INTRODUCTION
Alvy Singer relates a joke near the end of Annie Hall, a bit of corny humor he uses to make a point about love. "This guy goes to a psychiatrist and tells him, 'Doctor, it's my brother. He thinks he's a chicken.' The psychiatrist says, 'Why don't you turn him in?' The guy says, 'Can't do it. We need the eggs.'"
That joke offers a grand state of mind in which to enjoy the movies of Woody Allen. They may be illogical, maddening, even ridiculous, but just as with love, we need the eggs.
The writer-actor-director made his bones with blatant comedies such as Bananas and Take the Money and Run, then plied an intellectual skill to what would later be thought of as romantic comedies such as Play It Again, Sam, Sleeper, and Love and Death. Then came the deluge. Annie Hall (1977), which no less a personage than Gene Shalit referred to (even at that time)) as Woody Allen's breakthrough movie, a film so good that on Oscar night the director decided to play clarinet at Michael's rather than go collect his Academy Award. Interiors (1978) was a bit of a stumble, an intensely serious film presented to an audience primed to expect intellectual slap-stick. Then seemingly from out of nowhere exploded the raging beauty of Manhattan (1979), the first of a series of black and white exercises in post-natal delivery, where Allen the director at last freed himself up enough to take chances that he could not have dared while still learning his craft. The scene of the stars in the background where Allen and Diane Keaton escape the rain is worth ten times the price of admission all by itself and the humanist Allen emerges for perhaps the first time, although certainly not for the last.
There followed a bit of a retreat after the commercial and critical success of Manhattan. Stardust Memories (1980), beautifully filmed and psychologically studious, felt to many people like an attack on the audience that had stayed with Woody all those years, what with the constant reminder from walk-on characters in the film demanding that Sandy Bates (looking for all the world like Marcello Mastroianni) return to making funny movies again, although the scene at the UFO convention rips with a violent hilarity ("Aliens took over the planet long ago. And I'm the only one who knows!") Still, it was better than no Woody Allen movie at all and I think most people felt good that the director still had his edge.
Allen slid back considerably with his next picture, A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982), a movie which seemed to be nothing more than a pale attempt to blend high art with Allen's desire to force new paramour Mia Farrow into the deserted shoes of Diane Keaton.
But all was forgiven with the cinematic and story-telling brilliance of his next five consecutive smashes. Beginning with Zelig (1983) and ending (perhaps) with Radio Days (1987), Woody Allen proved beyond all doubt that he had the outraged humility and shiny sharp imagination of the best speculative or fantasy/fiction writers.
Right smack dab in the middle of this barrage of brilliance appeared the first of the two films under discussion today, that being Broadway Danny Rose (1984). Allen inhabits the title role, that of a third-rate talent agent and manager who books borderline acts like a blind xylophone player and a one-legged tap dancer, as well as a beautiful woman who plays songs by touching the tops of glasses. One of Danny's problems is that every time he actually discovers someone with genuine talent, he helps the person get near to the big time glare of success and the soon-to-be-a-star leaves him for a more prestigious manager. Danny Rose is genuinely mystified by this treasonous behavior. He simply cannot understand how his friends would come to treat him this way. He is puzzled by this and that bewilderment is in turn one of the main reasons that he has stayed small time. And yet everyone struggling in the business knows Danny Rose and everyone has a favorite story about him, especially the older comedians who are now struggling to make ends meet. It is through their eyes that we get to know Danny Rose and even the most hilarious perspectives on this dear man shatter the heart like a glass tossed against a fireplace. The one story which forms the main thrust of the film reveals Danny's and Woody's recurring humanism, as well as their humanity, which are not necessarily one and the same thing. When the talent agent finds himself betrayed by a lousy lounge singer whom Danny has risked his very life in order to give the man the break of all breaks, we watch Rose (what a perfect name!) celebrating Thanksgiving with his other clients, talking about how TV turkey dinners are maybe even better than the regular kind. Broadway Danny Rose does justice to those of us who never gave up on Allen's ability to cast furious illusions across the eyes of the movie theatre.
Nevertheless, perhaps because his budgets often exceeded the box office gross, Woody Allen stopped getting the type of distribution necessary and appropriate for a filmmaker of his worth. And so it was a few years before he came back stronger than ever with the floodgate-bursting beauty of Shadows and Fog (1992). If Annie Hall was the first breakthrough and Zelig the second, certainly Shadows and Fog was the third. Based loosely on a one-act stage play called Death, which in turn was based on a section of his book Without Feathers, S&F reasserted the humanism of comedy without sacrificing the inherent courage required to go out on a stage, or appear on a movie screen, attempting to make people laugh, something painfully understood by the clown character played by John Malkovich, only one of about twenty brilliant actors in this spooky and even occasionally disturbing movie. Among the others are Donald Pleasence (in quite possibly the creepiest role he has ever had), Lily Tomlin (who evokes more about loving a man than any lesbian who ever lived), William H. Macy (although you have to look hard to find him), Jodie Foster (looking, I am embarrassed to admit, sexier than at any time in her adult life), Kathy Bates (perfect, as always), Madonna (who delivers her lines with all the skill of a young Katharine Hepburn), David Ogden Stiers (quite intimidating, however briefly), Mia Farrow (still in the director's good graces and still not quite what the audience had come to expect), John Cusack (as the rancid intellectual, type-casting in all likelihood), John C. Reilly (from a time when no one outside his family knew his name), and (again, if you look close) Fred Gwynne. But this is much more than a movie with some of Allen's favorite people in it or something to do with a script that was just lying around. This movie was all about furious illusions, about how a nebbish accountant-type person finds himself in absurd circumstances--so absurd and comic they would mystify Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka--and how he comes to terms with his own latent courage by at long last joining the circus, just the metaphorical way we all do if we are lucky enough to figure out who we really are.
Well, after that Woody started getting all good and stuff and making critically acclaimed movies that were only ever shown in New York City and other presumed cultural meccas, except for the excellent Deconstructing Harry (1997), which got a wide release, and last year's shoulda-been-a-winner Midnight in Paris. The fact is he hasn't made a movie since Shadows and Fog that has been anything less than wonderful and deserving of all the accolades received.
As something of a post script, I should remind you that Barbara Kopple created what I think was a fascinating documentary of Allen on a tour of Europe called Wild Man Blues (1997) during which he played clarinet. Even though I doubt this movie revealed anything that Woody didn't want it to show, the scene with his parents, where his father is particularly unimpressed with some reward a town has given to his son, is so touching it bites nearly fifteen years later. Anyone who thinks they don't like Allen should watch that scene before deciding for sure.
That joke offers a grand state of mind in which to enjoy the movies of Woody Allen. They may be illogical, maddening, even ridiculous, but just as with love, we need the eggs.
The writer-actor-director made his bones with blatant comedies such as Bananas and Take the Money and Run, then plied an intellectual skill to what would later be thought of as romantic comedies such as Play It Again, Sam, Sleeper, and Love and Death. Then came the deluge. Annie Hall (1977), which no less a personage than Gene Shalit referred to (even at that time)) as Woody Allen's breakthrough movie, a film so good that on Oscar night the director decided to play clarinet at Michael's rather than go collect his Academy Award. Interiors (1978) was a bit of a stumble, an intensely serious film presented to an audience primed to expect intellectual slap-stick. Then seemingly from out of nowhere exploded the raging beauty of Manhattan (1979), the first of a series of black and white exercises in post-natal delivery, where Allen the director at last freed himself up enough to take chances that he could not have dared while still learning his craft. The scene of the stars in the background where Allen and Diane Keaton escape the rain is worth ten times the price of admission all by itself and the humanist Allen emerges for perhaps the first time, although certainly not for the last.
There followed a bit of a retreat after the commercial and critical success of Manhattan. Stardust Memories (1980), beautifully filmed and psychologically studious, felt to many people like an attack on the audience that had stayed with Woody all those years, what with the constant reminder from walk-on characters in the film demanding that Sandy Bates (looking for all the world like Marcello Mastroianni) return to making funny movies again, although the scene at the UFO convention rips with a violent hilarity ("Aliens took over the planet long ago. And I'm the only one who knows!") Still, it was better than no Woody Allen movie at all and I think most people felt good that the director still had his edge.
Allen slid back considerably with his next picture, A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982), a movie which seemed to be nothing more than a pale attempt to blend high art with Allen's desire to force new paramour Mia Farrow into the deserted shoes of Diane Keaton.
But all was forgiven with the cinematic and story-telling brilliance of his next five consecutive smashes. Beginning with Zelig (1983) and ending (perhaps) with Radio Days (1987), Woody Allen proved beyond all doubt that he had the outraged humility and shiny sharp imagination of the best speculative or fantasy/fiction writers.
Right smack dab in the middle of this barrage of brilliance appeared the first of the two films under discussion today, that being Broadway Danny Rose (1984). Allen inhabits the title role, that of a third-rate talent agent and manager who books borderline acts like a blind xylophone player and a one-legged tap dancer, as well as a beautiful woman who plays songs by touching the tops of glasses. One of Danny's problems is that every time he actually discovers someone with genuine talent, he helps the person get near to the big time glare of success and the soon-to-be-a-star leaves him for a more prestigious manager. Danny Rose is genuinely mystified by this treasonous behavior. He simply cannot understand how his friends would come to treat him this way. He is puzzled by this and that bewilderment is in turn one of the main reasons that he has stayed small time. And yet everyone struggling in the business knows Danny Rose and everyone has a favorite story about him, especially the older comedians who are now struggling to make ends meet. It is through their eyes that we get to know Danny Rose and even the most hilarious perspectives on this dear man shatter the heart like a glass tossed against a fireplace. The one story which forms the main thrust of the film reveals Danny's and Woody's recurring humanism, as well as their humanity, which are not necessarily one and the same thing. When the talent agent finds himself betrayed by a lousy lounge singer whom Danny has risked his very life in order to give the man the break of all breaks, we watch Rose (what a perfect name!) celebrating Thanksgiving with his other clients, talking about how TV turkey dinners are maybe even better than the regular kind. Broadway Danny Rose does justice to those of us who never gave up on Allen's ability to cast furious illusions across the eyes of the movie theatre.
Nevertheless, perhaps because his budgets often exceeded the box office gross, Woody Allen stopped getting the type of distribution necessary and appropriate for a filmmaker of his worth. And so it was a few years before he came back stronger than ever with the floodgate-bursting beauty of Shadows and Fog (1992). If Annie Hall was the first breakthrough and Zelig the second, certainly Shadows and Fog was the third. Based loosely on a one-act stage play called Death, which in turn was based on a section of his book Without Feathers, S&F reasserted the humanism of comedy without sacrificing the inherent courage required to go out on a stage, or appear on a movie screen, attempting to make people laugh, something painfully understood by the clown character played by John Malkovich, only one of about twenty brilliant actors in this spooky and even occasionally disturbing movie. Among the others are Donald Pleasence (in quite possibly the creepiest role he has ever had), Lily Tomlin (who evokes more about loving a man than any lesbian who ever lived), William H. Macy (although you have to look hard to find him), Jodie Foster (looking, I am embarrassed to admit, sexier than at any time in her adult life), Kathy Bates (perfect, as always), Madonna (who delivers her lines with all the skill of a young Katharine Hepburn), David Ogden Stiers (quite intimidating, however briefly), Mia Farrow (still in the director's good graces and still not quite what the audience had come to expect), John Cusack (as the rancid intellectual, type-casting in all likelihood), John C. Reilly (from a time when no one outside his family knew his name), and (again, if you look close) Fred Gwynne. But this is much more than a movie with some of Allen's favorite people in it or something to do with a script that was just lying around. This movie was all about furious illusions, about how a nebbish accountant-type person finds himself in absurd circumstances--so absurd and comic they would mystify Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka--and how he comes to terms with his own latent courage by at long last joining the circus, just the metaphorical way we all do if we are lucky enough to figure out who we really are.
Well, after that Woody started getting all good and stuff and making critically acclaimed movies that were only ever shown in New York City and other presumed cultural meccas, except for the excellent Deconstructing Harry (1997), which got a wide release, and last year's shoulda-been-a-winner Midnight in Paris. The fact is he hasn't made a movie since Shadows and Fog that has been anything less than wonderful and deserving of all the accolades received.
As something of a post script, I should remind you that Barbara Kopple created what I think was a fascinating documentary of Allen on a tour of Europe called Wild Man Blues (1997) during which he played clarinet. Even though I doubt this movie revealed anything that Woody didn't want it to show, the scene with his parents, where his father is particularly unimpressed with some reward a town has given to his son, is so touching it bites nearly fifteen years later. Anyone who thinks they don't like Allen should watch that scene before deciding for sure.
HANNAH AND HER SISTERS
One of the most intelligent and mature movies of Woody Allen's career, as well as one of his most accessible, Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) blows apart the anhedonic nebbish of his best early films and resolves that the meaning of life is life.
The movie concerns Hannah (Mia Farrow) and her sisters Lee (Barbara Hershey) and Holly (Dianne Wiest) and the men who keep messing up their lives as those men try in vain to remain relevant. Hannah is married to a well-off accountant named Elliot (Michael Caine) who is in love with Lee. She is involved in an odd relationship with Frederick (Max von Sydow), a frustrated but gifted artist many years her senior. Holly exploits Hannah's need to be liked by hitting her up for permanent loans as she struggles to find her purpose in life. Holly has even survived a date with Mickey (Woody Allen), who just happens to be Hannah's ex-husband. If this description sounds soap opera-esque, the characterizations run infinitely more deep than that.
Part of what makes this movie so special and spectacular is the way plot and characterization become one and the same. Everyone here is searching for something. If you asked each person, she or he would give an answer specific to that character. By the end of the film, however, we recognize that they have all been seeking the age-old question: what is the meaning of life? Just as in real life, not everyone arrives at an answer. Von Sydow's character is perhaps the most sympathetic because as he loses Lee, we ache with the knowledge that she has been his sole (soul) connection with the world outside his home studio. His self-analysis gets projected out at the world--and not in a favorable way--to the point where he watches television just to have something that makes him feel superior.
While I will resist giving away more of the story, I will tell you that the story appears to have been extremely important to the director. Gone are the self-conscious camera angles and affinity for black and white cinematography. Nowhere do we find the homage to foreign filmmakers. What we do get are living, breathing people with honest problems that materialize through deception, desperation, exploration and even a bit of procreation. This was a major evolutionary leap in Allen's development. By the mid-1970s, he had already joined the ranks of the world's best filmmakers (Kubrick, Kurasawa, Bergman, Fellini, Vargas, Altman, Godard). With Hannah and Her Sisters, he became a stylist of the tallest order.
The movie concerns Hannah (Mia Farrow) and her sisters Lee (Barbara Hershey) and Holly (Dianne Wiest) and the men who keep messing up their lives as those men try in vain to remain relevant. Hannah is married to a well-off accountant named Elliot (Michael Caine) who is in love with Lee. She is involved in an odd relationship with Frederick (Max von Sydow), a frustrated but gifted artist many years her senior. Holly exploits Hannah's need to be liked by hitting her up for permanent loans as she struggles to find her purpose in life. Holly has even survived a date with Mickey (Woody Allen), who just happens to be Hannah's ex-husband. If this description sounds soap opera-esque, the characterizations run infinitely more deep than that.
Part of what makes this movie so special and spectacular is the way plot and characterization become one and the same. Everyone here is searching for something. If you asked each person, she or he would give an answer specific to that character. By the end of the film, however, we recognize that they have all been seeking the age-old question: what is the meaning of life? Just as in real life, not everyone arrives at an answer. Von Sydow's character is perhaps the most sympathetic because as he loses Lee, we ache with the knowledge that she has been his sole (soul) connection with the world outside his home studio. His self-analysis gets projected out at the world--and not in a favorable way--to the point where he watches television just to have something that makes him feel superior.
While I will resist giving away more of the story, I will tell you that the story appears to have been extremely important to the director. Gone are the self-conscious camera angles and affinity for black and white cinematography. Nowhere do we find the homage to foreign filmmakers. What we do get are living, breathing people with honest problems that materialize through deception, desperation, exploration and even a bit of procreation. This was a major evolutionary leap in Allen's development. By the mid-1970s, he had already joined the ranks of the world's best filmmakers (Kubrick, Kurasawa, Bergman, Fellini, Vargas, Altman, Godard). With Hannah and Her Sisters, he became a stylist of the tallest order.
STARDUST MEMORIES
Whether by character or by sensibility, there are those for whom filmmaker Woody Allen holds little or no interest. I recommend that those people--whom I'm sure are very nice--may want to skip what follows.
You're going to read it anyway, huh? Suit yourself. But you probably will not be able to get beyond the predisposition that there is something a little creepy, a little unsettling, unpleasant and maybe not even funny about the man, in spite of all the fine things you are possibly about to read.
Woody Allen is the perfect link between not only classic movie-making from the 1930s and 1940s (Marx Brothers, Orson Welles, Michael Curtiz) and today; he is also the same kind of link between art film directors (Fellini, Bergman, Godard,) and contemporary romantic comedies. His use of absurdities to amplify genuine human feelings runs consistent through the bulk of his work. Because many of his early movies had Allen playing characters who might be described as a passive-aggressive nebbish, as someone who is himself intelligent yet wary of intellectuals, as indefatigable in his willingness to let his indecisiveness screw up his plans--there has, over the years, been a tendency to assume that those fictional characters were to a great extent reflections of the man's overall perception of himself, and that, given such consistency, he was therefore a narcissist.
For all the people who did indeed take him to be a nebbish, a man suspicious of cant, a narcissist, Woody Allen made a movie to debunk all of that rubbish. He called it Stardust Memories (1980). Coming as it did after four successful directorial knock-outs (Love and Death, Annie Hall, Interiors, Manhattan), Stardust Memories left more than a few people dampened in their reactions. The protagonist, Sandy Bates, played by Allen, was clearly mocking his fans and their adoration of him, or so many people editorialized. His use of a wide-angle lens in close-ups of the exuberant crowds that gaggled around him at a retrospective of his films made the people look paralyzed with their own ill-fitted self-importance.
This kind of reaction--and it was widespread upon the movie's initial release--was simply wrong. It was wrong to the extent that it was (a) irrelevant, and (b) ignorant of movie history.
The point of whatever hostility Woody Allen may have felt against his fans and supporters, especially in light of the disappointment many felt with his attempts at seriousness with Interiors, did get some support from the director himself, what with the most often-repeated line in the movie being to the effect that people wanted him to go back to making funny pictures again, like he used to do. A lot of people did say that at the time. So I will concede that he was drawing from his own personal experiences there. But none of that makes a bit of difference because in this movie the audience is viewing those fans from the camera point of view of the protagonist, the character with whom, to some extent, we are expected to identify.
Anyone still not as yet convinced should take a gander at the film upon which Stardust Memories pays homage: 8 1/2 by Frederico Fellini. When I say that Woody pays homage to Fellini, I do not mean in the same sense that Brian De Palma often paid homage to Alfred Hitchcock. In other words, Allen did not steal from Fellini. He created a conscious and deliberate parallel of the Marcello Mastroianni character in Fellini's film, a parallel which utilized elements of the nebbish character Allen had been using for years. And the stylistic similarities with not only 8 1/2 but also with Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt are as deliberate as they are honest.
But all this explication ignores something I believe is far more important: this is a genuinely enjoyable movie, one crammed with some of the best screenwriting Allen has ever done, with lines that bite like sabers, one of the best of which takes place in a large field where UFO believers are apparently awaiting the landing of aliens and one of the men looks right into the camera, declaring that the Soviets are beaming satellite transmissions from the Empire State Building to cloud our minds, and finishes by saying, "And I'm the only one who knows."
Stardust Memories also introduces a specifically American audience to visuals for which that audience was, to put it mildly, unprepared. The presentation of the troubled ex-girlfriend Dorrie (Charlotte Rampling) implied rather than showed the depth of her struggles. There are otherwise empty shots of her enigmatic beauty, yet, near the end, we see her in rapid still shots as she babbles helplessly in a mental institution.
In Sandy's apartment, as he is being berated by studio people who want him to go back to making funny movies again, we cannot help but see that behind him, on the large wall, is an enormous photograph of the famous image from the Tet Offensive where a Viet Cong prisoner is about to be shot in the head by a South Vietnamese General. A few minutes later the picture has been replaced by a radiant Groucho Marx.
I realize that I have not said anything about the plot of this movie and that is because plot in this movie is nothing more than a device through which the writer-director is able to express the idea that personal and social responsibility can be tough in a world where most people only like you because it makes them feel important to do so. A small but vocal number of those wounded people may even try to kill you.
At the end of the scene in the field with the expectant UFO-seekers, Sandy Bates is confronted by a fan who points a gun at him and fires. A little more than three months following this movie's release, Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon.
So for those of you--nice people, one and all--who resist enjoying Woody Allen because you find him a bit creepy or because you don't find his ideal characterization of himself to be something with which you can relate, I nevertheless urge you to reconsider your position by seeing this movie. Listen, even if all this art work and cinematic stylism eludes you, even if the struggle for morality in this film leaves you unsettled, even if you just don't want to watch it no matter what I say, you can tell yourself that it's a great way to people watch. You'll see a very young Sharon Stone, plus all sorts of other cool New York people, such as Judith Crist, Laraine Newman, Louise Lasser, Tony Roberts, and Anne DeSalvo, among others. If you look even closer, who knows? You might even see yourself.
You're going to read it anyway, huh? Suit yourself. But you probably will not be able to get beyond the predisposition that there is something a little creepy, a little unsettling, unpleasant and maybe not even funny about the man, in spite of all the fine things you are possibly about to read.
Woody Allen is the perfect link between not only classic movie-making from the 1930s and 1940s (Marx Brothers, Orson Welles, Michael Curtiz) and today; he is also the same kind of link between art film directors (Fellini, Bergman, Godard,) and contemporary romantic comedies. His use of absurdities to amplify genuine human feelings runs consistent through the bulk of his work. Because many of his early movies had Allen playing characters who might be described as a passive-aggressive nebbish, as someone who is himself intelligent yet wary of intellectuals, as indefatigable in his willingness to let his indecisiveness screw up his plans--there has, over the years, been a tendency to assume that those fictional characters were to a great extent reflections of the man's overall perception of himself, and that, given such consistency, he was therefore a narcissist.
For all the people who did indeed take him to be a nebbish, a man suspicious of cant, a narcissist, Woody Allen made a movie to debunk all of that rubbish. He called it Stardust Memories (1980). Coming as it did after four successful directorial knock-outs (Love and Death, Annie Hall, Interiors, Manhattan), Stardust Memories left more than a few people dampened in their reactions. The protagonist, Sandy Bates, played by Allen, was clearly mocking his fans and their adoration of him, or so many people editorialized. His use of a wide-angle lens in close-ups of the exuberant crowds that gaggled around him at a retrospective of his films made the people look paralyzed with their own ill-fitted self-importance.
This kind of reaction--and it was widespread upon the movie's initial release--was simply wrong. It was wrong to the extent that it was (a) irrelevant, and (b) ignorant of movie history.
The point of whatever hostility Woody Allen may have felt against his fans and supporters, especially in light of the disappointment many felt with his attempts at seriousness with Interiors, did get some support from the director himself, what with the most often-repeated line in the movie being to the effect that people wanted him to go back to making funny pictures again, like he used to do. A lot of people did say that at the time. So I will concede that he was drawing from his own personal experiences there. But none of that makes a bit of difference because in this movie the audience is viewing those fans from the camera point of view of the protagonist, the character with whom, to some extent, we are expected to identify.
Anyone still not as yet convinced should take a gander at the film upon which Stardust Memories pays homage: 8 1/2 by Frederico Fellini. When I say that Woody pays homage to Fellini, I do not mean in the same sense that Brian De Palma often paid homage to Alfred Hitchcock. In other words, Allen did not steal from Fellini. He created a conscious and deliberate parallel of the Marcello Mastroianni character in Fellini's film, a parallel which utilized elements of the nebbish character Allen had been using for years. And the stylistic similarities with not only 8 1/2 but also with Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt are as deliberate as they are honest.
But all this explication ignores something I believe is far more important: this is a genuinely enjoyable movie, one crammed with some of the best screenwriting Allen has ever done, with lines that bite like sabers, one of the best of which takes place in a large field where UFO believers are apparently awaiting the landing of aliens and one of the men looks right into the camera, declaring that the Soviets are beaming satellite transmissions from the Empire State Building to cloud our minds, and finishes by saying, "And I'm the only one who knows."
Stardust Memories also introduces a specifically American audience to visuals for which that audience was, to put it mildly, unprepared. The presentation of the troubled ex-girlfriend Dorrie (Charlotte Rampling) implied rather than showed the depth of her struggles. There are otherwise empty shots of her enigmatic beauty, yet, near the end, we see her in rapid still shots as she babbles helplessly in a mental institution.
In Sandy's apartment, as he is being berated by studio people who want him to go back to making funny movies again, we cannot help but see that behind him, on the large wall, is an enormous photograph of the famous image from the Tet Offensive where a Viet Cong prisoner is about to be shot in the head by a South Vietnamese General. A few minutes later the picture has been replaced by a radiant Groucho Marx.
I realize that I have not said anything about the plot of this movie and that is because plot in this movie is nothing more than a device through which the writer-director is able to express the idea that personal and social responsibility can be tough in a world where most people only like you because it makes them feel important to do so. A small but vocal number of those wounded people may even try to kill you.
At the end of the scene in the field with the expectant UFO-seekers, Sandy Bates is confronted by a fan who points a gun at him and fires. A little more than three months following this movie's release, Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon.
So for those of you--nice people, one and all--who resist enjoying Woody Allen because you find him a bit creepy or because you don't find his ideal characterization of himself to be something with which you can relate, I nevertheless urge you to reconsider your position by seeing this movie. Listen, even if all this art work and cinematic stylism eludes you, even if the struggle for morality in this film leaves you unsettled, even if you just don't want to watch it no matter what I say, you can tell yourself that it's a great way to people watch. You'll see a very young Sharon Stone, plus all sorts of other cool New York people, such as Judith Crist, Laraine Newman, Louise Lasser, Tony Roberts, and Anne DeSalvo, among others. If you look even closer, who knows? You might even see yourself.
