The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen Read Online Free PDF Page A

abandonment of the early films’ “vulgar vibrancy,” their rambunctiousness, playfulness, raucousness, their “hostility … and freak lyricism,” their “organic untidiness” and general air of deliberate comedic subversion. When she wrote in her take-no-prisoners review of Stardust Memories, “From the tone of this film, you would think that vulgarians were putting guns to Woody Allen’s head and forcing him to make comedies,” the judgment carried its own tonality of personal betrayal, one never completely absent from Kael’s subsequent reviews of his films.
    17. Again Mary P. Nichols and I draw diametrically opposed conclusions: “I agree that Allen’s films address these modern—or postmodern—positions,” she argued. “But Allen’s films do not celebrate this lack of moral or intellectual coherence or give birth to myriad and contradictory interpretations that cannot be resolved.” Reconstructing Woody p. xiii.
    18. Quoted in McCann, p. 208.
    19. Frederico Fellini, 8½ .
    20. The identification of this suddenly ambiguous figure with Allen is probably obviated by a trivial fact Lax records: Allen’s “unwillingness to have his vision interfered with extends to not wearing sunglasses because of the alterations they make in color and light” (p. 233).
    21. A seminal difference between Mary P. Nichols’ Reconstructing Woody perception of Allen’s view of art and mine is that she insists upon a distinction between Allen’s art and that of his characters. Nichols maintains that neither Bates nor Cliff of Crimes and Misdemeanors is the artist Allen is, the disparity containing for her the difference between the art Allen satirizes and the more substantial art he creates and thus affirms. Although I’d agree that the quality of Allen’s work is greater than that of his artist protagonists, I’m not at all convinced that the dubious attitude toward the artistic enterprise dramatized in his films and voiced by his protagonists is completely ironized in such a way as to elevate Allen’s own work above the critique. Nichols contends that Allen’s art transcends its own critique of art in the same way, say, that Joyce’s Portrait transcends the art of the young artist it depicts; my dissenting argument is that, because of his very real dubiety about the claims of aesthetic transformation, Allen’s art consistently accuses and indicts itself.
    8. Woody’s Mild Jewish Rose: Broadway Danny Rose
    1. The contrast between the highly sympathetic depiction of the world of Jewish-American comedy and the much more negative vision of Hollywood in Allen’s next film, The Purple Rose of Cairo, isn’t surprising, given Allen’s career choices, but it is nonetheless instructive. The Hollywood film within Purple Rose presents nothing but illusions belied by the actions and characters of the actors who appear in the movie, but which the hopeless economic straits of the audience compel them desperately to embrace; the comedians are aware of and sensitive to their audience, enjoying each other at the Carnegie Deli as if they are that audience.
    2. Woody Allen, Broadway Danny Rose, in Three Films of Woody Allen (New York: Vintage Books, 1987), p. 255.
    3. Jonathan Baumbach, “The Comedians” (review of Broadway Danny Rose), Commonweal, March 23, 1984, p. 182.
    4. Another small consonance between beginnings and endings in the Danny Rose fable: when Danny arrives at Tina’s apartment to meet her for the first time, she’s talking to Lou on the telephone; when she arrives at Danny’s apartment on Thanksgiving to make up with him, he’s talking on the telephone.
    5. John Pym, review of Broadway Danny Rose, Sight and Sound, Autumn, 1984, p. 300.
    6. Baumbach, p. 182.
    7. The comedians are not the only ones being nostalgic in Broadway Danny Rose . Weinstein’s Majestic Bungalow Colony, a Catskills resort where Danny is pictured pumping his acts, is where Allen’s performing career had its start, the