A change in plans: No GLG story for you!

[This relates to this signpost entry of last December. Edit 5/30/14. Update 5/31/14: For a substantive follow-up to this entry, see here.]

I have decided to put the mini-series on the placement firm that I had given the abbreviation GLG, into a bin labeled “Some assembly required.” What this means is that I will not post a series on it specifically, for the foreseeable future.

The story is at least as interesting as many of the other media stories reflecting “dark stuff in the back room” that I have put on my blogs, and it is relevant to one or more of the “JCP” and “RVT” projects mentioned at the start of “Dollars & sense, …Part 1.” But pending those projects, the only way I would be apt to present the GLG story is to plop down, almost unreconstructed, some of the documentation that pertained to the complaint I started pursuing with the state Department of Labor in spring 2007, concerning GLG’s being weeks, then months, behind in having its paychecks able to be cashed. (They bounced otherwise. And for me, thousands of dollars in pay was outstanding. Other employees of GLG got the same treatment, and at least one former employee of GLG started suing it, leading one principal to pay me through cashier’s checks…while he was shielding from the lawsuit what money he could get to pay employees.)

This would mean indications of the many little items of evidence (for instance, a three-page list I have a copy of, a sort of cover sheet listing documents that I sent to the state, is quite illustrative of the nature of the problem, as well as of how unprecedented it was for me, but it may suggest what a tedious process the complaint was, along with all else).

This all could be said to comprise—making the larger story look like—the kind of “pile of leaves” that would be interesting to investigators but not to the more casually interested members of my audience. In 2007, it was interesting stuff to deal with in the thick of resolving a thorny matter of a workplace collapse, but a retrospective traipse through it doesn’t make for romantic reading, so to speak.

Some might also say, it’s old news, so why bother? But it figures in a years-long recent history of changes in the climate and practices of certain “arcane” sectors of the media world in New Jersey that it would be foolish to ignore.

And perhaps the former principals of GLG, if they were aware of this planned mini-series, would feel it was just as well I didn’t post a fuller version of the story on my blog.

Movie break (Summer Lite*): A lot of interesting elements, but adding up to what?: Rumble Fish (1983)

Ninth in the series: Morning Becomes Reagan: A revisiting of 1980s pop (and political) culture

* “Summer Lite” is a new subhead for light viewing for the summer. (This series I will try to make interesting but I will try not fuss over details of the entries as much.)

Subsections below:

Coppola’s yeomanly try at righting his financial ship coincides with a critical decline in his image
Rumble Fish seems squarely to be more accomplished visually than story-wise
The film’s failings (from my quick view)
Dillon’s performance annoys; other names are here, famous before or after

[Edit 5/24/14. Edits 5/27/14. Edit 5/30/14.]

I saw this film in the theater, and the Wikipedia article on it (that is, the release date noted) suggests it had to be in my senior year of college, though I don’t really remember the school-related context too well (and normally I would). What I do remember is that there were reviews of Rumble Fish (typically, at the time, I was clued off to “what was good” in movies by Time magazine, with probably some help from The Washington Post and/or The New York Times, though I don’t think I read the latter on a regular basis until about 1985, certainly starting in 1986).

I knew that by 1983 director Francis Ford Coppola was in a peculiar phase in his career; Apocalypse Now (1979) had been a focus of anticipation for years, and of final audience and critic beholding in August-September 1979. (I went to a September showing in Manhattan, of all places, prompting a droll story I’ll maybe tell you in a future posting.) Then came the disaster of his One From the Heart (1982), with which Coppola had taken the production tack that was diametrically opposite that of Apocalypse: everything done on a sound stage with maximum control, with Francis inside a trailer or such, directing with help from a TV monitor, almost like an obsessive-compulsive avoiding germs. Heart was big on visuals and not at all on story. The box-office disaster was so bad that Coppola would be working prodigiously to recover from it for many years.

By the way, along with all else, for what would be a limited period, Francis changed his name’s form in public connections, starting in spring 1977 as he was finishing up principal photography on Apocalypse; he dropped the middle name Ford. I think in the biography of him by Peter Cowie (see reference at end), the reason is given (I don’t remember it); but this explains why the on-screen and packaging credits for Rumble Fish, reflecting the 1983-struck form, show him as “Francis Coppola”—he retained this use until, at some point, maybe the end of the 1980s, he went back to including the “Ford.” (This while within the copy on the 2005 DVD that reflects the way his production firm came up with a new edition of the film, the full name Francis Ford Coppola is also shown.)

Such complexities show why, with Coppola, if you know the biographical details, along with the constellation of people he used for this film, you are then acquainted with his world, which in some respects helps you understand the intent and virtues of his films. I am a fan of Coppola, while I won’t shy from the criticisms made of him as an artist; for other blog entries I did on work tied to him, see this on the documentary Hearts of Darkness and this on his well-regarded The Conversation (1974).

For Rumble Fish, not only does he use long-time producing partners—producer Fred Roos, production designer Dean Tavoularis, and sound designer Richard Beggs—but (seen in Apocalypse) the actors Laurence Fishburne, Dennis Hopper, and, [update] yes, Herb Rice, the Black actor who played Roach (at the Do Lung [sp?] bridge) in Apocalypse—here, he is a man commenting in a pool hall where live music is being played.

Coppola’s yeomanly try at righting his financial ship coincides with a critical decline in his image

Coppola’s first efforts to dig himself out of the profound financial hole he was in, triggered by One From the Heart, was to make The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, both released in 1983 and both based on novels published years before by S. E. Hinton, a writer of young-adult works (not a common career at the time) (End note). Regarding Coppola, the critical consensus was forming by 1983—and I parroted this, rather regrettably, in summer 1985 in a paper I did on Apocalypse Now for a class I took on U.S. classic films that was offered by the American Studies department: After the two Godfather films, Coppola tended to be good with images, but equally inevitably, his storylines could suffer. This came to be regarded as something of a curse of his work.

I think today, as applied to Apocalypse, this is an unfair assessment. Granted, there are little infelicities with Apocalypse, like little improbabilities here or there; unclear speaking by actors in places…. But I think, on multiple viewings, Apocalypse reveals itself as a work to be appreciated as a sort of Gestalt—with images and an understanding of the larger story bridging little holes in the narrative and petty-level dialogue. And this film is thus amazing for delivering, in the American film language, a rendering of a cross between Joseph Conrad’s novella/short story “Heart of Darkness” and a gawking “travelogue” of the Vietnam War that, apart from the film’s political/peacenik slant and some off-base details on the nature of military activity, is the best “mystical” treatment we have of this traumatic phase in American cultural and historical life since World War II. Even if you disagree that Apocalypse meets this goal so well, or that it’s presumptuous for a film to even try to do this, I think it accomplishes something in this direction (and in proportion to its ambition) much better than any of Coppola’s other post-1970s films—those that have been criticized for narrative flaccidity—reach this own respective goals.

Following my own position, we can say Apocalypse was Coppola’s last great picture (if it isn’t indeed his very greatest). When we get to the two S. E. Hinton films, I think a lot of us will be in greater agreement that these films are rather lacking.

Rumble Fish seems squarely to be more accomplished visually than story-wise

Actually, I’ve never seen The Outsiders, though I would like to. But it seems “of a piece,” in how accomplished a work it is, with Rumble Fish (as might be likely given that they were produced back to back). The later-released Rumble Fish I did see, first in 1983, and I think I was inclined to agree with critics who felt Coppola had gotten erratic in crafting narrative structure, even while his images could be arresting.

When I saw the film this past week, I felt that I almost had never seen it before. And I found it really hard to embrace. I mean, I remembered some little images—as I saw them again—from when I saw them in 1983. But in general, I was rather put on my mettle to enjoy this film.

For one thing, visually it was something else. The Wikipedia article talks about an imitation of 1920s German expressionism shaping its style; I would have said it did a lot to imitate Orson Welles a la Touch of Evil (1958). Angles, shadows, smoke…and high-contrast black-and-white. Overall, this makes for interesting “eye candy.” And the editing and variation of shots, such as focusing on a face one time, showing people from another angle another time—as a matter of visual variation while maintaining situational continuity—works well enough.

A 2005 DVD extra shows how Coppola and his team shot storyboards of the film on video to see how it would look. This is like extensively outlining a written article, which helps give it a structure and clarity that aid readability. I can see that Coppola, in his preproduction planning and general conceptions, could get intriguing visual structures and that this can, at least in theory, punch up the flow of the story.

The soundtrack, by Stewart Copeland, drummer of the rock group The Police, is interesting. It almost seems a little too busy at times, but it’s generally OK, intriguing for its combinations of sounds, with usually an emphasis on rhythm (and it includes instruments other than drums, including guitar, though whether Copeland played all the instruments, I’m not sure).

The film’s failings (from my quick view)

What I found lacking in this film was, basically, the story, and one performance in particular. It didn’t really hold me so closely as to allow me to “drink down” this film with enjoyment. I watched it through once and got most of the way through a second watching before finishing up this review (the second time I had a rather bad headache, which didn’t mean any particular strong change [for the better or worse] in how the film struck me, based on its merits and not my illness; sometimes a good film can make your illness-feelings recede a bit; this didn't happen here).

I mean, Welles’ Touch of Evil has its visual pyrotechnics, but if you’ve seen that film a few times, you appreciate how Welles articulates the whole noir-ish story scene by scene, arresting shot by arresting shot; and generally, like a master, he shows how visuals and story can be complementary.

With Rumble Fish, I felt that the “spiky” visuals rather “got in the way” a bit, or attracted a film student’s wondering/appreciative eye, while the story—which seemed banal (as to basics “on the page”) on the one hand and barely rising to complement the visual brio on the other—barely enabled me to accept the visuals, in the way that the story could have hooked me right into them if they all worked together well.

In particular, I thought Matt Dillon’s performance was downright annoying. Here, he plays Rusty James—the script is such that the full name keeps being repeated, sounded clanging and story-parodying—who is an aspiring street tough who starts out ambivalent about his older brother, “Motorcycle Boy” (his given name is also mentioned, Michael), played by a young Mickey Rourke, who arrives on the scene and vanquishes the man Rusty James fought in a street rumble. Motorcycle Boy presently becomes, and also is assumed to be, a hero who, nevertheless, has an ambivalent attitude toward Rusty James and his hankering to be an alpha punk in town. The two seem to do a symbiotic dance with each other through the film, with Rusty James hankering to acquire Motorcycle Boy’s mojo, or mystique, or coolness, or whatever…and there is some directive from Motorcycle Boy for Rusty James to eventually go to California and get to the ocean. Which, after a dramatic downfall has happened, Rusty James eventually does, for an aching try at atonement, or such, at film’s end.

I know I’m crumpling up a summary of the plot, but the whole portentous, jejune, barely interesting thing seems (1) stupid enough that it shouldn’t take much to understand it and yet (2) am I not appreciating something here, as to why this story should mean more than it seems to?

(By the way, no slight to Coppola, but the theme of a younger brother [or other type of male] regarding an older brother [or other seasoned role model] as a mentor occurs numerous times in Coppola’s work, including in Apocalypse, regarding the way Captain Willard looks up to Colonel Kurtz in his perverse Special Forces-schooled self-made-ness, and even in, I believe, the late film Tetro [2009], which Coppola wrote as original work. This, as is no secret, reflects Coppola’s attitude toward his brother August, who was a professor and who died a few years ago. In fact, end credits show Rumble Fish is dedicated to him.)

Dillon’s performance annoys; other names are here, famous before or after

Especially icing the ambiguous cake in Rumble Fish is Matt Dillon’s performance. Whether intentional or not, he comes across as an un-remediated dolt; you don’t know whether he wants to be a kind of “tough” that sounds stupid as part of his trademark (as if to call out, “Be intimidated by me, because I’m so stupid, you should be afraid of me just for that!”), or whether he is just a moron who is aspiring to be something even a moron can’t achieve—a street tough who has his whole small town in his pocket.

Dennis Hopper is on board as Rusty James’ and Motorcycle Boy’s father, an apparent town drunk. A making-of doc suggests a lot of takes were required to get Hopper to be on point in the scene where the father is with his sons in the café. Here, he’s approximately the burnout, with a capacity to be eloquent, that he was in Apocalypse Now.

Speaking of that film, another star from it is here: Laurence Fishburne, as a sort of local Black friend, entering shots with a sort of effortless cool, who does little more than make comments to help establish the dramatic situation.

Among new faces, Nicolas Cage is here in his first film role, or one of his first, as a friend of Rusty James' (Cage is a son of August and nephew of Francis); Diane Lane is here as Rusty James’ girlfriend, looking quite young (but still as attractive as she would be in middle age); and Sofia Coppola, credited as “Domino,” is here as the Diane Lane character’s younger sister. Sofia hardly looks here like a family relation to Lane and in fact—no harshness intended—here she’s at an awkward age where a girl looks as cute as a middle-aged person’s bare foot. But she makes a game effort at acting, not the washout as numerous critics and viewers have judged her with The Godfather Part III.

Maybe disturbing those who don’t like nepotism, Coppola’s sons Roman and Gian-Carlo (the latter died in 1986), are listed as associate producers.

End note.

I first became aware of S. E. Hinton through an issue of a magazine, aimed at young students and on writing, that I got in an English class in ninth grade (1976-77). I think I still have this magazine in my files. As was a novelty in 1976, Hinton had published her first fiction when she was in her teens (I think in the 1960s). By 1976 she was securely established as a writer, and the magazine article mentioned either or both of the novels Coppola adapted for the screen (I think a title like Rumble Fish was not such as would have interested me in the novel much). Hinton, as to the evidence I had then (and looking back, I couldn’t say I was wrong), was not the sort of writer I would have read when I was in my teens. But the same magazine title (maybe a different issue) had an article on Ray Bradbury that interested me more, and you could say Bradbury inspired me to some extent as an aspiring writer. I did get a copy of his The Illustrated Man and Other Stories, whatever the title, and read some stuff in it.

Reference.

Peter Cowie, Coppola (New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1990).

Movie break (Summer Lite*): A landmark teen film delivers wit and heart: The Breakfast Club (1985)

Five high school types in Saturday detention gravitate to self-induced, self-managed, mitigating “group therapy”

Eighth in the series: Morning Becomes Reagan: A revisiting of 1980s pop (and political) culture

* “Summer Lite” is a new subhead for, you guessed it, light viewing for the summer. (School is done; time for fun.) Just as the films won’t be too demanding, I won’t go to too great a length to review them.

[Edit 5/23/14.]

I remember seeing this film in the theater, and I was fairly impressed with it then. While I am not a super-fan of director/writer John Hughes (1950-2009), I recognize his importance in the post-Vietnam history of American film. And while I am not a freak for teen films, this is definitely one of the better ones, to put in a pantheon with such cult favorites as the very different Heathers (1989), Clueless (1995), and Mean Girls (2004), among others. (I never saw Fast Times at Ridgemont High [1982], one of the forerunners of knowing post-Vietnam teen films.) This film is arguably John Hughes’ best (he did things ranging from Sixteen Candles [1984], which has received notice recently for its 30^th anniversary, to Planes, Trains and Automobiles [1987], and Home Alone [1990].)

One notable thing about Hughes’ films, at least several of the ones I’ve mentioned, is that he can capture young viewpoints (and concomitantly make adults look a bit like boobs without completely caricaturing them) in a way that dignifies teens (hence his appeal to this audience). He can also toss in some gross-out gags (such as related to impolite bodily functions), but these aren’t, in some sense, as coarse or, definitely, as tendentiously included as these seem to be in films today. In fact, in Breakfast Club you almost wouldn’t notice them (and the masturbation details related to character Brian Johnson I think I missed when seeing this film in ’85).

This film also has a couple distinctions that mark it as a true Reagan-era artifact: first is that it is one of the trio of films that set up Molly Ringwald’s status as teen hero in the 1980s (the other films were Sixteen Candles, which Hughes wrote and directed, and Pretty in Pink [1986], which Hughes wrote and produced but didn’t direct; Ringwald also made the cover of Time magazine in 1986). The second distinction is that it represents a selection of what became known as the “Brat Pack,” a set of young stars of the mid-1980s that, from film to film, varied a bit in membership (End note 1).

Present here were notables listed in the character roster given below; future members of the Brat Pack would include Demi Moore and Rob Lowe, among others, in St. Elmo’s Fire (1985). These films tied in to other modes of pop culture enough that songs featured in the soundtrack could be radio (and MTV) hits without being merely “for movies” songs. For The Breakfast Club, the big hit was “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” by the rock group Simple Minds, which I remember from radio (and MTV) play and rather liked. (In those days, MTV was all about music videos, and from May 1984 until February 1986, I shared a house with law students where we had cable TV, a relative rarity in those days, and I could see MTV when it was at its height in terms of cutting-edge music videos.)

(St. Elmo’s Fire featured an eponymous song [actually, “St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion)”], performed by Canadian musician John Parr and written by David Foster, that had the distinction of showing misunderstanding what actual St. Elmo’s fire is. The lyric talks about it “burning in me,” but the term normally refers to ignis fatuus, or the light given off by incandescent swamp gas. This though the movie writers, as far as I know, didn’t mean the term that way.)

The phenomenon of high school types

I don’t know if this is so true overseas, but the phenomenon of there being “types” of personalities that cohere in subgroups in high school seems to be have going on for generations, and is a staple of post-Vietnam high school movies (whether satires or not). At my high school in Vernon Township, N.J., which I attended from 1975 to 1980 (my eighth-grade class attended the school the first year it opened, though technically we weren’t in high school), there were only three types: “jocks,” who were basically the athlete types; “rednecks,” who were essentially the good students, or anyone who wasn’t a “jock” or “pothead” (I was among the “rednecks”); and the “potheads.” (Whether the “redneck” term was meant to reflect on us being in a semi-rural school, I don’t know. For one thing, the term was usually used by the potheads, who of course went to the same semi-rural school; and not only that, but in the potheads’ slovenly ways of wearing concert T-shirts and, typically, their winter coats indoors throughout the cooler months, they looked arguably at least as hick-ish as anyone else among the students in school.)

We had no “preps,” which as a category I only found out about (and heard all kinds of cultural effluvia on, especially in mainstream media in the 1980s) once I got to college. We had no “princesses,” which the films Heathers and Mean Girls (and even Clueless) seem to suggest are as inevitably a part of high school as is the American flag. One interesting thing I found, once I got to George Washington University, was the phenomenon of JAPs—“Jewish American princess” or “…prince”—which seemed to be typical of high schools in more upscale areas, usually closer to New York and Philadelphia. (In the 1980s, this group very roughly paralleled the preps, in terms of their attending upscale-area high schools and some of the broad opprobrium they attracted. Incidentally, when I get to talk about my college roommate Alan L., I will be all too willing to explain the background and specifics of his once characterizing me as a “greasy prep,” which I didn’t 100 percent, or passionately, object to. [For one thing, there was a heck of a lot more that was critical, and nastier, that came out of his mouth toward me.] )

There was a certain cultural aspect that interested me about Molly Ringwald in 1985—when I was much more impelled to focus my critical eyes on college culture—and no longer had such interest in “squaring with” the provocative and unsettling aspects of high school (which could have reflected my own “misfit” qualities as well as others’)—in terms of what I would embrace in pop-culture consciousness and “debate” or in my own creative efforts. I think that, regarding Ringwald, I probably thought—more or less as I might today—that Hughes’ having her represent (in Breakfast Club more than he ever did in Sixteen Candles) a cross between the princess subgroup and the prep group was a bit artificial, but not too preposterous that you couldn’t accept it. It was interesting to me that Ringwald was presented in Hughes’ films—and came off—as a very relatable, if still somehow refined and ethereal, young woman—a sort of girl fans could both look up to and see as “just like them.” I am almost 100 percent sure she is of Jewish background, and yet she wasn’t presented this way.

And her redhead aspect brings up a somewhat related point. It is interesting that, in post-Vietnam cinema, when a Jewish female actress seems unlike the more common view of Jewish young women, she takes roles, and is styled, as something not at all Jewish, or not typically Jewish. Now, when you consider actresses like Julie Kavner, with her appearance and voice, you know she will all too willingly occupy roles as some kind of Jewish woman, whether on TV’s Rhoda in the 1970s or in several of Woody Allen’s films. Yet starting with Goldie Hawn, notable Jewish actresses with either blonde or red hair, or otherwise “atypical of Jews” in appearance and manner, take roles that either omit the ethnic identity entirely, or don’t make much of an issue of it. (Hawn has mixed ethnicity, according to her Wikipedia article; her mother was Jewish, with parents from Hungary; her father, a Presbyterian, is a descendant of a man who signed the Declaration of Independence.) (By the way, this is a discussion that can be done with a lot more thoroughness and subtlety than I seem to use here, but my more relevant points will come along before long.)

In Ringwald’s case, it seems she fit the bill perfectly as a sort of “girl next-door” of a rather unusual mien, with, as a broader phenomenon, red hair seeming—as it typically (and rather stupidly) does—to connote some special quality, over the years and across cultures (End note 2). Thus Ringwald fit Hughes’ category for her as the slightly melancholy, gently mystique-bearing, and visually intriguing sweetheart in his films, and developed quite a fan base as a result. And then, though Ringwald worked for years afterward, she never again had the presence and prestige in U.S. films that she did in the mid-1980s.

Even if you don’t entirely warm to this analysis, I think it’s fair to say the film, while sharp in its wit and humor, seemed a bit posturing in 1985 with how it presented the student types. But, more positively, this is the sort of thing that—as such a film settles into cult status over the years, with younger people rediscovering it and eating it up like an old comic book—you can forgive for being “off” in its cultural analysis as it may have been regarded on first release, and you can respect for how “more than half-full” the film is rather than lacking. (This is true for any film of decades or so ago, which might have been controversial in its time, especially on points that people could get passionate about, and which in modern times becomes more of a historical artifact that people get fond of for different reasons, depending on whether they were alive or culturally aware when it was released, or not.)

Another provocative character is John Bender, played by Judd Nelson. Bender is equivalent to what would have been the “pothead” in my late-’70s high school. I think that in 1985, I maybe found his character a bit artificial, a bit of a creative pile-up of characteristics and gestures, but today I find him quite amusing. In fact, he seems to steal the show for the first 50 or 60 percent of the film, and even the 2008 DVD extras remark on how showy the performance is. Not that I forgive the completely potheads of Vernon Township of, say, 1978 (any more than someone would completely forgive what was downright bullying behavior); but when you see a film try to sum up what the “drama” was in high school for a fairly broad audience by the ameliorating alchemy of art, the John Bender character provides a closely enough observed example that the humor of his obstreperous behavior comes forth more than the specific “hurts” we retain from our own personal experience of high school.

That is, portraying a noisy punk in a comic film is a paradox: such a person would be provoking and a bit vile in real life, no less for stirring up strong reactions in his equally young peers; but the negative qualities get sanded down, and the humor beneath the self-dramatization becomes salient in the portrayal. (Interestingly, Nelson is Jewish, but this isn’t really brought to bear in his character; meanwhile, a lot of the potheads in my high school—or at least many of the more vocal ones—were Italian-American.)

Story aspects

I won’t say much about the story; this is one of those films where, if you are attracted to the genre, I think you will enjoy it for what it brings—and it’s not such as would curve your spine. And different people will enjoy it—or assess it—differently, based on their own high school experiences.

One major plot angle is of how the young can work out their problems among themselves if elders leave them alone long enough. This, in general, seems an appealing enough idea, though some may feel the development of Bender and Claire’s aiming toward a sort of romance by the end is a little “artificial” or wishful thinking on Hughes’ part; while the coupling of the athlete Andrew Clark (Emilio Estevez) and the weird girl Allison Reynolds (Ally Sheedy) is less forced.

Some of the actors were a who’s who of young up-and-comers in the ’80s

(Notice the variation in the birth dates for the actors playing the students; they ranged from about age 16 to about 25 at the time of filming. Asterisk indicates he or she was also in St. Elmo’s Fire.)

Students:

Molly Ringwald (b. 1968), as Claire Standish, the princess/prep (this actually neatly combines two types that seem largely separate from what you hear of various high schools’ cultures). Prior to her association with Hughes, Ringwald had experience as a child or teen actress, on TV and otherwise. Her Wikipedia article suggests that as a young child, she had a fair amount of chances at doing acting on TV and otherwise, and singing parts, as well as performing on a jazz record (her father was a jazz musician). Ringwald seems never to have had as high a profile as an actress or celebrity since about 1986 as she did under Hughes’ mentoring wing. In the mid-1990s she lived and worked in France (she is fluent in French, according to the Wikipedia article). But even in more modern photos, she has an appearance of a sort of delicate elf/America’s sweetheart. In her older work, she consistently seemed vulnerable but not pathetic; she was emotionally articulate enough, not quite pouty/moody, in the Hughes films, which I think was key to her appeal then.

Judd Nelson* (b. 1959), as John Bender, the “criminal”/burnout. He appeared with Sheedy not only in St. Elmo’s Fire, but also in Blue City (1986), which from all indications—including comments of Sheedy’s on the 2008 DVD—was a bomb. He is interesting to listen to, many years older and with beard, in comments in extras on the 2008 DVD.

Anthony Michael Hall (b. 1968), as Brian Ralph Johnson, the high-achieving geek. He was a standout in Hughes’ Sixteen Candles. He speaks interestingly on the 2008 DVD at about age 39.

Ally Sheedy* (b. 1962), as Allison Reynolds, the weird (almost-goth) girl. Sheedy has the distinction of having (years ago) published a children’s book, She Was Nice to Mice (~1974), and I’d thought that for this, she had been listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the youngest author published by a trade publisher, though a look at my own 1976 Guinness Book shows this wasn’t the case. In any event, a girl of 12 having a trade book published, which goes on to sell a lot (according to Sheedy’s Wikipedia article), was quite a rarity in the 1970s. She speaks on the 2008 DVD, very clear in her views (she’s almost exactly an age peer of mine, so—not that this is so common among actors my age—I find she speaks about some things very similarly to how I would). Her unusual jaw line—even in 1985 she had a bit of a pointed chin, and today her facial features just exaggerate a bit what was the case 30 years ago—made her attractive in a way, but not strikingly beautiful; her intelligence, though, combined with her somewhat average looks cut her out for roles that meant she wasn’t to be a sex object (smart or not) but to be someone of unusual talent or personality. I vaguely recall that in the film WarGames (~1984), which I didn’t see (and wouldn’t have), she was some smart girl as a partner to the male star, or such. In Breakfast Club, she is fine as the weird girl who turns out not to be so weird. And her acting ability is on point; she exemplifies how, if you can tersely but feelingly spew out “Eat shit!” as her Allison does without sounding like incorrigible trash, that shows acting skill.

Emilio Estevez* (b. 1962), as Andrew Clark, the jock (athlete). Estevez is Martin Sheen’s son and Charlie Sheen’s brother, but you probably already knew that. Not to give him short shrift, but I don’t know much about his work or life; but in Breakfast Club he has a simpatico Martin Sheen–type flavor.

By the way, the array of characters shows an unusual marketing/strategy move—or, I should say, one that wouldn’t be made today—in that the group of kids here contains three boys and two girls. Today, you would figure, the number from each gender would be equal. I guess Hughes had a specific set of “types” he wanted to write on, and didn’t want to be too encumbered with too many students, so five was the total, and three would be boys.

School staff:

Paul Gleason (1939-2006) as the principal, Richard Vernon. He is remembered fondly by various on the 2008 DVD.

John Kapelos as the wiser-than-you’d-think janitor, Carl Reed. In real life, Kapelos had actually gone to the high school featured in the film (at least to one of the two high schools used in the film, to judge from the end credits).

End note 1.

An extra on the 2008 DVD is dedicated specially to explaining the “Brat Pack” label. I knew at the time (1985) that the term was a glib media moniker, but it seems the way it arose is that, for publication in 1985, New York magazine wanted to do an article initially on Emilio Estevez alone, but this devolved into an article on him and a constellation of other young stars he was working with. In the process, the label “Brat Pack” was incorporated by the article; and it was obviously derived from the old term “Rat Pack” for the set of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and others who performed as a clique-of-sorts in the early 1960s. Various Breakfast Club stars speaking in the DVD extra, from the vantage point of about age 40, say that the term was a mixed blessing at best. I didn’t know at the time that it carried such negative connotations as they suggest it did, with harder consequences for them.

End note 2.

This is an area that, I am well aware, could raise some people’s hackles as connoting racism, stereotyping, and so forth, but I think that avoiding discussing certain points here that are really, in good part, about biological aspects of people (and derivative habits of mind, however traditional and stupid) throws the baby out with the bathwater.

To note something that is biological fact on which I have general knowledge: red or blond hair and blue (or green) eyes are generally recessive traits, and brown hair and brown eyes are dominant traits. This means that, with the way genetics works out (the genes make up the DNA-based genotype, and the visible traits are the phenotype), if couples had children when one parent has all dominant traits, and another has all recessive traits, the children—and their children, assuming the trait-mix of mates over generations is similar—would likely tend to have dominant-trait/phenotypes occur more often than recessive (though lower-likelihood outcomes are possible).

Thus, in ethnic populations in which there is high predominance of one type of trait or the other, this suggests not a lot of intermixing with other ethnic groups. For instance, people of (almost) entirely Irish or Scandinavian stock would have a lot of blue eyes and blond or red hair in families, reflective of a fair amount of ethnic (not familial) interbreeding; while those of, say, Jewish or some other Mediterranean-group background would feature a lot of brown eyes and dark hair.

There are exceptions, of course, which I’ll get to. But over the centuries, and as what may seem a sort of peasant belief, blond or red hair and blue eyes seems to suggest a kind of “special” status, whatever this may mean (and apart from the merely biological aspect of “recessive-trait” status). As long ago as about the year 1066, according to the old historical story, William the Conqueror (I think it was), who was from northern France, on entering England named the English English because, with all the blond heads he saw, he thought they looked like “angels” (note how the two words seem to share a common root).

Broadly speaking, the startling status of blond heads continues today, such as in the example where one of my nephews, who is blond and has blue eyes, was visiting China within the past few years, and he was gawked at by a number of people there because, presumably, not only did he not look Oriental, but his blond head, obviously, stuck out. (By the way, if you think I am a “German showing a certain boneheaded indelicacy,” keep in mind that reality always has its complexity. My nephews are half Jewish, and of course my experience with Jewish people as friends and otherwise goes all the way back to about 1968—a whole area of discussion I may eventually get to on my blogs.)

Of course, as a broader matter in European and American society, the attraction of blond people in other contexts can range from the merely “animal-logical” of sexual attraction—some men prefer blonds (as women might prefer their own idea of “ideal” physical types) for whatever reason; and of course, the potential insanity of judging people by physical appearance reared an especially ugly head in Nazi Germany, where operatives making a quick field decision on who was Jewish decided entirely on physical appearance (for instance, a blond person with blue eyes, ipso facto, had to be “Aryan,” or Germanic and not Jewish).

Such thinking wasn’t constricted to Nazi Germany in totalitarian circles (and could occur on levels other than governmental policy); supposedly, Svetlana Alliluyeva, a.k.a. Svetlana Stalin (a.k.a. Lana Peters), daughter of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, said late in her life her father loved her to the extent that, she said, he liked her because she was a redhead like her mother. (Stalin was a dark-haired and –eyed ethnic Georgian.)

To the topic at hand: in my experience, redheads among ethnic and racial groups who typically are dark-haired and dark-eyed do occur, and whether this is due to some intermixing in their family tree, I don’t fully know. I have encountered a number of redhead Jewish people over the years (and typically they have brown eyes, not blue), and there, of course, have been redhead Blacks, too (but interestingly, it doesn’t seem redhead qualities occur among Oriental races). I wonder if the genotype for redhead features somehow has more affinity for the genotype for brown hair and brown eyes than the blond/blue-eyed genotype does with the latter.

Thus—while Molly Ringwald wasn’t presented in her characters in the Hughes films in connection with being Jewish—her “flavor” was rather intriguing in her being a redhead (with brown eyes). And in the same stroke—as far as I know—no one in films not helmed by Hughes tried to capitalize on her qualities that were other than her seeming like a sort of rarefied “girl next-door” (e.g., no one sought to cast her in Jewish roles in a high-profile movie).

Bottom line: if an actress, whether Jewish or not, is redheaded, this seems to cut her out for an image as something special, whether there is a simply suggested, or decidedly vague/mythological, or somewhat obfuscating quality to this or not. (And of course, physical appearance, whether aligned with traditional notions of sex appeal, is a perennial standard squared with in filmmaking that is foolish to ignore or decline to interpret.) This redhead aspect may, like so much else related to beauty, carry her to a large extent for a while, but not forever. As for Ringwald specifically, there may be a ton of reasons why her career did not continue past about the late 1980s with as much heft as it had in the mid-1980s. But her flavor as a teen hero, including her sharp acting, certainly hit a sweet spot with audiences for a brief time in those days.

Movie break: A shallow but entertaining comedy/mystery allowing intricately witty interplays: Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)

First in a series: Post–Soviet Union Adventure, Days of Clintons Past*: A recollection of cultural ephemera of the 1990s

Also fits this series:

“We’ll always have Woody”: A look at Woody Allen films

Also in the series:

Films including Diane Keaton, an exemplar of Baby Boomer leading actresses

*Two notes: First, the subhead portion “Days of Clintons Past” does not mean to imply anything about my opinion of Hillary Clinton as she is a public figure today, whether regarding her possible run for the White House in 2016 or otherwise. Second, my original plan was to stick with my general approach of reviewing Allen films in strict chronological order, and (regarding pending work) to cover Husbands and Wives (1992) first, which would theoretically make at least the first of its three parts the first in my 1990s series. But due to logistical challenges, a review of Manhattan Murder Mystery gets posted first.

[Edits 5/23/14.]

##

This film could be said to provide a bookend to Allen’s film career, in the following way: it represented the first co-starring role he gave Diane Keaton since 1979 and Manhattan, and thus it also represented a return to partnering with Keaton (if very briefly) after his professional relationship with Mia Farrow collapsed amid the notorious family issues that welled up in later 1992.

Also, cowriter Marshall Brickman—who notably worked with him on Sleeper, Annie Hall, and Manhattan—was involved with Allen on this script, because apparently it had been started between the two writers (in or by the mid-1970s) in preparation for the project that became Annie Hall (1977) (or it was a separate project that started before it). Then, in about 1992, Allen got out the old MMM script, which represented (per Allen) a fairly large amount of work by Brickman, and in 1992 Allen opted to get it prepared to be shootable as his next project (different comments by Allen in Eric Lax, Conversations with Woody Allen [Knopf, 2007], e.g., pp. 29 and 94, are a little confusing as to whether Brickman was substantively involved in 1992 or not; possibly not).

Lastly, MMM was (as far as I can tell) Allen’s last film with the relatively simple producing “banner” he had benefited from, for his films, since about 1969: producers/agents Jack Rollins and Charles H. Jaffe, usually with more-specific-project-focused aid from producer Robert Greenhut. The possible/speculated-on (or research/source-based) reasons for this might be worth looking into, but I won’t do that here.

The film has a place-thematic homecoming flavor; and it’s more casual in craft

As a return to a film celebratory of Manhattan in some way, MMM is also notable in Allen’s career, and it charms me for this reason (not that I’m a New Yorker), because some of its scenes, vividly photo’d in handheld way by Carlo Di Palma, I can readily imagine being at. (For instance, the Greenwich Village scenes remind me of places there that I’ve been; and other aspects of the New York scene in MMM, with camera from off the sidewalk, remind me of my few peregrinations over the years in Manhattan.)

The film even starts, under the titles, with a cabaret-type song celebratory of New York (if with some occasionally mildly ironic lyrics).

So, in a sense, this film is a sort of homecoming and reminder of past glories for Allen. But by comparison to the films of his “major phase” (see my “Director’s dossier” on him for a list of his works; and see my review of his Manhattan [1979]), it seems rather slovenly, both visually and in bits of the performances. The handheld camera work seems at times a little sloppy for Allen by comparison with the best of the Gordon Willis work and earlier Di Palma work for him. (But actually, this represents, relatively speaking, a cleaning-up of what he did in Husbands and Wives, which we will look at in due time.)

Allen uses his form of cultural allusion—in this case, early on in MMM, his character Larry Lipton (a book editor at Harper’s) making noise about wanting to see a Bob Hope movie on TV, the night he and his wife get home from attending a hockey game (at which his wife, Keaton’s character Carol Lipton, has shown undisguised boredom). Allen in Lax (p. 133) indicates he wanted to show these characters were average people—which may, incidentally, help explain why he considers this film and the immediately preceding Husbands and Wives (1992), in 2005 (Lax, pp. 254-55), to be among the very few in his huge oeuvre that “came off.” We can guess he may think this because, along with whatever other virtues they have, they show “real people” in a sort of casually realistic way.

Dialogue situations in MMM can also sometimes be sloppy. The plot of the story seems simple, and the comedy (especially between Keaton and Allen as two anxiously interacting spouses dealing with a mystery) can work quite well. But some of the dialogue seems overly worked, either because of undisciplined writing and/or directing, or because of possible improvisation. (This though, even if Keaton gets to sound too much like a “nervous nelly,” she’s still usually entertaining.)

One co-star, Alan Alda, is here as Ted (somewhat similar in flavor to Lester of Crimes and Misdemeanors), a playwright who becomes very helpful to Carol in talking over the murder mystery before her husband Larry is solidly on her side with this. Another co-star, Anjelica Huston, is here as a literary writer whom Larry, as book editor, is mentoring in a way; apropos of Larry’s and Carol’s extracurricular activity of dealing with the murder in their apartment building, she offers especially probing theories on how and why the murder took place.

As is typical for Allen, there are some eddies of paranoia about possible marital infidelity, this time from Larry to Carol vis-à-vis Ted and from Carol to Larry vis-à-vis the Anjelica character, but it’s pretty harmless stuff in the context of this playful film.

Jerry Adler is effective as Paul House, the poker-faced neighbor whose wife has died, who it turns out has been murdered. Lynn Cohen is his wife, Lillian.

Zach Braff has his, I believe, first film role here (and a brief appearance), as Larry and Carol’s son, home from college or some such thing.

In the film’s climax, there is an allusion (in a showy visual sequence) to Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai (1947), in (in MMM’s current-world context) an old movie theater that Paul House has been renovating and wants to sell. This climax is, basically, only a little more artful, and no more or less casually done, than the rest of the film.

##

Bottom line: if you’re expecting a well-crafted work on the order of Allen’s “major phase,” you’ll be a bit disappointed. But it’s still a diverting film, and photographically (in terms of the colors of New York conveyed, leave aside the handheld aspect) quite nice.

How we’re staying the course

A quick note explaining what my agenda is with ongoing and coming entries, especially on movies. My agenda has been clear to me, while for you it may have seemed about as hard to figure out as the mysterious, sad loss of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in March (End note).

I had planned in late December (indicated in this entry, subsection 9) to do entries related to 1970s movies, and on other cultural aspects of that decade, but I turned out, as time went on, just to cover movies. Then this “line of analysis” started to focus on Woody Allen movies, which naturally led to his 1980s films, with the associated decade subhead. With this, I had planned to do other 1980s movies than his.

Well, to cut to the chase:

For all decades on which I do movies (and occasional other entries) related to the cultural features of a decade, which means 1970s through 2000s (2001-10), the decade headings are as follows:

[1970s] “Patchouli and B.O.” (a recollection of the ’70s)

[1980s] Morning Becomes Reagan: A revisiting of 1980s pop (and political) culture

[1990s] Post–Soviet Union Adventure, Days of Clintons Past: A recollection of cultural ephemera of the 1990s

[2001-10] Post-9/11 Blues, Internet-infected Brave New World: A revisiting of 2001-10 pop (and political) culture

I will indeed cover at least one 1980s movie other than Woody Allen’s (for instance, one featuring Molly Ringwald seems in order). The same variation (not necessarily related to specific stars) will come with the subsequent decades.

Meanwhile, as for Woody (in case you’ve been wondering if I’ve gone batty with him), my coverage of his films will become more sporadic, as the quality of his films after Husbands and Wives (1992) becomes more hit-or-miss. But as this entry suggests, I still have some definite films of his to cover, and more will be added to this set.

##

End note.

I followed the news on that aviation disaster closely in March and into April (and of course the story isn’t done). It was such—and others among us may have been haunted the same way—that a few nights in the late winter, I would wake up, maybe 2-something or 3-something in the morning, unable to sleep further, and dwelled on, was haunted by, the MH370 loss as if somehow it implicated something concrete regarding me, or as if I had to exert some responsibility related to it (i.e., as if I had a relative on the plane, which I didn’t; or as if I should do something to aid in the search, which of course wasn’t realistic). Who knows why.

Movie break: Body heat in cool England, with thematic antecedent in 1989: Allen’s Match Point (2005)

Part 3 of my multi-part review of Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)

A thorough tale of a man on the make who makes two women and ends up in a murderous noir

Woody lucks out with a Hollywood-ish thriller adapting his Crimes theme

First in a series: Post-9/11 Blues, Internet-infected Brave New World: A revisiting of 2001-10 pop (and political) culture

Also fits this series:

“We’ll always have Woody”: A look at Woody Allen films

The heart has its reasons which reason does not understand.

—Blaise Pascal (1623-62), mathematician and philosopher

…I want to obey the story and if you obey the needs of the creation of the piece of fiction, the meaning reveals itself.

—Woody Allen in Eric Lax, Conversations with Woody Allen (Knopf, 2007), p. 123 (speaking in February 2006)

Every decision that was made on the picture, not just by me but by everybody, just worked. I don’t know if I can ever repeat it or make a film as good.

—Allen in Lax, p. 98 (speaking in May 2005)

One of the few [films] that didn’t [take on decreased qualities in production] is Match Point. It seemed I was actually enhancing it as I mounted [made] it.

—Allen in Lax, p. 252 (speaking in Spring 2005)

[In the production of Match Point] [E]verything just fell in.

—Allen in Lax, p. 359, with a “tone of wonder” in his voice

Subsections below:

A landmark work, in terms of his career

Allen achieves a competent “Hollywood film,” afield of his preferred art-film metier

A mix of a dark European theme plus trusty ingredients, new and old

An earnest young man starts his rise in society, all innocent at first

The sexual side of things enters

The affair launches in hungry form, with a sequence of wily scenes

The decline in Chris’s character

Is Allen too hard on women in his best works?

[Edits 5/6/14. Edit 5/7/14. Edits 5/12/14. Edit 5/20/14. Edit 5/22/14.]

Woody Allen originally wanted to do this film set in the United States (with the rich family ensconced in the Hamptons) and made here, as he had so many of his films leading to the summer of 2004, when Match Point was filmed. But the financing came from Britain before he could get financing in the U.S. (see Lax, p. 25), so off to Britain he went. (One big help in Britain was that there weren’t the union workers there that are common to productions in the U.S., and the process was less regimented, as Allen says in Lax, p. 163.) Of course, he has made several films in Europe since, ending up a little like Orson Welles, another New York–born film auteur who eventually became so un-embraced by Hollywood that he could only get financing from within Europe (there are obvious differences between the two directors, also).

A landmark work, in terms of his career

The result is a film that has several distinctions, making it stand out (largely positively) like a sore thumb among Allen’s work of the past 20 or more years; but it is actually less the anomaly some might think. First, from the sleek DVD packaging (and even original film ads in newspapers), with the sensual bearings of stars Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Scarlett Johansson, it seems almost too surprising, maybe even an Allen-style joke, that the film is identified as written and directed by Allen. Second, it was distributed by DreamWorks, which in itself is not so peculiar, except that when you expect (from the online promo or the DVD packaging) a sleek entertainment and you see the DreamWorks logo-sequence when you first put the film on, with the boy fishing in a pond from a crescent moon, you then wonder, Did Steven Spielberg sign off on this?

Third, the film made several times its cost, more than $85 million (which included overseas ticket sales), according to the film’s Wikipedia article), which is so atypical of Allen’s work that, again, it seems almost like an Allen-style joke.

And fourth, a more ironic joke, when viewers see the film and the social-climbing and femme fatale doings, and then in its last 40 minutes the film gets into a well-tooled, well-edited murder phase, these viewers, especially if they are, oh, age 30 or younger, may say, “Whoa, wait a minute. I’m freakin’. I see a British class-related story, plus it’s Woody Allen and not a whole lot of jokes, plus Scarlett Johansson looking hot, and the whole thing turns into a tough murder story—and yet, overall, the film isn’t too bad—but I’m askin’, What is this? Did someone do a brain transplant on the Woodman? This is so off his usual track in so many ways.” (OK, my rendering of a young person’s voice isn’t all true to life.)

Well, as I took pains to show in Parts 1 and 2 of this mini-series starting with Crimes and Misdemeanors, which itself was a step in a new direction for Allen in 1989 (but was a sturdy work based on 15 years of advancing himself and doing his most original work up until then)—Allen had already walked in the territory of doing a Crime and Punishment story (the Dostoyevsky novel). (And the 1989 film got delayed recognition in 2010 [End note 1].)

Allen achieves a competent “Hollywood film,” afield of his preferred art-film metier

Another aspect of this achievement, which is not thematic—which I will look at appreciatively via details later—is that in Match Point, Allen actually had the luck—due to a solid script and a raft of competent actors, along with an eager-and-capable BBC Films as his ad hoc partner studio—to put together a sort of Hollywood work, a solid tank of a serviceable movie, at about two hours long (unusual for him; he usually clocks in at 1:30 or 1:40), with all its details aligned in service of a sort of tried-and-true genre work. It is like Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) or Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980)—a well-engineered, diverting (to many) example of its genre, something that gives solid entertainment and even rewards multiple viewings for its technical sides, but which is cold in its outlook on humanity and, for that reason, may be respectable and good for students of film technique but not something you can love for its breadth (or warmth) of heart. Allen himself has shown a distinctly more broad-hearted approach in films like Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and even Crimes and Misdemeanors, among others.

Thus, when Allen talks (as he does at several points in Lax [see my epigraph quotes above]) as if Match Point is his best film, this could easily be the sort of self-assessment an elder artist makes about his latest work (e.g., Joseph Heller saying in a 1984 Washington Post interview [October 8, 1984, p. D13] that he felt his new novel God Knows was his best, but admitting that—presumably because of the recentness of the work—this was a “natural” opinion if not an “objective” one). And it may be this film pleased Allen because there were the fewest compromises to his original script-bound vision. But I think if you systematically review his total set of works, it is an important late film for him, not least for revisiting the austere height of his Crimes/Dostoyevsky theme, but surely it can’t be better than, say, a sort of album of “the best sections of”—or, simply, a representation of all of—Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Crimes.

A mix of a dark European theme plus trusty ingredients, new and old

I won’t cover all that thematic ground here. In fact, Match Point compresses the specifically Dostoyevsky treatment to the last third, unlike this taking up most of the tragic side of Crimes and Misdemeanors. The first two-thirds of Match Point is setup for the murder, and itself is both a not-anomalous product of Allen and yet an advance, in part, I would guess, due to happy accident. Allen had a breath of fresh air in the production venue of Britain, as he partnered with the BBC. (The credits at the end of Match Point show a heck of a lot more British names, in all sorts of roles like gaffer and/or such, than his films made in America ever do. And several of the producers below the level of executive are, judging by the names, English.) His way of working out details of a story by reviewing the early-edited totality of what he’s shot and then doing reshoots and reworkings was possibly held much in check here.

But in Britain he had on-point actors, and he didn’t ask a whole ton from anyone except the leads, Rhys Meyers and Johansson. The summer period in which it was shot (I’ve heard puckish remarks that summer in Britain is about three weeks in August) adds to the sense of beauty here (notice the yellow meadow grass in the turning-point sex scene).

The large aspect of Match Point of the social (and personal) rise of a young man from a relatively Spartan background is the sort of story that may bore some, but is an important foundation here—it interests me, after I’ve written in relation to the theme for years (roughly 1984-95, not all published), and I’m also the sort who doesn’t mind the dossier-reviewing sections of Apocalypse Now, which might bore others to the gourd. But the career-rise phase of MP adds to a comfortably paced film that, really, I think intrigues people the most in its femme fatale aspect, a role carried (slightly lonesomely) by Johansson and without whose spark and beauty the film might seem pretty also-ran-ish.

In short, Allen weaves themes into this ambitious drama that he has either covered directly or touched on over many years. OK, Allen’s language in the film—according to criticisms noted in the Wikipedia article—doesn’t all jibe with English manners, conventions, and idiom. (Well, then we’re even: the rightly esteemed English director Ridley Scott has fumbled trying to represent microscopic aspects of American style in such films as Thelma and Louise [1991] and Matchstick Men [2003], but we Yanks don’t care that much; in most respects, for what it’s trying to be, his work is still fine.)

But Allen had a solid enough script, and fortuitously it seemed to mesh enough with British competence and middle-class morés (though I think the Hewett family, the rich business family Chris is grafted into, could still have been well rendered as American, with adjustments in manners), that the resulting film is generally pretty technically adept, and engaging. (The spelling of the Hewett surname follows the film’s Wikipedia article.)

I saw it when it was in the theater and have since seen it numerous times on DVD, not just this year. It is fascinating, even if I would consider it atypical of Allen in various big ways. But let’s look at a lot of details, with a strong sense of fun. We can appreciate this film, and yet laugh at certain bits in it too; we can well realize why critics have considered it his best since maybe 1989, and also understand more why it seems the “dark” thing it is, ending up revealing to us a Chris Wilton (Rhys Meyers) who seems like a cold fish of cheap-spirited, and maybe seriously confused, ambition.

By the way, by summer 2004, Allen no longer had his long-lived production team in a couple ways: his longtime editor Susan E. Morse, who worked with him from Manhattan (1979) through Celebrity (1998), was gone; and his favored cinematographers—such as Gordon Willis, Carlo Di Palma, and Sven Nykvist—were all out of the picture. His cinematographer here, who would also work with him on Scoop (2006), was Remi Adefarasin, who lends a sensitivity and a certain exploratory or floating supple-ness in his dollyings and pans here.

An earnest young man starts his rise in society, all innocent at first

Chris Wilton seems inoffensive enough—rather like Joe, the “football” (soccer) coach he played in Bend It Like Beckham (2002), which Allen saw and inspired him to hire Rhys Meyers for Chris’s part. Rhys Meyers’ earnest manner helps sell the part early on. Chris is seeking a job as a tennis pro (instructor) at a high-end club; he explains to his interviewer that you have to want being a pro, and Chris didn’t want it enough, nor could he fully warm to the traveling, and he didn’t have the talent of Andre Agassi and such players anyway. Whether he gets points for modesty, he gets the job. (We find later he came from a Spartan upbringing; his father was a somewhat imposingly religious sort. We don’t hear about his mother, I think.)

He rents an apartment, and the representative of the renting facility (“real estate agent” as I saw him called somewhere isn’t quite right) gives his spiel, providing some of the only offhand, spontaneously finessed humor in the film. The actor is Paul Kaye (according to Lax, p. 98), and his cockney accent (I think it is) make his speech sound like that marbles-in-the-mouth way some (and only some) British have to us Yanks; this quality is such as makes it almost impossible to know all of what he’s saying, yet we glean just enough to get the basic meaning, and we smile at such verve-driven, gabbled-out talk. He even improvises with reference to a wok (the Oriental frying pan) being left in the apartment from the “geezer” who’d had it last.

So far, Chris seems like any other young man starting out: all hopes, sincere presentations at interviews, trying his best…. Rhys Meyers seems “clean-nosed” enough till here, while later in the film he has a sort of steely-eyed look and occasional abrupt hesitation in his speech—whether intended or not—that cohere with his character’s proving to be a bit ambiguous, and in any event arguably capable of the gruesome act he is going to commit late in the film.

Chris meets Tom Hewett, played by Matthew Goode, who has an upper-crust, lilting way of talking, striking us clodhopper Yanks as maybe a bit effeminate, or at least spoiled, but quite believable as the upper-middle-class scion of his comfortable family. His father (played by Brian Cox) has a company that seems to be involved in financing other companies (such as overseas), and (I believe, but am not sure) the son works there, too. After a session of Chris’s teaching Tom some tennis, they find they share an enthusiasm for opera. Tom invites Chris to attendance at an opera performance his family has tickets for. And thus begins Chris’s becoming ingratiated on, and soon insinuated into, the Hewett family.

When Chris meets Tom’s sister Chloe, played by a suitable Emily Mortimer, slightly homely/simpatico in a British-ingenue way, and with an artless (and slightly emotionally shallow) manner that makes her one of the more pleasant and uncalculating  characters in this milieu, the two become an item, not due to any particular machinations on Chris’s part. Chloe soon—only with the best of intentions on behalf of her working-his-way-up boyfriend—asks her father to see if he can get Chris a job in one of his companies.

The innocuous career-start aspect. For a film that patiently unfolds Chris’s more honorable ascension in English society, and for a young man who early had a drive to succeed in tennis but was not steered by fate or desire as a youth to business financing, the way his career comes together is a good (if in its details novel) depiction of something that, very generally, is common enough in America. When so many of us Yanks are fated to scratch and scrape together our careers by main force amid the debris of circumstance, a story of a young person’s earnestly stitching together his or her fate can be touching. (Meanwhile, the ethical “core” of Chris, referred to a few times via various characters, where he has a yeomanly way of working his way up [he even says “Hard work is mandatory…”] intermixes, rather surprising to some of us perhaps, with his affirming the key role that luck plays in life. Luck in this film being, of course, a conspicuous theme and at times a little terror.)

The more ambiguous element of economic/societal influence on a youth. Allen (as I said) originally saw this as a story set in the U.S., where I’m sure his eye on a rich-bitch family fully allegiant to the American deity of The Almighty Dollar, would have been razor-sharp. Instead, he fashioned the story for Britain, and called it a British story (Allen in Lax, p. 164: “I wasn’t making an American picture in London, I was making a British picture, it was a British story.”). Apart from his occasionally not getting linguistic idioms right (according to the film’s Wikipedia article), his take on broader aspects of British life may be off-base at times or in ways annoying to British viewers. It may have been pretentious for him to think he could skewer the type of semi-wealthy working upper-middle-class of Britain, as opposed to what could have done very nicely (and based on more thorough experience he had) regarding the rough American counterpart.

But as is evident from this film’s being finished and leading quickly enough to resounding success, no one in the land of shepherd’s pie, beefeaters, and G & T’s told him in early stages, “Kibitzer go home!,” and I think we can readily accept this film as only nominally set in Britain, but suitably situating his Chris Wilton in the embrace of a wealthy family as would have been a good representative of any English-speaking industrialized nation’s family-and-work life, in order to root what was arguably the better half of Allen’s thematic agenda with MP: the way materialistic motives can tempt, warp, and otherwise distract human personality, family values, and working toward good ends, or at least the way those can set up horrendous conflicts between two very potent but contradictory holds on a striving young man’s passions.

Just as the “Champagne comedies” of the late 1930s that Allen has romanticized (such as is noted on the DVD liner notes for The Purple Rose of Cairo) really didn’t represent any truly recognizable part of real American life, the upscale British world of 2004 that he draws here is what might be called a roughly-drawn intersection of what American writers—whether with Mark Twain’s earthy humor or a New York Jewish comedian’s street smarts—would consider the epitome of capitalist bourgeois living mixed with Old World estate-associated social status, complete with a nobleman’s type of manor, skeet-shooting, horse-riding, and oh yes, a set of shotguns in a cellar area, which the resourceful fellow will find need not only be used on skeet.

As I’ve said in Part 2 of my Crimes and Misdemeanors review, this is a story most distinctly—so far—modeled on Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, and more generally is a story as has been written by many, a young man’s starting out in life, where the story can be any of a variety of concrete adventures, with the thematic bones alternatively being a study of “inner” character and/or a look at getting “somewhere desired” amid the tremendous (and often uncooperative) flotsam and jetsam of circumstance…and it’s a classic American sort of story, in this land of liberty, dreams, and the occasional erratic federal benefits program. I myself have written a couple novel manuscripts (in the 1980s) along these lines (and they are among my most incisive and heartiest works, I think).

The term bildungsroman is used for a novel of a young man coming of age, and this need not focus only on young-adult career; further, the real-life sources of such stories (in various personal histories) and the general literary form certainly are robust, stolid things. And it may be that some people who never had to worry much about starting their careers may be bored by this sort of tale a bit. Anyway, for those who love this, the first two-thirds of Match Point offers Allen’s sleek example of the form; but for those who came to MP really for the sex-and-danger story, there’s a good, “kick-ass” chunk of that.

Which is where Scarlett Johansson’s Nola Rice comes in. And the scene in which Chris meets her in a table-tennis room—where he’ll show her (from his regular-tennis angle) a good way to serve—is one of the more hackneyed in the film, but it still plays pretty well, given the film’s overall interest. Nola, of course, is first seen as Tom Hewett’s girlfriend, and Tom seems firmly attached to her, even though his mother Eleanor (Penelope Wilton) vocally doesn’t approve of her (Mother considers her “spoiled and temperamental”).

(Sidebar—the Celtic ethnic elements in the story. Interestingly, Allen makes a token acknowledgement of consciousness of Chris’s Irish background as opposed to the Hewetts’ English-ness—in general, and very vaguely put by me here, the Irish have historically been regarded as the poor slobs within the island constellation of the U.K. and Ireland [hence the long alienation of Ireland from the rest, with even the Celtic-derived Scotland being pretty securely in the fold with England, at least until recently, in terms of political stirrings]. But except for a passing remark, this sort of distinction doesn’t figure into the script much. Chris’s Irish background could be an important element for someone writing a paper on this film that included a character analysis, but that would be in the vein of reading a little more into the depictions than Allen seems to have deliberately opted for. Also, notably, when the police enter the scene late in the film, maybe no fewer than two of them seem, to my philistinish American ears, to have Scottish accents, but I don’t think this was a deliberate “statement” by Allen; more likely it reflected who the BBC-associated casting director was able to scout up for roles in the film.)

The sexual side of things enters

The way Chris and Nola take to each other with an immediate sexual draw is well enough acted, and obvious enough in the story development. In fact, the whole “affair” side of Chris’s life should be clear enough to young viewers (and it certainly comprises the “marketing draw” and ineluctable dance beat here) that I don’t need to analyze much of it. It, indeed, is one enjoyable aspect to this film, as its accessibility and way of ratcheting up suspense/intrigue in the film are probably what to many gives the film its most juice. Hence, to analyze it would be like trying to verbally analyze a sunset, or the film Young Frankenstein (1974), or one of the several Jim Carrey film performances from 1994; you should just behold it and enjoy it, for whatever inevitable pleasure it gives you.

A bar/restaurant scene with some droll features. There is a multi-section scene in which Chris and Chloe are to meet Tom and Nola for dinner at a restaurant. At first Chris and Chloe are at a bar, with Chloe talking to Chris ingenuously about how she has arranged with her father to give him a job offer. There is something a little stilted about how the two talk, which in part suits the kind of conversation—sincere but drily career-start-related—which inevitably would seem a bit artificial or synthetic. But notice how Rhys Meyers looks to the side as he unfolds his talk (including what starts with, “It’s strange, but coming where I come from”): I’ve seen this several times, and each time I think he is reading cue cards as he delivers some of his somewhat “earnest-appeal/formal” comments to Chloe/Mortimer. This could very well be, as the scene is in a real restaurant, and Allen could well have been under the gun to get the scene wrapped in short order, and with his typically having actors do only two or three takes anyway, maybe Rhys Meyers couldn’t memorize all the lines in time. (Mortimer, for her part, doesn’t seem here to use cue cards.)

Sidebar: Compare the steamier conversation (at another location) between Chris and Nola after her unavailing audition at the Royal Court Theatre: In a fairly extended scene with Chris and Nola speaking after she confesses to needing a drink following a flame-out at an audition, Nola tells Chris a lot about herself, getting noticeably drunk (and with her eyes not always meeting his) in the process. Per Lax p. 165, this was the first scene filmed with Johansson (and perhaps her suffering jet lag helped cement her suitable performance). This conversation probably is a familiar enough type to any young Americans who have become familiar with singles bars and the like, but it is key to this film, without being too hokey, in showing how Chris and Nola’s pairing becomes more “confirmed,” even while Chris seems to exercise a bit of steely-eyed distance from the more vulnerable Nola. Johansson imbues her performance with a quality that seems emotionally insinuating to us. Among two interesting points of content: Nola (rather tritely) warns Chris that he will go far with the Hewett/career route, as long as he doesn’t blow it (“How?”) by making a “pass” at her. Also, she dismisses the Hewett family as “inbred,” and as “sick” in this. This refers to Tom’s mother’s wanting him to marry a cousin. This aspect of the family’s self-regard, its sense of entitlement, or whatever you want to call it—where cousins may marry, the sort of thing you see in royal families (or families that think they are royal)—is something Allen doesn’t follow up much in this story. As far as any sexual “untowardness” goes among the Hewetts, he seems more concerned with what a goat Tom can be (more on this later), which seems more of an American characteristic.

The foursome at the restaurant dinner table. After their career-germane talk at the bar, Chris and Chloe decamp to a table when Tom and Nola have arrived. Here, there are a few technical things to note. First, for a good deal of the four-person conversation, there are shots of just the heads in isolation, which is atypical of Allen in his films since about Manhattan. Allen has spoken in Lax, and certainly it is obvious from his later films, that he usually uses master shots, meaning a long shot encompassing a lot of different action and different actors’ parts. In one respect, doing this saves on production cost. And with Allen’s stories and actors often delivering a sort of “stage drama” where the verbal content is key, this is sufficient.

But in the case of this table scene in Match Point, it may have been that Allen had to salvage the best performances from different takes, and hence had his now-longtime editor (Alisa Lepselter) just frame individual heads (I have puzzled over some of the shots, with their seeming slightly decreased resolution, to speculate whether this actually was done). Whether this selective framing was done or not, the net result is individuals speaking alone in shots, and this works so well—and conforms with such typical American film practice anyway—that most viewers wouldn’t notice it (as unusual for Allen). And anyway, the conversation among these young people is gripping enough (even if the “academic” talk about the role of luck and faith in life may strike some as a little dry and gratuitous).

The consummation of the Chris/Nola affair-relationship. After Nola/Johansson has spoken with some welling of bitterness about how she wouldn’t want to go back to her home in Colorado, even amid her continuing frustrations in getting somewhere with her acting career, we find she ends up looking linkingly toward Chris, who himself has been eyeing her and talking to her with piqued interest (despite her being Tom’s “main squeeze”); she has a sort of touched/newly ingratiated look. What might this mean?

I have talked (in a 2012 blog entry; see here) about the “firewall” women have between their career drive and their mate-related tendencies. Individual women differ quite a bit, and in signature ways, regarding this. Here, Nola may be suddenly conceding to a sort of intrigue in Chris after—and dynamically set up by—her revealing her half-despair over her career and her view of herself regarding her peers. Meaning, a woman, with her personality type, who is running into frustrations as she is, is apt to suddenly take a strong interest in a new male (potential mate) like Chris. This is not a universal or formulaic matter; it is a pattern discerned in certain contexts after the fact. In any event, the way Allen whips up this rise of the femme fatale in Chris’s life—and of course, both young people have responsibility for their whirlwind association—is done very well.

The affair launches in hungry form, with a sequence of wily scenes

Of course, the obvious and spectacular way in which their bond is consummated is one of all the circumstances’ being more extreme: the Hewetts, Nola, and Chris are at the family’s estate. Mother Eleanor makes remarks about Nola’s intrepid tries at getting a start in acting in a way that offends Nola. Nola, who has been drinking wine, needs a break and leaves. She takes a walk outside in a summer thunderstorm. (Allen is big on using tumultuous weather conditions—almost as if he is being a German expressionist, or something—when his characters are in the throes of sudden love developments, a trope of his I’ll return to when I review his Husbands and Wives [1992].)

Chris, partly honestly sympathetic and partly, we assume, at the beck and call of the ol’ libido, heads out after Nola. In a summer-blanched grassy field, with rain pouring down, they have sex for the first time.

Sex scenes between the two then become a habit for the film. We can enjoy the film overall and still find these to be (at times) a bit comical despite themselves, i.e., not as intended.

Notice the situation, during Christmas, where Chris and Nola (Chris’s life has become stiffly compartmentalized by his confirmation in his “respectable” middle-class life) are secreted away in her apartment, snow tumbling down outside, for another tryst. He is putting what seems like baby oil on her back. Notice how Johansson stifles a giddy smile or laugh as Rhys Meyers starts to do this. Either she finds the scene rather ludicrous, or the feel of the oil makes her laugh.

(Adding to the layers of this story, which is pretty dense in meaning and incident despite its apparent slickness, Allen has Chris and Chloe go to the length of seeing a fertility doctor, amid their [in both practical and biological respects] frustrating tries at having a child, while Chris and Nola….)

A more amusing scene is when Chris and Nola meet at her place for a midday roll in the hay (not so literal this time), and in the throes of rampaging passion, she takes off his workday necktie and ties it around his eyes and he turns around, back facing her, as he is famishedly helping her undress. The whole situation almost looks sick, or as if they’re having a fit. It reminds me of the lyrics of another Brit, Sir Michael Jagger, in the Rolling Stones song “Shattered”: “Pride and joy and freaky sex / that’s what makes that town a mess,” or some such. Yes, freaky sex here, but that’s more a New York thing than a London thing, no?

The decline in Chris’s character

Allen doesn’t spend time—and probably felt it would be a waste—to look closely at Chris’s motives as things change more broadly for him. The most we see of Chris’s intellectual or self-reflective side is (early on) in his reading Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which of course is a typical “cultural allusion” of Allen’s, which doesn’t hurt here for those unfamiliar with his Crimes and Misdemeanors. What is a little droll is that Chris’s interest in Dostoyevsky impresses father Hewett, as proof of Chris’s not being “trivial.” Of course, for those of us inclined to analyze things along the lines of social science (whether shallow or not), we may ask, Is Chris a potential sociopath who is “educated” the tragically wrong way by Dostoyevsky, where the Russian writer insidiously influences him to consider murder as a way to resolve a serious dilemma in his life? Or is he a young man who has gotten himself into a horrible bind, and ends up settling on the murder option only as a cold “least of evils,” with only a bit of intellectually justifying help from Dostoyevsky?

Either way, we find Chris to be a rather cold fish of a person by the film’s final third, and we certainly would blame him whether he had “inadvisable help” from a literary source or not. Of course, Allen probably wouldn’t think that this is a story of a bad influence by literature; we know he likes Dostoyevsky anyway (as allusions in some of his films, such as Husbands and Wives, attest). The real thematic issue is what evil a man is capable of, if he doesn’t minutely decide more wisely, or doesn’t be more honest with himself and/or significant others. In Match Point, the story is beefed up with how Chris has gotten “wedded” to the ideals/ethos of middle class and material success, along with his partnership with a wife (and daughter of his boss) who is both rather bland (if well-meaning) and sexually not a good partner (for whatever reason).

In Crimes and Misdemeanors, the tragedy Judah has gotten into is that of a successful professional man, a doctor, in middle age who not only faces the ruin of his marriage by the possible revelation of his affair with Dolores, but her (as a threat to get him to honor her wishes) triggering an inquest into his arguable financial misdeeds regarding a foundation he has helped lead. Judah, like a tragic figure, focuses on some of the hard realities of life—tragic figures are not simply people who can’t reason or see the facts sanely; the sane in their minds mixes up with big mental mistakes, which constitutes the key of the tragedy. Judah says at one point that he will not be destroyed by a “neurotic woman.” And, if this were the only issue, it could be quite a solid and hard-to-mitigate problem that (in life at large) crops up in various quarters in American society. But the problem for him is that he opts for murder, though not without a lot of soul-searching, including with his more coolly assessing brother Jack.

In Match Point, things hustle along more pell-mell. Chris turns to the murder option without all Judah’s preliminary soul-searching. (Chris strikes us as opaque and surprisingly quick in deciding to kill Nola, but he is more vivid in the aftermath, with his emotional tumult once he has pulled the trigger….) We see the bind he is in—and he even makes a game effort at talking with a friend about his dilemma: for instance, he says he has more passion for Nola, but can’t see a future with her. His relationship with Chloe is cooler, but his life as tied to her family is quite comfortable. He tosses off a line—“Maybe it’s the difference between love and lust”—such as Allen uses in as disparate love-themed places as A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982) or Husbands and Wives (1992), which in a dramatic-line way reflects some aspect of trials associated with love, but may seem like a dry, “token literary” gesture.

Some of the same “script gesture” happens earlier in this story, where Nola and Chris are having a passionate discussion about her being pregnant with his child: he can’t believe he got her pregnant, when he has been laboriously trying with Chloe for so long, to no avail. Then Nola says this may be because their child was “conceived out of genuine passion,” though Chris quickly dismisses this skeptically as “your interpretation?” This may reflect Allen’s view that, as much a miracle as conceiving a child is, coming up with moral interpretations as to how it fits into life when it can be most inconvenient in some way that is significant regarding other life-plans means a sort of desperate groping after a “moral narrative” of our lives, while sometimes we might more honestly admit that some developments in life—even the more positive—are about as chancy as the more negative and tragic ones.

Sidebar: The Hewetts as morally ambiguous. It’s also worth noting that the Hewett family is by no means a paragon of moral righteousness (with the possible exception of Chloe), from the standpoint of non–Old World Americans (whether Christian or Jewish or other). The parents and Tom all seem to often have a drink in their hands, and whether or not the father’s business is ethical (e.g., whether it foments pollution in far-flung places, facilitates child labor, or the like), the family is definitely one of a kind of stuffy “successful upper middle class” burghers who are quite comfortably well off and reflect where they socially stand by, among other things, frequenting the opera. Tom, in particular, is something of a roue, as he not only routinely holds a drink (even though he sums up Nola, after they have broken up, as a “lady of the sauce,” even adding that it runs in her family—fairly unambiguously, Nola is a more pathological drinker), but Tom (not unlike Nola) is also sexually in the randy-goat direction. The young woman he eventually marries is pregnant at their wedding; and in fact, Nola had conceived a child of his, but he had demanded, successfully, that she abort it.

Whether Allen meant with all this to satirize, or cast a jaundiced eye on, the ethos of British middle-class sorts who derive their standing (in part) from inherited property or from being the beneficiaries of some well-kept investment vehicles (or from fronting a rock band with, on stage, gym socks stuffed into their pants crotch), certainly at the very least he wanted to situate Chris’s moral predicament in a family/social setting that wasn’t exactly aces in the moral rectitude department, as more artless Americans would assess. In this, his details supporting this are many. (Chris recognizes his compromises in this milieu when he says to a friend, with some irony, “I’m the boss’s son-in-law, and he loves me.”)

He even gets in a last remark on the Hewetts’ nature when, at the tail end of the film, Tom is leading a toast with what sounds like, “To Terrence [the new baby]! And all that sailing!”

In any event, Match Point is a seductive ride down the road of some young people’s typical arrangements in life—career start, aim for family, all that other sunny-skies-ahead stuff—with a sudden collision into appalling calamity, all (1) of an interpersonal sort, (2) of a gross murder sort, and (3) of a moral-decline (in Chris) sort. Young viewers might be shocked at the turn things take, but if they had seen beforehand Crimes and Misdemeanors, they’d see in Match Point that Allen’s aim is true in one sense: to be as honest with ourselves and our dilemmas as we can, because to take a sudden coldly expedient turn in acting as if the end justifies the means and might be a way to “karate chop” a problem out of our life, also deals a bad fracture to our moral being. (End note 2)

A last look at a spurned woman: I’ve said regarding Crimes and Misdemeanors (in Part 1, toward the end) that, in the kind of pitched tragedy the Judah/Dolores and Chris/Nola couples are in, neither side is all right or all wrong. But the temperature is certainly ratcheted up for Nola in MP, maybe as “befits” young people with their living life more intensely. In one dynamic exchange she has—post-pregnancy-revelation—with Chris in her apartment, she laments that she has “no psychiatrist to talk to, I can’t, everything is so damned secretive!” She is truly isolated in a way that makes her situation all the more desperate.

Is Allen too hard on women in his best works?

This is a tough question, in the sense that it seems quite generalizing and arch, and also can be subject to different, heartfelt answers from people of very different philosophies. I might almost have phrased it, “Is Allen a misogynist?,” but I think the word misogynist is overused today, like the words stalker, unstable, delusion, and other such words—which seem (unknown to the users) to reflect enough anxiety and uncertainty on the part of the average person in the American middle class that these words that used to stand for extremes are increasingly bandied around to throw at merely disagreeable people regarding whom the users are reading their worst, generalized fears into these people more than seeing them for what they are (ambiguous or not).

To answer my question partially, I think Allen, with female characters he puts in the worst extremes, still usually gives these women “room to breathe,” a chance to show some dignity, and often their dire predicaments are more a reflection of his seeking to look at human experience—embracing both sexes—in a world that he sees as darker than a lot of us would like to admit, rather than saying, more narrowly, that women in their own right, irrespective of circumstances, can be awfully difficult sometimes, and thus this adds considerably to the larger world’s darkness.

Dolores Paley in Crimes and Misdemeanors and Nola Rice in MP may seem like unreasonable bitches in, for instance, demanding feverishly, of the man they’ve had the affair with, that they speak baldly to the man’s wife, to bring the affair out in the open, with the not-unreasonable expectation of the best outcome of allowing themselves to be freer to have the relationship with the man that the affair initially “promised.” This doesn’t simply mean these women are monomaniacal harridans, but that the circumstances into which their (formerly) beloved men, with un-best motivations of their own, have put them have led them—if with certain wily human passions intervening, on both sides—to make the demands they do.

But this also comes amid an absurdly dilemma-like situation for the male, which he—as the story has it—ultimately chooses to resolve by murdering the “other woman.” You might not entirely like the overall Hobbesian view of life that Allen suggests with this dramatic “nexus,” this sort of zero-sum situation, but at least you can say that up until the murders, the demanding “other women” are doing the best they can, or doing little worse than the men that have set them up in that way, in an awful situation.

From another angle, Allen may be someone whose world view is dark and, accordingly, he shows the world—which seems to be, for practical purposes, a “man’s world” no matter how dark one views it—as being inhospitable to women, or at least apt to stimulate women’s more unreasoning sides. But this is not terribly different from, say, the thematic propositions of novelist Joseph Heller (see my review of his novels here; the longer version is here), whose fictional world largely centers on men, and whose female characters usually are not as distinguished as the most fully depicted men—though Heller did give us vivid, intriguing female characters—or at least strong “counters” to the male protagonists—in the daughter in Something Happened and in Belle, the wife of Bruce Gold, in Good as Gold.

Director Stanley Kubrick, who has also been criticized for having a bleak worldview, and certainly focused mostly on men (and their grand foibles) in his movies, did occasionally allow some females to shine, such as Alice Harford in his last film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), or arguably the mother Charlotte Haze in Lolita (1962).

In the cases of Heller and Kubrick, and arguably of Allen, as they got older and their works in some sense got more mature, they were willing to have strong enough women enter their stories, if not in leading roles. Or, if the women were in situations that brought some nastiness out of them, the authors still gave these women dramatic room to breathe and be fairly well-rounded. This can be kept in mind as it is said, even today, that actresses have liked to have an opportunity to feature in a Woody Allen film because he writes good roles for women.

I hope to address the issue of Allen’s admission to suffering lifelong, mild depression (and my own speculations and opinions on how this may relate to his art), and also the thornier and more controversial area of his 1992 family crisis, in my next review, on his Husbands and Wives (1992). (This film also has a good performance by Judy Davis as a spurned woman who entertains us and earns our respect with some fireworks of pissy anger and indignation she brings to bear.)

End note 1.

As I said in Part 1 of this mini-series, in 2010 C&M won some 20/20 Awards, for generally the same points as it got Oscar nominations for in 1990 (it was Oscar-nominated—and won 20/20 Awards—for supporting acting by Martin Landau and the original script; and it won a 20/20 Award for best picture, but it wasn’t nominated for this for an Oscar in 1990, while Allen did get an Oscar nomination for Best Director), according to the film’s Wikipedia page.

End note 2.

Near the end, in a stagy sequence that has Chris being confronted by the ghosts of Nola and Mrs. Eastby [sp?] after he has killed them—a dramatic artifice that grows on you with multiple viewings—Chris says [maybe a paraphrase], “Sometimes innocent people have to be killed to make way for a grander scheme. You were collateral damage,” he says to Mrs. Eastby. The latter replies, “So was your own [unborn] child!”

Appendix: The subplot in Crimes regarding Cliff’s sister

One little feature of Crimes and Misdemeanors that would fit the details I held off on in Part 2, could fit here. There is a start of a subplot that might strike some as strange, as it seems to go afield of the rest of the movie, and isn’t followed up terribly much. Woody’s character Cliff has a sister (played by Caroline Aaron), who is the mother of the teenager (played by Jenny Nichols) whom Cliff takes to old movies, as part of an education he’d promised the girl’s deceased dad he would give her. We see their outings more than Cliff’s dealings with his sister.

But in one relatively early scene, Cliff speaks with his sister, and teary-eyed, she tells of a horror she experienced one recent night, in her post-widowhood dating life. She had met a guy, and they had a good time at a dance club, and then when he accompanied her home, there was a weird sexually related experience. Almost too awed at the experience to reveal it, she tells Cliff: the man tied her up to the bed, and got on top of her and relieved himself on her (the messier way). Cliff is, suitably, appalled and disgusted. He remonstrates with her a bit….

Well, this dating subplot—which seems to have echoes with Looking for Mr. Goodbar—isn’t followed up much. But there is a tiny glimmer of how Allen might have built on this, for comic purposes: near the film’s end, the sister is talking to another woman at the big wedding party, and the other woman tells her she has a man in mind for the sister: he’s in jail for insider trading, but is due to come out in two years. Sounds like a comically grotesque advance on the relieving-self man? Well, what could top that? If she then dated a “Vice President and Associate Creative Director” at some medical promo…well, never mind. After someone like that, she may want to go back to the relieving-self man.