Primer is The A.V. Club's ongoing series of beginners' guides to pop culture's most notable subjects: filmmakers, music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests us—and hopefully you. This week: Woody Allen, the comedian turned actor-writer-director behind many films, including the new Vicky Cristina Barcelona.
Woody Allen 101
Though his now four-decade-long moviemaking career technically began with the overdubbed 1966 lark What's Up, Tiger Lily?—addressed here in "Miscellany," where it belongs—any formal Woody Allen education must begin with 1969's Take The Money And Run. When people talk about Allen's "early, funny period," this is the model: A goofy, inconsequential 85-minute comedy that pulled off the not-inconsiderable feat of stuffing the physical and verbal comedy of the Marx brothers within the slender frame of a clumsy, bespectacled Jew from New York. Taking the form of a mock documentary, the film chronicles the life and times of a petty criminal (Allen) whose ineptitude in robbing banks is equaled only by his ineptitude with women.
Right from the start, Allen established a comedic persona that would more or less stretch through every phase of his career. Yes, he has depths of intellect and melancholy that don't surface here, but other elements are firmly in place: The runaway neuroses, the merciless self-deprecation, the bumbling physical hijinks, the ongoing feelings of romantic and sexual inadequacy. In a cinema full of glamorous heroes, characters like Allen's Virgil Stockwell (one of his funniest character names, second to Bananas' Fielding Mellish) were refreshingly down-to-earth, the personification of the klutzy, neurotic fussbucket that exists in all of us. Finally, someone to relate to!
Take The Money And Run is somewhat unique to the Allen filmography in that it has no subtext whatsoever. It's simply about stringing together as many gags as possible, which makes it lumpy viewing at times, but mostly confirms Allen as a gifted, energetic, inspired new presence in American comedy. A textbook gag about a bank robbery foiled by poor penmanship ("I have a gub") is the obvious highlight, but Allen gets a lot of mileage out of the faux-documentary conceit, from the wry narration and hilarious talking heads (especially his mortified parents) to the running joke that the audience is watching a filmed monument to one man's failure.
Allen stepped up his game considerably with his 1971 follow-up Bananas, perhaps the zaniest and most purely pleasurable of his early-period laughers. Once again, Allen plays an inept fool: an empty-headed consumer-products tester whose infatuation with a good-looking political activist (Louise Lasser) leads him to the unstable Central American banana republic of San Marcos, where he unwittingly gets involved in the revolution. And somehow, through a combination of dumb luck and one incredibly goofy Fidel Castro-inspired fake beard, he becomes a figurehead among San Marcos' rebels, impressing the girl after all.
Much like Duck Soup, an Allen favorite, Bananas takes a typical jester's stand on politics—declaring it all a circus that sweeps up the naïvely idealistic (or, in this case, horny) and deposits them wherever the winds may blow. It's telling that Howard Cosell of ABC's Wide World Of Sports serves as commentator for the assassination of "El Presidente" and Allen's marital consummation at the end of the film, as if both were equally absurd. But mostly, Bananas is a cavalcade of inspired silliness, with highlights that include Marvin Hamlisch's infectious score (with kazoo!), a courtroom scene where Allen breathlessly interrogates himself ("Does the codename 'sapphire' mean anything to you?"), and some funny physical business involving a young Sylvester Stallone as "Subway Thug #1."
Allen delved into politics again with his ingenious 1973 science-fiction spoof Sleeper, which takes place in a future world dominated by an oppressive, invasive government. Again, he joins an anti-government group less out of an activist impulse than a desire to get a few spins with Diane Keaton in the Orgasmatron. Playing a health-food-store owner frozen by scientists and awakened 200 years in the future, Allen shows off an impressive repertoire of physical and verbal comedy. Some scenes have the quality of a classic silent movie, like one where Allen wakes up with massive disorientation and muscle atrophy, or another where he clumsily imitates a robot to infiltrate the government. (He keeps his glasses on, which sets him apart from other robots.) He capitalizes on the futuristic setting, which allows him to speculate on mating habits and rewrite giant swaths of history. If the history books were rewritten in accordance with Sleeper, Bela Lugosi would be the former mayor of New York, Charles de Gaulle a famous French chef with his own television show, and Howard Cosell a form of punishment for high crimes against the state.
No longer content with simple laughs, Allen moved decisively into the next phase of his career with 1977's Annie Hall, which won him Oscars for Director, Screenplay, and Picture, as well as Best Actress for his effervescent co-star Diane Keaton. While refining his distinctive brand of New York Jewish humor, Allen turned his attention for the first time to a serious, insightful look at a romance that waxes and wanes, flourishing until finally, like a shark, "it has to keep moving or it dies." One of the remarkable elements of Annie Hall—and what separates it from every Woody Allen film to this day—is its loose-limbed, discursive structure, which gives Allen the opportunity to talk to the camera, move freely back and forth in time, insert random gags when necessary, and chart the full history of a relationship, including the romantic pasts of both people involved. As with all Allen films to come, its view of love is fundamentally pessimistic, but its tone is airy and accessible, and its observations universal.
The breadth of Annie Hall's influence can't be overstated. It's the birth of a modern-day American romantic comedy, where relationships are forged via banter-filled walk-and-talks and the male lead's idea of courtship is an extended stand-up routine. Annie Hall is to romantic comedies as Halloween is to slasher films—a great achievement that spawned a lot of bad movies. Allen's habit of breaking the "fourth wall" and addressing the camera directly has been similarly imitated, but beyond that, the movie serves as a clinic in how to mix serious insight and bright comedy without drawing too severe a line between the two.
Allen collected another Oscar for writing 1986's Hannah And Her Sisters, a dense, sophisticated comedy-drama about siblings who hurt each other while following their foolish romantic impulses. Mia Farrow is married to Michael Caine, but Caine's eye drifts to her beautiful younger sister Barbara Hershey, who in turn is committed to a severe older artist, played by Ingmar Bergman muse Max Von Sydow. Catastrophically, Caine and Hershey pursue their latent affections; their affair speaks to a recurring theme in Allen's work—that love is selfish, destructive, and utterly, tragically inescapable. The characters in Hannah And Her Sisters are slaves of the heart; it helps that Allen offsets their cruelty and pain by casting himself as the comic relief, playing Farrow's hypochondriac, death-fearing former husband with a typical absence of vanity. He also gives himself a sage line: "The heart is a resilient little muscle."
- Comments