He’ll Take Manhattan
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Hating Woody Allen is like hating Bloomingdale’s: There’s a lot you can complain about, but with so much in stock eventually you’ll find something you like. Film Forum’s new program, “Essentially Woody,” waggles Woody’s credentials in our face (37 movies, 14 Oscar nominations, 3 wins), but the real question is: Are his movies still funny? Answer: Not always, but they are well made. This retrospective is more like a relaxing soak in a warm bath of nostalgia than a cavalcade of classic comedy, but there’s so much of it to choose from that you’d be a fool not to try something. And with none of his movies running much more than 90 minutes, you might as well try two.
THE STAND-UP YEARS
A writer first, Mr. Allen only became a performer to protect his material. He so hated doing stand-up (he once famously turned his back on an audience and performed to the wall) that he armored himself with a public persona that’s proved to be more lasting than any of his films. His stammering, overly intellectual nebbish, eternally on the prowl for sex, became a role model for concave-chested men everywhere and an essential part of 1970s pop culture.
“Take the Money and Run” (1969), “Bananas” (1971), and “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)” (1972) are more like concert albums than movies. Mr. Allen’s co-stars try to interact with him but they’re flummoxed by his insistence on performing like a stand-up comedian: barreling through his material and rolling over them as if they were hecklers. Diane Keaton holds her own by ignoring him completely, turning “Love and Death” (1975) into her own private tour de farce.
But the best 15 minutes of Mr. Allen’s entire early filmography are when he’s off-screen entirely: Gene Wilder’s sweet, sheep seduction in “Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex.”
THE MANHATTAN YEARS
There’s one great theme that runs through all of Mr. Allen’s work: horniness. His obsession with getting the girl makes his movies feel particularly 1970s, all self-absorption and bed hopping, but there was a brief window when his obsession with sex met his obsession with New York, and audiences got 1977’s “Annie Hall.” An aggressively experimental fantasia in which he unleashed all the kung fu in his cinematic arsenal, “Annie Hall” leaves any other romantic comedy made since choking on its dust. Why do we pursue relationships knowing they’re going to end in disappointment and pain? Well, what else are we doing on Friday night? Woody’s skirt chasing had mellowed into something downright profound.
This era also provided the first glimpse of Mr. Allen’s New York: a pre-lapsarian fantasyland where there were few minorities, crime was cute, and no one rode the subway.”Manhattan” (1979) preserves his perfect city in a snow globe. Shot in mouth-watering widescreen, every frame fetishizes New York City and, coupled with George Gershwin’s music, it’s like getting high on the Manhattan skyline. It’s a small price to pay that the characters are a pack of braying, neurotic hyenas, all save Mariel Hemingway, whose presence fills the movie with an unearthly grace.
After enjoying massive critical acclaim for both movies, Mr. Allen flipped off his fans with 1980’s “Stardust Memories,” playing a comedian named Sandy Bates who’s rejecting his “earlier, funnier movies” in an attempt to make capital “A” art. It’s a patronizing flick, but visually stunning, with Mr. Allen acting like the only American who ever saw a Fellini film.
THE MIA FARROW YEARS
The Mia Farrow Years are paralyzingly refined. From A (“Alice”) to Z (“Zelig”) these flicks parcel out emotions with a teaspoon and arrive embalmed by good taste. Considering the cloying nostalgia of 1987’s “Radio Days,” the pampered prancing of 1982’s “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy,” the braying emptiness of “Broadway Danny Rose,” it’s as if the twee, sleepy Upper West Side had taken over the planet.
“Zelig,” a mockumentary about a guy who turns into whomever he happens to be near, was an astonishing technical achievement, seamlessly integrating Mr. Allen and Ms. Farrow into documentary footage 11 years before Robert Zemeckis did the same thing for far more money in “Forest Gump.”But it’s hobbled by the idea that since Mr. Allen can barely play Woody Allen convincingly, some other actor should have played the mutable Zelig.
“Purple Rose of Cairo” (1985) is as knotty as one of Allen’s New Yorker stories with Jeff Daniels playing both a character who escapes from a movie and the actor who plays the character trying to track himself down, but Mr. Allen can’t give into the anarchy of his own idea so he holds his nose and abruptly pinches off an acceptable ending: the lead actress’s dreams are crushed and everyone goes home. That said, few directors can make a movie as well as Mr. Allen. As his narrative ambitions scaled down his technical skills ramped up, and there’s not an uncommitted performance, ugly costume, or jarring edit to be found in the half dozen movies that make up this period.
Through sheer hard work, Mr. Allen has turned out a handful of movies that will survive, and the one from this period that will be eternal is 1986’s “Hannah and Her Sisters.” Stuffed to overflowing with great actors it exudes a ragtag charm that hadn’t been seen since “Annie Hall.” It doesn’t hurt that it’s probably the only really good Thanksgiving movie in the history of cinema.
THE EUROPEAN FILMS
Arguably the funniest movies Mr. Allen ever made — though not intentionally so — “Interiors” (1978), “September” (1987), and “Another Woman” (1988) are like college admissions essays for the Ingmar Bergman University of Life Is Suffering. These movies are Bergman fan fiction — Mr. Allen doesn’t want to satirize the worst excesses of Euro Art cinema; he worships them. “Interiors” is loopily enjoyable thanks to Geraldine Page’s endless monologues about interior decorating which actually — wait for it — cover her inner pain, but for the most part these movies are inert.
But you can’t dismiss them entirely: Right after “September” and “Another Woman” came 1989’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” which is mannered and WASPy, but in a good way. Martin Landau, as an ophthalmologist who has his mistress murdered and gets away with it, and Alan Alda as an obnoxiously successful sitcom producer, give more evidence in the case against Mr. Allen casting himself in his own starring roles, and the film contains one of the funniest, bleakest scenes in his entire career: a blind date that ends in a scat joke. It’s the last truly great movie he’s made.
THE FINAL MISHMASH
Desperate for ideas, Mr. Allen flails about. As a young man he just wanted to deliver his material. Then he wanted to make movies about the meaning of life and love. Even when he wanted to be Ingmar Bergman, there was a point to it all. These days he just grabs a script and gums at it for a while.
Giving Mira Sorvino an Oscar for “The NEBBISH CHIC Clockwise from above, Woody Allen in 1972’s ‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask)’; with Diane Keaton in 1977’s ‘Annie Hall’; in 1971’s ‘Bananas’; in 1973’s ‘Sleeper’; and Diane Wiest and John Cusack in 1994’s ‘Bullets Over Broadway.’ Mighty Aphrodite” (1995) probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but that’s about all that can be said for the movie.”Everyone Says I Love You” (1996) is a wan, saccharine musical and “Deconstructing Harry” (1997) feels like a pity party. Even Ms. Keaton (1993’s “Manhattan Murder Mystery”) and Sean Penn (1999’s “Sweet and Lowdown”) can’t force him out of his hermetic world with its once fresh, now tiresome, preoccupations But he does offer audiences 1994’s “Bullets Over Broadway,” a period piece about gangsters on the Great White Way that feels like a Damon Runyon short story in all the best ways.
Once his greatest strength, by this point Mr. Allen’s productivity has calcified into monomania, as if he keeps making movies to avoid being put in a home. Familiarity has bred contempt, but there’s a lot to be said for watching an artist age onscreen: from the fumblings of the Stand-Up Years, to the triumphs of the Manhattan Years, the desperation to be someone else in his European Years, and all the while he still manages to make the occasional movie that will last. You just wish he’d listened more to the aliens who visited him in “Stardust Memories” and said, “You wanna do mankind a real service? Tell funnier jokes.”
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