of Cairo
and the Genres of Comedy,”
Literature/Film Quarterly
16, 1 (1988), p. 42.

9. I’m not alone among Allen critics in conferring such ultimate status on
Purple Rose:
Richard Schickel described it as “one of the best movies about movies ever made”
(Time,
March 4, 1985, p. 85), while Ralph Tutt argued that, whereas
Crimes and Misdemeanors
readily acknowledges its indebtedness to other films,
Purple Rose
“transcends homage and genre. It gives us a bona fide auteur working independently in the seriocomic mode most congenial to his talent” (“Truth, Beauty and Travesty: Woody Allen’s Well Wrought Urn,”
Literature/Film Quarterly
16, 1 [1988], p. 108). In conversations for Lax’s biography, Allen affirmed that he considered
Purple Rose
“the best film he’s made” (p. 371).

10. Bjorkman, p. 210.

11. The “final solution” implications of
Shadows and Fog
and its allusions to
Night and Fog
are explored in detail in Mashey Bernstein’s “‘My Worst Fears Realized’: Woody Allen and the Holocaust,”
Perspectives on Woody Allen,
ed. Renee R. Curry (New York: G.K. Hall & Company, 1996), pp. 218–36.

12. At a time when so much of American film could be characterized by the title of the Jim Carrey film
Dumb and Dumber,
it seems particularly anomalous to see sophisticated reviewers carping with Allen’s evocation of Kafka, Brecht, German Expressionist film techniques, and similar references to the history of film and ideas in
Shadows and Fog
and his other films. Seldom did the negative reviews of
Shadows
suggest
why
the movie’s numerous allusions to film and literature were false or ineffective; David Denby’s
New York
description of
Shadows and Fog
as,”in art-world jargon, postmodernist pastiche” (“Fogged In” [review of
Shadows and Fog],
March 30, 1992, p. 58) typified the accusation-constitutes-indictment mentality of reviews written by the movie’s detractors. Allen’s films have proven particularly susceptible to the sort of review which manifests little interest in evaluating the movie responsibly or illuminating its concerns for readers but perceives it instead as an occasion for self-indulgent displays of the reviewer’s verbal cleverness. Richard Schickel’s
Time
review was much more explanatorily helpful: “
Shadows and Fog
is most obviously an exercise in style, a beautifully made tribute to the expressionist cinema of 1920s Germany. It’s all here: a homicidal maniac stalking the menacing night streets of a nameless, timeless city; a circus and a brothel populated by fringe figures who, naturally, are less hypocritical socially and sexually than the police, the church and the bourgeoisie; a score that features the music of Kurt Weill; lighting and a camera that pay homage to the whole Weimar school of cinematography” (March 23, 1992, p. 65).

13. The only human activity unaffected by the presence of death is—not surprisingly, given a Woody Allen film—sex. “There’s only one thing men will brave murder for,” one of the prostitutes argues, “the little furry animal between our legs.” That the brothel is aligned with the art-allegorizing circus is suggested by the response of one of the prostitutes to Irmy’s assertion that she is a sword swallower in the circus: “A sword swallower? That’s my specialty too.”

14. Woody Allen, “Death (A Play),” in
Without Feathers
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1983), p. 106. Perhaps because the release of the film made it seem a less effective first draft of
Shadows and Fog
“Death (A Play),” like “God (A Play),” isn’t included in
The Complete Prose of Woody Allen,
which otherwise reprints the complete contents of
Without Feathers, Side Effects,
and
Getting Even
.

15.
The Purple Rose of Cairo
and
Shadows and Fog
both offer a real world middle ground between the polar opposites of reality and fantasy: a brothel. The kindly whores of
Purple Rose,
unaware that they’re encountering a fantasy projection in Tom Baxter, offer him all sorts of fantasy gratifications free of charge. The prostitutes of Felice’s Place in
Shadows and Fog
are even more self-conscious about their roles as facilitators of male fantasy. Dory (Jodie Foster) comments on the disparity between worlds: “They look so innocent and dignified when they walk in here … and then the things they want you to
do
!” The brothel madam, Felice (Lily Tomlin) offers a parable of a man who likes to be ridden by a naked woman as she digs her spurs into his sides, and who achieves a “marriage made in heaven” when he finds a woman who enjoys riding him. The brothel clearly is a place where reality and fantasy effectively converge. The prostitutes’ forthrightness about sexual realities contrasts with the
legerdemain
and prevarication of the townsmen, while partaking of the circus’s gratification of fantasy, thus accounting for Allen’s characterization of the film’s emotive dynamic: “The thing that tied it all together was that there was the shadows and fog going through the night all the time. And then there was the occasional respite in the brothel. An occasional warm respite indoors” (Bjorkman, p. 235).