Woody, p.25
Woody, page 25
The film was a labor of love for its director, Martin Ritt; its screenwriter, Walter Bernstein; and its cast, many of whom—like its star, Zero Mostel—had themselves been victims of the Hollywood blacklist. It had devastated the lives and careers of many figures in show business. Philip Loeb, who played Gertrude Berg’s husband on the TV program The Goldbergs between 1949 and 1950, committed suicide; John Garfield’s death at an early age may have been precipitated by the blacklist; and scores of others had seen their lives broken and careers crippled. Allen undertook the project for both moral and personal reasons: Abe Burrows, the relative who had befriended him when he sought help in getting started in the business, had been a target of the blacklist. Burrows had been selected to be the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in Letters for Guys and Dolls in 1951, but the prize was withheld that year. In addition, as Allen told the interviewer Ken Kelley in 1976 in Rolling Stone, “I remember hearing about blacklisting when I was in public school, not really understanding the implications of it all. But in retrospect, what I know now historically, it was a horrible time. The script expresses me politically even though I didn’t write it.”
“When Martin Ritt and I were finally cleared of the blacklist and were able to work again,” Walter Bernstein told me, “we had always wanted to do a movie about the blacklist. We wanted to do a straight drama about someone who’s been blacklisted, why, and what happened. But we could never get anybody interested. Marty, who had some kind of clout as a director, would take it to a studio, and they would turn it down. Too controversial; they didn’t want to touch the subject. Finally we got the idea of coming at it sideways. About a guy who was a front for blacklisted scriptwriters, and doing it as a comedy.
“An ex-agent of ours,” Bernstein continued, “David Begelman, had become the head of Columbia. We went to him and got a derisory amount of money. He liked it, he would do it if we got a star. Redford, Jack Nicholson, people like that. The only way he would do it. So we puzzled awhile, and finally one day I was playing tennis with Marty and he stopped and said, ‘What about that kid?’ I said, ‘What kid?’ He said, ‘That funny kid.’ He couldn’t think of the name. Finally I said, ‘You mean Woody Allen?’ ‘Yes, that’s who.’ ‘Well, he’d be great.’ We called Begelman, and he said yes. So we sent the script to Woody, and he said yes. And that made it possible.
“So we flew to Paris to meet with Woody. He was making Love and Death. He was living in a hotel. He had covered up all the windows in his room. He said, ‘I like the script and I’d like to do it.’ That was it.
“He came on the set. He said, ‘Fellas, I’m here as an actor. What do you want me to do?’ And that was it. He didn’t write anything. His sympathies were liberal. He took direction. He was a gent. We didn’t talk much politics. We talked about sports mostly. It was a significant experience for us. Woody contributed to that. He’s a good guy. He’s an Energizer Bunny. He knows where he’s going, know what he has to do. I mean he’s found a way to handle his craziness.
“Zero Mostel’s character [Hecky Brown, who commits suicide by jumping out of a hotel window] is partly derived from John Garfield and partly from Philip Loeb. Garfield and I were friends. Garfield had a heart condition and was being squeezed. Very much. HUAC was after him. They wouldn’t let up. They made it so that there was no way out unless you became an informer, and gave names. He solved it by dying. He didn’t want to be a snitch. He didn’t want to have to give names. He liked being a movie star.”
In a key scene in the film, Woody’s character, Howard Prince, drives Hecky up to the Concord Hotel in the Catskills to play an engagement. He expects to get a paltry $500 because he is damaged goods, but receives an even more humiliating $250 from the hotel director. He explodes with rage. The scene was based on Mostel’s actual experience, with Bernstein as witness. “I drove Zero up there,” Bernstein said. “The guy cut him, and he went on in a rage. Eight hundred people in the audience. Cursed the audience in Yiddish and called them names. The more he did it, the more they loved it. They had no idea what was going on. He came off and drank half a bottle or more of booze and went to bed. I wanted him to do that in the movie, but he wouldn’t do the scene. It was still too painful.”
As the final credits of the film roll, they identify the producer, director, writer, and cast members—and also list the year in which each was blacklisted.
The film’s potential for overearnestness, considering the subject and the personal experience of its participants, is somewhat undercut by its comic form. It is, to its credit, not a diatribe. To that extent it benefits from the levity. However, its black-and-white view of characters and events (the progressives are always purely good guys, the committee members are always monsters) keeps complexity and nuance at bay. And paradoxically, because of the humor, it emerges as a hybrid of drama and comedy that don’t fully mesh. Woody’s Howard Prince is a character portrait of a nebbish, a cashier and small-time bookie in hock who becomes a charlatan, pretending to be a writer, and displays courage at the end. The film doesn’t block out the feeling that we are watching Woody Allen; we don’t forget who he is. “The Front, while ogling Significance, is content to cohabit with Farce,” wrote John Simon. “A serious problem can, of course, be treated as comedy, especially as black comedy, if it has been sufficiently dealt with as a serious problem in the past, if we have become tired of it when served up straight. But when its surface has barely been scratched, yukking up the subject seems at best evasive, at worst jejune.” Simon added, “To have been a Communist or Communist-sympathizer is not an automatic guarantee of moral and intellectual superiority.”
“There is, in the end,” Richard Schickel wrote, “something held back about The Front, some strange refusal to really dig into and turn over very rich historical and psychological soil. The result is a film unworthy of its excellent intentions.” What is held back is the complexity of the deceptive nature of the Communist Party, which controlled its members’ thinking to the extent that they believed that Stalin was the “new Moses” (the words of American party leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn), that the gulag was a workers’ health resort, and that, during the Hitler-Stalin Pact, opposing Nazism was giving support to “imperialism.” They were capable of striking for milk for poor children in the United States and organizing black workers in the South against the Ku Klux Klan and segregation, while supporting the purges and sadistic murders of millions (many of whom had given their lives to the cause of “progressive humanity”) in the Soviet Union.
Nevertheless the authenticity of feeling and atmosphere, the injustice of the blacklist, and the serious historical events that we see unfolding give The Front a seriousness of purpose and integrity.
* * *
Annie Hall was the first of the five pictures to be made when Arthur Krim and Eric Pleskow renewed and extended their UA contract with Allen. “A career that seemed a fluky and limited one,” Steven Bach wrote, “full of New York angst and schtick which didn’t travel well into mid-America and had almost no foreign passport, had turned into a prodigiously likable series of pictures: Bananas, Sleeper, Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex, and Love and Death. They were original not only in subject but in their angle of vision and style, evolving from an early awkward jokiness to the seriocomic poignancies and polish of Annie Hall. Taking a flyer on Allen had proved to be one of the happiest and smartest gambles in recent movie history.” Allen had singlehandedly revitalized UA’s reputation for originality and independence. He was in a filmmaker’s heaven.
So imagine we’re seeing Annie Hall for the first time. It is 1977. We’ve seen Woody as Virgil, Boris, and Fielding, characters caught up in wild, slapstick adventures. We’ve seen him closer to earth in Play It Again, Sam as Allan Felix. But here we are much closer still with Alvy Singer. He stands there facing the camera. No music. Woody’s Dixieland scores are absent. He tells two jokes, then tells us he’s turning forty. He confides that one of the fates he fears is turning into the old guy with the shopping bag, dribbling at the mouth, hanging out at cafeterias shouting about socialism. (Woody will give us variations of that dreaded image in films to come, like the guy selling comic books in front of Bloomingdale’s in Annie Hall.) And then he gets down to it: “Annie and I broke up.” He doesn’t know why.
He tells us he had a normal childhood, but the first flashback contradicts him. He’s in Brooklyn on a doctor’s couch, and his mother has taken him there because he has grown depressed since realizing that the universe is expanding and will eventually break up. “What is it your business?” shouts his mother, and the doctor tells him it won’t happen for billions of years and it’s his duty to enjoy himself—and the doctor laughs heartily to show how enjoyable life is. Alvy informs us he’s in analysis and that his house was beneath the roller coaster in Coney Island—a brilliant Woody stroke. (He was driving around Brooklyn looking for locations, and his art director, Mel Bourne, and cinematogapher, Gordon Willis, discovered the little solitary apartment actually lodged beneath the roller coaster.) Soon we’re back in elementary school, and Alvy at six is stealing kisses from the girls (just as Woody actually did) and being upbraided by the strict, wizened Irish teachers. We immediately segue to an actual scene from a Dick Cavett TV interview with Woody, lest there be any doubt this is Woody’s real story, that this is the story of the successful star of stand-up comedy, Johnny Carson, and many other television shows, the Woody who rejects the world of TV comedy writing because it is insipid and sterile—as he will do again in Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Crimes and Misdemeanors. Back to his mother, telling him he was always out of step with the world and distrusted people. And Woody’s themes begin to cascade over us: (1) Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Woody tells Rob (Tony Roberts), the eternally shallow, swinger friend dressed in white, who represents the emptiness of Los Angeles, where he moves (he pops up in several Woody films in the exact same role, even in a cameo in Hannah and Her Sisters), of people muttering “Jew” at him or framing innocent-sounding questions so that “Did you” turns into “Djew,” or playing Wagner in record stores to torment him. Scenes from the great Ophuls documentary The Sorrow and the Pity, about the Nazi occupation of France, are referred to and shown several times.
Now we are at the Beekman Theater, where we will meet Annie for the first time. Alvy is waiting for her to go in to see an Ingmar Bergman film. He is surrounded by three primitive Brooklyn guys, and we are introduced to Allen’s second theme, (2) the burdens of being a celebrity. Annie arrives late (the film’s events are actually all in flashback, since we know they have broken up), and Allen cannot go into a movie that’s already been running for two minutes, which opens up the third theme, (3) Alvy’s uncompromising search for truth. They now wind up on line at the New Yorker Theater, where we (and everyone in line) learn that Annie and Alvy have sexual problems and that she is dealing with them in analysis. Alvy is infuriated by the comments of the academic pedant behind him in line, and a fourth theme is introduced, (4) Alvy’s judgmental nature. Almost no one lives up to his expectations, including Annie. The film’s experimental techniques also begin here, when Alvy conjures up the real Marshall McLuhan to refute the professor’s fatuous remarks about him. Another flashback introduces us to Alvy’s first wife, Allison (Carol Kane), whom he meets at an Adlai Stevenson rally where he is going to do his stand-up routine. He immediately disparages her while simultaneously flirting with her, guessing at her “New York left-wing Jewish Intellectual” background, going to Brandeis, socialist summer camps, and her father’s Ben Shahn drawings on the wall, reducing her to what she calls a “cultural stereotype.” As he is about to go onstage, a fifth theme briefly appears, (5) Bob Hope’s influence on Allen’s comedy. Alvy asks Allison for encouragement, and she says he’s cute, causing him to straighten his tie and emit a smug Bob Hope whistle. We see him at the rally with yet more examples of the Woody Allen stand-up comedy routines. In the next scene we see him avoiding sex with Allison by obsessing about the JFK assassination, leading Alvy to face the camera and address the audience (another device Allen employs throughout the film) and repeat the joke that started the film (and this is a sixth theme): (6) “Oh my God! She’s right!… Is it the old Groucho Marx joke that—that I-I just don’t wanna belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member?” The next scene, filmed at a beach house, is iconic: Alvy’s struggle with getting live lobsters into a pot. It was the first scene in the movie that Allen and Keaton filmed, and they broke up spontaneously with laughter. The joyousness of the scene is overwhelmingly conveyed by its improvisatory feeling. This couple had lovely moments together, and here was a record of those idyllic times.
And that was only the beginning of the film. Each scene glistens, the story borne forward by Allen’s whip-smart comic sense: Alvy and Annie on their first date and Alvy stopping Annie in the street and suggesting they kiss for the first time right then because “We’re just gonna go home later, right? There’s gonna be all that tension,” Alvy reasons. “You know, we never kissed before and I’ll never know when to make the right move or anything. So we’ll kiss now and we’ll get it over with and then we’ll eat. Okay?”
“Oh, all right,” says Annie.
“And we’ll digest our food better,” explains Alvy.
They kiss. “So now we can digest our food,” he says.
The sexual problems between the couple start early and permeate the film. Annie does not seem to be turned on by Alvy; she needs marijuana to enjoy sex. Alvy is turned off by what he regards as her rejection. He argues quite reasonably that as a comedian, he knows that if an audience is high, their laughter doesn’t mean anything because it was artificially induced. In one of the many original scenes that break with naturalism, we see Annie’s spirit leaving her body as they are having sex: She crosses over to a chair and watches them having intercourse and chats with them.
Anyone watching the film remembers their own first date, the fumbling and embarrassment, moving one’s arm tentatively around the shoulders of the girl, fearing rejection. Allen has encapsulated that entire experience in the most original, fresh, and charming way. Did he actually do this in life? Of course he did.
And so the story is everyone’s story of a first love that goes astray, often for reasons that are understood only years later. Alvy is controlling, judgmental, rejecting of everyone else’s failings. He is an island of integrity and morality in himself; he feels both superior and inferior to everyone else. Does that sound familiar? He rejects Annie by not wanting her to move in with him. He ridicules her intellect so that she finds solace in the embrace of a college teacher and, ultimately, with the smooth-talking, mantra-spouting Hollywood record producer, Tony Lacey (Paul Simon). Alvy isolates Annie from the world because no one can live up to his high standards, except, inexplicably, his swinger pal Rob, who can’t wait to sell out to Hollywood and doesn’t seem to have a clue as to what Alvy is talking about—even preferring fake laugh tracks for his TV comedy shows so that he won’t have to bother to write funny dialogue.
Alvy supports Annie’s aspirations to sing and to “find herself”—he even pays for her therapy—but he rejects Tony Lacey’s offer to produce her record and is stunned to discover that Annie’s therapy is liberating her from his control. After all, he is paying for it. He has lost Annie by denying her a chance at success in life, and he experiences the results in her rejection of him.
Allen gained the distance to write about his love affair with Keaton very quickly; perhaps that was because the more intense affair had been with Louise Lasser, one which he has never dealt with in his movies except by creating relatively extreme characters like Dorrie and Harriet Harmon—grotesques. Lasser was an exquisitely talented comic actress, as she demonstrated in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, whose later career was undermined by her own serious emotional problems. (She was arrested for cocaine possession while starring in Mary Hartman; this event was turned into a brilliant episode of the program as well as a sketch on Saturday Night Live.)
Keaton and Allen had had diametrically different life experiences, were from wildly different ethnic and social classes. (Lasser was also from an upper-class milieu.) Keaton and Allen were sources of exotic fascination for each other. The lifeblood of each other was ingrained in Lasser and Allen; they knew and understood each other even before they met. They were brilliant Jewish comic originals and terrific ad libbers; they were sexual flames to each other and intellectual equals. Louise, like Allison Portchnik, studied at Brandeis. Allen could not patronize Lasser or raise her up to his level: She was on his level. They spoke each other’s language. She could pick up on Allen’s Yiddish expressions; she could do shtick almost as well as he could. Both were secular Jews to the core, but very Jewish all the same. Lasser had a zaftig, fully feminine body, just what Allen craved. What undermined them was Lasser’s emotional turmoil; it was impossible for Allen to function in that hothouse. What was initially her psychic withdrawal twice a month turned into twice a week and, finally, almost all the time. Allen was left alone; his companion was gone; his rigorous work schedule threatened.
The story of Annie Hall is universal and the first film of Allen’s that would be loved by audiences throughout the world. The last scenes, in which Diane Keaton sings a moving, even mesmerizing version of “Seems Like Old Times,” and the final montage of moments in the love affair, accompanied by her singing the song, are unforgettable. This is everyone’s memory of a first love that has gone astray but remains tenderly enshrined in the memory forever. Even if it was not really Allen’s first love—Harlene—or his second—Louise—it was artistically and universally true.
