The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (59 page)

16. Quoted in Frank Gado,
The Passion of Ingmar Bergman
[Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1986], p. 239.) Bergman’s influence on
Shadows and Fog
is less obvious than that of German Expressionist film, and yet the preoccupation of Bergman’s
The Magician
with the absolute disparity between human magic tricks and the Christian miracle of resurrection seems to be echoed in the failure of Irmstedt’s magic to capture the killer/arrest the process of death.

17. Given the negativity of Allen’s characterization of Paul early in the film, his comment to Stig Bjorkman about clowns is illuminating: “I never liked clowns—unlike Fellini. And this may be because what we get in the United States is radically different from European clowns. I’ve never enjoyed clowns.” Bjorkman, p. 5.

18. Woody Allen,
Husbands and Wives
(Columbia TriStar Home Video, 1992).

19. Allen’s concurrence with Kleinman’s judgment that the inevitability of death prevents anything good from happening pervades his work. “There is no other fear of significant consequence,” he told Stig Bjorkman, as the fear of death. “All other fears, all other problems, one can deal with. Loneliness, lack of love, lack of talent, lack of money, everything can be dealt with. In some way, there are ways to cope. You have friends that can help you, you have doctors that can help you. But perishing is what it’s all about” (Bjorkman, p. 106).

20. Michael Kerbel’s
Cineaste
essay, “The Redemptive Power of Art,” suggests that, “Unlike the ending of
Deconstructing Harry
this conclusion [of
S&F
] proclaims both the power and the evanescence of our artistic creations.” In addressing
Harry
I will argue that that film is no less ambivalent in its claims about art than is
Shadows and Fog
.

12. Poetic License, Bullshit:
Bullets Over Broadway

1. Allen characterized that film style in describing the first Bergman film he saw as a teenager, his description anticipating the
mise en scene
he would attempt to create in
Shadows and Fog:
“I never knew who directed the film, nor did I care, nor was I sensitive at that age to the power of the work itself—the irony, the tensions, the German Expressionist style with its poetic black-and-white photography and its erotic sadomasochistic undertones.” “Through a Life Darkly,” p. 29.

2. Fox, p. 243.

3. The Doctor in
Shadows and Fog
makes a similar argument conjoining artistic and destructive tendencies: “Sometimes certain impulses that inspire an insane man to murder inspire others to highly creative ends.” In
Sweet and Lowdown
the same point is made through the paralleling of Emmet Ray’s musical gift to a gangster’s gift for killing.

4. Although Shayne’s debt to these playwrights is expressed largely through his own melodramatic excesses, Allen is clearly locating the fault in Shayne and not in his models. Allen is, he told Eric Lax, “a product intellectually, artistically and emotionally—and for better or worse—of that group of sort of New York playwrights Theirs was the era of the well-made play, three- or two-act plays with a certain old-fashioned construction. It permeates my work in one way or another. … I would have been, I think, very happy and functioning well in the 1920s and ‘30s with [Anderson, George S. Kaufman, Odets, O’Neill and Robert Sherwood].” Lax, p. 241.

5. At least some of Cheech’s aesthetic derives from Allen’s directorial practice. According to Farrow, he would say to an actor, “I don’t believe a word of it…. Human beings don’t talk that way.”
What Falls Away
p. 203.

6. Lionel Trilling, “Reality in America,” in
The Liberal Imagination
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976), pp. 3–4.

7. Trilling, p. 13.

8. At the end of
Shadows and Fog
Irmy and Paul leave the circus just as Kleinman is joining it; by the close of
Husbands and Wives
, Sally and Jack have reconciled after announcing their separation in the film’s opening scene to Gabe and Judy, who have divorced by the movies final scene; Carol is initially the character obsessed with the murder in
Manhattan Murder Mystery,
but by the end, her husband Larry’s preoccupation with it has surpassed hers; Linda Ash doesn’t know that Larry Weinrib has adopted her child when they meet for the first time in
Mighty Aphrodite,
and he’s unaware that he has fathered the child with her at their final meeting.

9. Woody Allen and Douglas McGrath,
Bullets Over Broadway
(Studio City, Hollywood: Hollywood Scripts, n.d.), p. 111.

10. Allen and McGrath, p. 109.

11. It is one of the real oddities of this film in which plagiarism is a central theme that
Bullets Over Broadway
so often echoes another film with which Allen was associated which also dealt with ghostwriting—
The Front
. The “artist or the man” issue is found there; Florence (Andrea Marcovicci) admits to “having made this kind of mistake before, confusing the artist with the man,” as is the tide notion, and Howard Prince (Allen) pretends to be the author of work by blacklisted writers and criticizing their scripts when they don’t live up to the standards “his” previous efforts have established.

12. In both
Crimes and Misdemeanors
and
Bullets Over Broadway,
artistic idealism is embodied in characters with insufficient strength of character or integrity to withstand the real world’s capacity for undermining that stance. Cliff’s wife speaks disparagingly about her husband’s documentaries with their implicit “fantasies about changing the world”: “he’s a man who thinks he can change the world. He makes these films, and in the end they come to nothing.” Shayne believes it is the “theater’s duty … to transform men’s souls,” but
Bullets
makes clear that it is the thoroughly corrupt world of the theater which is most in need of transformation.

13. Peter Rainer tentatively posited a connection between Cheech’s murderously aesthete stance and Allen’s initial reaction to the Mia Farrow imbroglio: “It’s possible—though not very productive—to interpret the movie as Allen’s apologia for his above-it-all stance during the early stages of his famous troubles”
(Los Angeles Times Calendar,
October 21, 1994, p. 1). Andrew Sarris was more categorical:
“Bullets Over Broadway
is as close as he’ll get to saying I’m sorry.’” Allen has now wrested poetry from “pain and guilt… regret and remorse” (quoted in Georgia Brown, “Biting Bullets” (review of
Bullets Over Broadway), Village Voice,
October 18, 1994, p. 54).

14. Lax, p. 277.

13. Lets Just Live It: Woody Allen in the 1990s

1. Fox, p. 246.

2.
Celebrity
eclipsed both films, costing more than $20 million.

3. A variation on these embodiments of pragmatism is the “Woody’s pal” character played by Tony Roberts in
Annie Hall, Stardust Memories,
and
Midsummer Nights Sex Comedy,
and by Michael Murphy in
Manhattan
. This character contrasts with the Allen protagonist in his more forthright devotion to materialism and his greater sexual libertinism. Whereas the pragmatists make the Allen protagonist doubt his idealistic impulses, the Roberts/Murphy character makes him regret his own inhibitions as well as inspiring a measure of envy for his pal’s prosperity.

4. Harry Block, a less sympathetic Allen protagonist, also looks to the skies for confirmation of the real: “I’m strictly, you know, quarks and particles and black holes,” Harry explains, “all the rest is junk to me.”

5. Mashey Bernstein, “’My Worst Fears Realized’: Woody Allen and the Holocaust,” in
Perspectives on Woody Allen,
ed. Rene Curry (New York: G.K. Hall, 1996), p. 223.

6. Woody Allen, “Random Reflections of a Second-Rate Mind,”
Tikkun: A Bimonthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture and Society
(July, 1991), reprinted in Joyce Carol Oates, ed.,
Best American Essays 1991
(New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1992), p. 8.

7. Lax, p. 373.

8. John Lahr, “The Imperfectionist,”
The New Yorker,
December 9, 1996, p. 74. 9: Lax, p. 285.

10. Lax, p. 293.

11. Wilde,
Horizons of Assent,
p. 15.

12. DeCurtis, p. 50.

13. Graham McCann makes a similar argument in slightly different terms: “The aesthetic wholeness Allen finds in a work by Fellini or Renoir is no more or less likely than the aesthetic wholeness people find in, say,
Hannah and Her Sisters
. For all his talk of wanting to make a ‘masterpiece,’ Allen does not yet possess the self-confidence to acknowledge (even to himself) the fine things in his work. His romantic notion of greatness belittles his own achievements.”
Woody Allen: New Yorker,
p. 169.

14. Bjorkman, p. 156.

15. Allen’s impulse to end films with scenes from other films (
Duck Soup
in
Hannah, The Lady from Shanghai
in
Manhattan Murder Mystery
and his early intention to close
Crimes and Misdemeanors
with a film clip) seems a filmmakers’ version of this desperate need: if you can’t arrive at your own resolution, offer the representation of one from another movie.
Celebrity
closes with Lee Simon (Kenneth Branagh) watching a film in which a word skywritten by an airplane summarizes his condition: “HELP.”

16. Quoted in Alexander Nehamas,
Nietzsche: Life as Literature
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985), p. 44.

17. DeCurtis, p. 50.

18. Cynthia Ozick, “Saul Bellow’s Broadway,” in
Fame & Folly
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 182.

14. Because Its Real Difficult in Life:
Husbands and Wives

1. Walter Isaacson, “The Heart Wants What It Wants” (interview with Woody Allen),
Time Magazine,
August 31, 1992, p. 61.

2. David Denby, review of
Husbands and Wives, New York,
September 21, 1992, p. 60.

3. John Baxter sees both
Midsummer Nights Sex Comedy
and
Zelig
(which were shot almost simultaneously) as films whose good spirits reflect the emotional buoyancy of the Allen/ Farrow coupling.
Woody Allen: A Biography
pp. 308–9.

4.
Deconstructing Harry
which shares some of
Husbands and Wives
aura of emotional demoralization translated into cinematic technique, interrupts Allen’s typical uniformity of opening title presentation by cutting in jarringly repetitive images of Lucy arriving at Harry’s apartment building, the alternation prefiguring the film’s constant destabilizing shifts from Harry’s life to scenes from his fiction.

5. These qualities have attracted other filmmakers and screenwriters as well as audiences: movies written or directed by Marshall Brickman, Albert Brooks, Nora Ephron, Spike Lee, Ron Howard, Rob Reiner, and Kenneth Branagh (particularly in
Peter’s Friends
and
A Midwinter’s Tale)
clearly reflect the influence of Allen’s scripts and scene composition.

6. Kenneth Turan’s review of
Husbands and Wives
described the film as a “reverse mir- ror-image” of
Hannah and Her Sisters. Los Angeles Times Calendar,
September 18, 1992, p. 1.

7. Bjorkman, p. 244, 255.

8. “What is This Thing Called Love?” with its attendant, heartfelt questions—“Just who can solve its mystery? Why should it make a fool of me?”—provides the opening and closing musical theme of
Husbands and Wives,
but the title of one of Rains short stories epitomizes much more precisely the films antiromantic, anti-aesthetic, blundy erotic, and completely demoralized conclusion: “Oral Sex in the Age of Deconstruction.”

9. Bjorkman, p. 112.

10. Fox, p. 230.

11. David Ansen’s review of
Husbands and Wives
characterized it as “Allen’s most uninhibited film in years,” one displaying no sign of the “compulsive tidiness” of the directors recent films.
Newsweek,
September 21, 1992, p. 76.

12. Isaacson,
Time Magazine,
p. 61.

13. Only in the opening and closing tide sequences and in party scenes where a pianist is performing is
Husbands and Wives
provided with a musical soundtrack The
Interiors-
like absence of music is a highly significant omission, its lack implicidy verifying how important a role songs in other Allen films play in structuring scenes and informing the construction of characters.

14. Jack Mathews’ description of Gabe’s encounter with one of Rains “midlife crisis set” conquests perfectly captures the erotic distortions and dislocations of
Husbands and Wives:
“There’s a hilarious scene where Gabe and Rain are accosted on a street by Rain’s agitated ex- lover (Ron Rifkin), the sixtysomething psychoanalyst who fell in love with her while trying to help her overcome her fetish for older men.” Review of
Husbands and Wives, Newsday,
September 18, 1992, Part II, p. 67.

15. It’s difficult not to see the shadow of the solitary exits of the little tramp in Chaplin’s films in the scenes in Allen’s films in which the protagonist he portrays is abandoned by those he’s trusted. Danny Rose’s walking in the rain after Lou Canova dumps him as his manager is one such highly melodramatic image; another is Gabe’s walking through a downpour after renouncing his incipient affair with Rain and realizing he no longer has Judy to go home to.

16. Because it is itself about Isak Borg’s attempt to estimate the value of his life, Bergman’s
Wild Strawberries
is a perfect film for Gabe to cite in attempting to affirm the value of his marriage.

17. In Ann Beattie’s story, “Snow,” the narrator, looking back disconsolately on a terminated affair, offers a similar argument: “Who expects small things to survive when even the largest get lost?” she asks. “People forget years and remember moments. Seconds and symbols are left to sum things up.” “Snow,” in
Where You’ll Find Me
(New York: Linden Press/Simon & Schuster, 1986), p. 25.