Woody Allen Films | Woody Allen Filmography | Woody Allen Biography | Woody Allen Career | Woody Allen Awards

Woody Allen's roots in American popular culture are broad and laced with a variety of European literary and filmic influences, some of them paid explicit homage within his films (Ingmar Bergman and Dostoevsky, for example), others more subtly woven into the fabric of his work from a wide range of earlier comic traditions. Allen's genuinely original voice in the cinema recalls writer-directors like Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Preston Sturges, who dissect their portions of the American landscape primarily through comedy. In his creative virtuosity Allen also resembles Orson Welles, whose visual and verbal wit, though contained in seemingly non-comic genres, in fact exposes the American character to satirical scrutiny.

Allen generally appears in his own films, resembling the great silent-screen clowns who created, then developed, an ongoing screen presence. However, Allen's film persona depends upon heard dialogue and especially thrives as an updated, urbanly hip, explicitly Jewish amalgam of personality traits and delivery methods associated with comic artists who reached their pinnacle in radio and film in the 1930s and 1940s. The key figures Allen plays in his own films puncture the dangerous absurdities of their universe and guard themselves against them by maintaining a cynical, even misogynistic verbal offense in the manner of Groucho Marx and W. C. Fields, but alternating it with incessant displays of self-deprecation, in the manner of the cowardly, unhandsome persona established by Bob Hope in, for example, his Road series.

Allen's early films emerge logically from the sharp, pointedly exaggerated jokes and sketches he wrote for others, then delivered himself as a stand-up comic in clubs and on television. Like the early films of Buster Keaton, most of these early films depend upon explicit parody of recognizable film genres. Even the films of this pre-Annie Hall period, which do not formally rely upon a particular film genre, incorporate references to various films and directors as commentary on the specific targets of social, political, or literary satire: political turbulence of the 1960s via television news coverage in Bananas; the pursuit by intellectuals of large religious and philosophical questions via the methods of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in Love and Death; American sexual repression via the self-discovery guarantees offered by sex manuals in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex.

All these issues will reappear in Allen's later, increasingly mature work?and they will persist in revealing an anomaly: Allen's comedy is cerebral in nature, dependent even in its occasional sophomoric moments upon an educated audience that responds to his brand of self-reflexive, literary, political, and sexual humor. But Allen distrusts and satirizes formal education and institutionalized discourse, which in his films lead repeatedly to humorless intellectual preening. ?Those who can't do, teach, and those who can't teach, teach gym,? declares Alvy Singer in Annie Hall. No character in that film is treated with greater disdain than the Columbia professor who smugly pontificates on Fellini while standing in line waiting to see The Sorrow and the Pity; Allen inflicts swift, cinematically appropriate justice. Yale, a university professor of English, bears the brunt of Manhattan's moral condemnation as a self-rationalizing cheat who is far ?too easy? on himself.

In Annie Hall, his Oscar-winning breakthrough film, Allen the writer (with Marshall Brickman) recapitulates and expands emerging Allen topics but removes them from the highly exaggerated apparatus of his earlier parodies. Alvy Singer (Allen) and Annie Hall (Diane Keaton in her most important of several roles in Allen's films) enact an urban-neurotic variation on the mismatched lovers of screwball comedy, now oriented away from farce and toward character analysis set against a realistic New York City mise-en-sc?ne.

Annie Hall makes indelible the Woody Allen onscreen persona?a figure somehow involved in show business or the arts and obsessive about women, his parents, his childhood, his values, his terror of illness and death; perpetually and hilariously taking the mental temperature of himself and everyone around him. Part whiner, part nebbish, part hypochondriac, this figure is also brilliantly astute and consciously funny, miraculously irresistible to women?for a while?particularly (as in Annie Hall and Manhattan) when he can serve as their teacher. This developing figure in Allen's work is both comic victim and witty victimizer, a moral voice in an amoral age who repeatedly discovers that the only true gods in a Godless universe are cultural and artistic?movies, music, art, architecture?a perception pleasurably reinforced visually and aurally throughout his best films. With rare exception?Hannah is a notable one?this figure at the film's fadeout appears destined to remain alone, by implication enabling him to continue to function as a sardonically detached observer of human imperfection, including his own. In Annie Hall, this characterization, despite its suffusion in angst, remains purely comic but Allen becomes progressively darker?and harder on himself?as variants of this figure emerge in the later films.

Comedy, even comedy that aims for a laughter of recognition based on credibility of character and situation, depends heavily upon exaggeration. In Zelig, the tallest of Woody Allen's cinematic tall tales, the film's central figure is a human chameleon who satisfies his overwhelming desire for conformity by physically transforming himself into the people he meets. Zelig's bizarre behavior is made even more visually believable by stunning shots that appear to place the character of Leonard Zelig (Allen) alongside famous historical figures within actual newsreel footage of the 1920s and 1930s.

Shot in Panavision and velvety black-and-white, and featuring a Gershwin score dominated by ?Rhapsody in Blue,? Manhattan reiterates key concerns of Annie Hall but enlarges the circle of participants in a sexual la ronde that increases Allen's ambivalence toward the moral terrain occupied by his characters?especially by Ike Davis (Allen), a forty-two-year-old man justifying a relationship with a seventeen-year-old girl. By film's end she has become an eighteen-year-old woman who has outgrown him, just as Annie Hall outgrew Alvy Singer. The film (like Hannah and Her Sisters later) is, above all, a celebration of New York City, which Ike, like Allen, "idolize[s] all out of proportion."

In the Pirandellian Purple Rose of Cairo, the fourth Allen film to star Mia Farrow, a character in a black-and-white film within the color film leaps literally out of the frame into the heroine's local movie theatre. Here film itself?in this case the movies of the 1930s?both distorts reality (by setting dangerously high, incongruous expectations) and makes it more bearable (by permitting Cecilia, Allen's heroine, to escape from her dismal Depression existence). Like Manhattan before it, and Hannah and Her Sisters and Radio Days after it, Purple Rose of Cairo examines the healing power of popular art.

Arguably Allen's finest film to date, Hannah and Her Sisters shifts his own figure further away from the center of the story than he has ever been before, treating him as one of nine prominent characters in the action. Allen's screenplay weaves an ingenious tapestry around three sisters, their parents, assorted mates, lovers, and friends (including Allen as Hannah's ex-husband Mickey Sachs). A Chekhovian exploration of the upper-middle-class world of a group of New Yorkers a decade after Annie Hall, Hannah is deliberately episodic in structure, its sequences separated by Brechtian title cards that suggest thematic elements of each succeeding segment. Yet it is an extraordinarily seamless film, unified by the family at its center; three Thanksgiving dinner scenes at key intervals; an exquisite color celebration of an idyllic New York City; and music by Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, and Puccini (among others) that italicizes the genuinely romantic nature of the film's tone. The most optimistic of Allen's major films, Hannah restores its inhabitants to a world of pure comedy, their futures epitomized by the fate of Mickey Sachs. For once, the Allen figure is a man who will live happily ever after, a man formerly sterile, now apparently fertile, as is comedy's magical way.

Crimes and Misdemeanors further marginalizes?and significantly darkens?the figure Woody Allen invites audiences to confuse with his offscreen self. The self-reflexive plight of filmmaker Cliff Stern (Allen) alternates with the central dilemma confronted by ophthalmologist Judah Rosenthal, a medical pillar of society who bears primary, if indirect, responsibility for the murder of his mistress. Religious and philosophical issues present in Allen's films since Love and Death achieve a new and serious resonance, particularly through the additional presence of a faith-retaining rabbi gradually (in one of numerous Oedipal references in Allen's work) losing his sight, and a Holocaust survivor-philosopher who preaches the gospel of endurance?then commits suicide by (as his note prosaically puts it) ?going out the window.? In its pessimism diametrically opposed to the joyous Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors posits a universe utterly devoid of poetic justice. The picture's genuinely comic sequences, usually involving Cliff and his fatuous producer brother-in-law ("Comedy is tragedy plus time!") do not contradict the fact that it is Allen's most somber major film, a family comedy-melodrama that in its final sequence crosses the brink to the level of domestic tragedy. Here, the Allen figure is not only alone, as he has been in the past, but alone and in despair.

In entirely contrasting visual ways, Alice and Shadows and Fog exhibit immediately recognizable Allen concerns in highly original fashion. A glossy, airy, gently satiric modern fairy tale, Alice implicitly functions as Allen's most open love letter to Mia Farrow. Her idealized title character searches for meaning in a Yuppified New York City. Eventually, she finds it by leaving her husband, meeting Mother Theresa, and, especially, by discovering that her two children offer her the only genuine vehicle for romance in this romantic comedy manque. The film's final shot displays a glowing Alice joyfully pushing them on playground swings as two former women friends, in voice-over dialogue, bemoan her self-selected maidless and nannyless condition, one which the film clearly intends us to embrace.

In Shadows and Fog, Allen employs a specific film genre more directly than at any time since the 1970s. His homage to German Expressionism, Shadows and Fog is shot in black and white in a manner deliberately reminiscent of the films of Pabst, Lang, and Murnau. That visual style and the placement at the film's center of a distinctly Kafkaesque hero (played by Allen) combine to make Shadows and Fog Allen's most explicitly ?European,? most wryly metaphysical film since Interiors fourteen years earlier. Not surprisingly, Shadows and Fog was greeted by critics much more favorably in Europe than in the United States.

As Chekhov's forgiving spirit energizes the comic tone of Hannah and Her Sisters, so the playwright August Strindberg's hostility controls the dark marital terrain of Husbands and Wives. Strindbergian gender battles frequently appear in earlier Allen films, but they are more typically rescued back from the precipice into a healing world of comedy. Allen's partial attempt to attribute comic closure to Husbands and Wives pleases but inadequately convinces. While the film (which might have been more accurately titled Husbands, Wives, and Lovers) is often extremely funny, its portrait of two deteriorating marriages is as corrosive as anything in the Allen canon. Husbands and Wives contains other elements long present in Allen's films: multiple story-lines, a deliberately episodic structure covering a period of about a year (as in Hannah and Crimes and Misdemeanors), and the involvement of a central character, Gabe Roth (played by Allen), with a woman young enough to be his daughter. Unlike Ike Davis's relationship with Tracy in Manhattan, however, this one is consummated?and concluded?with only a kiss.

Despite the presence of familiar material, Husbands and Wives shows Allen continuing to break new ground, particularly in the film's visual virtuosity. The frequent use of a hand-held camera reinforces the neurotic, darting, unpredictable behavior of key characters. Moving beyond his use of title cards to provide Brechtian distancing in Hannah and Her Sisters, Allen here employs a documentary technique to punctuate the main action of the film. The central characters and a minor one (the ex-husband of Judy Roth, the woman played by Mia Farrow) are individually interviewed by an off-screen male voice, which appears to function simultaneously as documentary recorder of their woeful tales and as therapist to their psyches. These sequences are inserted periodically throughout the film, as the interviewees speak directly to the camera? and therefore to us, thus forcing the audience to participate in the filmmaker-interviewer's role as therapist.

Husbands and Wives deserves a place alongside Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors to represent Allen's most textured and mature work to date. But the film's visual and thematic pleasures have been obscured by audience desires to see in Husbands and Wives the spectacle of art imitating life with a vengeance; and, in fact, Husbands and Wives does contain uncanny links to the Allen-Farrow breakup even though the film was completed before their relationship came to a dramatic and highly visible end.

The type of ethical dilemma that occupies such a central place in the Allen canon (and which usually finds its most articulate definition in the mouths of characters played by Allen himself) appeared to have tumbled out of an Allen movie and onto worldwide front pages. ("Life doesn't imitate art; it imitates bad television," says Allen's Gabe Roth in Husbands and Wives.) In 1992, shortly before the release of Husbands and Wives, Allen's romantic relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, Mia Farrow's twenty-one-year-old adopted daughter, was discovered by her mother, who made the fact public. Furious and ugly charges and countercharges ensued and led to Allen's loss of custody of his three children a year later.

Allen has made several films since Husbands and Wives was released, all of them reverting to the explicit world of comedy: Don't Drink the Water, adapted from his early Broadway play and first shown in America on network television; Manhattan Murder Mystery, a comedy-mystery in the manner of The Thin Man films and the Mr. and Mrs. North radio and television series (with Diane Keaton replacing Mia Farrow, who was originally scheduled to play Allen's wife); Bullets over Broadway, in which John Cusack plays a younger Allen stand-in, a playwright grappling with his first Broadway production; and Mighty Aphrodite, which again tempts audiences to see elements of Allen's life reflected in the central plot issue of child adoption. But with its parodies of Greek tragedy and its broadly satiric array of characters, Mighty Aphrodite rarely strays from its identification as genuine Allen comedy. These 1990s films reveal yet again why so many actors want to work with Allen: Dianne Wiest won her second supporting actress Oscar for her role in an Allen film for Bullets over Broadway (her first was for Hannah); and Mira Sorvino won the same award for Mighty Aphrodite the following year.

Allen's primary response to the tarnish on his personal reputation has been to keep making films. He has always denied that his film persona is related to his own, although it is often justifiably difficult for us to believe that. ?Is it over? Can I go now?? asks Gabe Roth of the offscreen interviewer in the final shot of Husbands and Wives. Divorced from his wife, Gabe is now alone, but he chooses be to alone. Gabe may not be happy?rarely is any character played by Woody Allen ever actually happy?but, unlike Clifford Stern at the end of Crimes and Misdemeanors, Gabe is decidedly not in despair. As the comic spirit of Allen's recent films suggests, that fact would appear to bode extremely well for Allen's future work and, especially, for those who love his films.?MARK W. ESTRIN