Movie break (Quick Vu): Woody’s candy-colored palette of folk and media of a bygone era: Radio Days (1987)

A vivid nostalgia-fest links droll anecdotes with evocative '40s radio fare

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

Also fits the series:
"We'll always have Woody": A look at Woody Allen films
 

Subsections below:

Details showing pluses and almost-minuses

Farrow’s character is the focus of most of the Allen-esque “romance comedy” here

Radio Days suitable as part of an “omnibus” approach to Allen scholarship

[Edits 4/17/14.]

This film is minor enough that I won’t dwell much on it—Woody Allen calls it a “cartoon” (End note 1), and its episodic structure (with no real, gripping story arc) and bountifully colorful production details mark it as rather whimsically entertaining on the level of Zelig (1983). I also didn’t have a lot of time to view it, but it didn’t grab me well enough to view it, say, three times, which is a minimum for a good film review of mine.

A film with a strong narrative line and thematic significance will strongly invite several close viewings; this film comes off as rather shallowly entertaining, and as such, in my current circumstances, it is almost off-putting. You marvel at how well the sets, costume, music—overall period detail—are done so conscientiously (or at least evocatively). But the anecdotes that fill out this film are, largely, baubles, and what overarching plot thread exists (maybe most notably with Mia Farrow’s Sally White) is amusing at best.

Ostensibly it’s autobiographical, but Woody Allen makes clear in Eric Lax’s interview compendium that it is only partly so. That is, several anecdotes start with real-life facts, but are adapted to a fictional standard for the film (End note 2). For instance, there is a situation where the boy Joe, who is a correlate for Allen (played by Seth Green, here a little squirt compared to the more adult-like Scottie he played in the 1997-2002 Austin Powers films), encounters (to his surprise) his father driving a taxi, but this is only partly based on Allen’s life. Allen says it was generally a mystery to him as a boy what his father did. Whenever he asked, he always “would get a different answer because he [his father] often switched jobs.” But as far as I can tell, Allen as a boy never encountered his father driving a taxi, as little Joe does in the film (Lax, p. 37).

Details showing pluses and almost-minuses

The photography is good; it is by Carlo Di Palma, who had first worked for Allen on Hannah and Her Sisters (see my review here), giving a sort of comfortably domestic/urban patina to that film, and he would be the cinematographer who shot more Allen films than any other (only Gordon Willis comes close). Here, Di Palma’s photography, combined with the elaborate set designs by Allen’s longtime production designer Santo Loquasto, makes perhaps the best and most consistently delivering aspect of the film.

The main characters are vivid in the way of cartoon figures, as Allen’s general description of this film implies. Julie Kavner cuts a sharp profile as the mother. Dianne Wiest is the wistfully hopeful Aunt Bea, who is always looking for a suitable husband (I think her voice is a little thin here, at least at times, while Kavner’s consistently comes right through).

Michael Tucker plays the father of Joe; Tucker did TV work in those days, I think (and he certainly did later). Josh Mostel is a newcomer to Allen’s fold as Uncle Abe. Abe is a rotund, jovial-looking character who is always bringing fish into the household that he’s gotten from shore fishermen, and once—during the Jewish High Holidays—he gets converted to communism by communist neighbors who are playing music during the Joe/Abe family’s abstaining religious observances. We’ve seen stories in this general realm before, but this one is played for pretty broad comedy.

Seth Green is interesting to watch in his scenes: unobtrusively but well enough if you watch him, he puts his heart into his acting, maybe a little more than Allen would ordinarily have directed a child to. In some scenes he’s on the receiving end of walloping corporal punishment (in an almost Three Stooges way), and he puts up with it patiently. In a New Year’s scene, he comes into view and gives his infant sister a kiss—this detail almost can be missed, with all that’s going on amid the extended family in the shot. Green’s take on a “Woody as a boy” character seems more well-rounded in this film than “Woody as a boy” (or, “the main character as a boy”) in the likes of Love and Death (1975), Annie Hall (1977), and Stardust Memories (1980).

Also, in a way, this film is a “homecoming” piece, in terms of actors, for Allen as was Hannah: Tony Roberts is here as a radio-show MC; Wallace Shawn, who put in a vivid appearance in Manhattan (1979), is here as the incongruous-looking Shmoe behind radio’s “Masked Avenger.” Two actors from The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) appear here almost like echoes of the earlier film’s characters: Danny Aiello is someone briefly here and named Rocco; and Jeff Daniels is here as a radio character who Joe as a boy felt would be the only person who believed that Joe had actually spotted a Nazi submarine in the bay off Rockaway Beach (I think is the local beach). Daniels’ character here is “Biff Baxter,” his moniker different only by first name from the “Tom Baxter” character he played in Purple Rose.

Farrow’s character is the focus of most of the Allen-esque “romance comedy” here

Among the few instances evidencing Allen’s capacity for sly, sharp, sexually (or couples-) related humor are those connected to the character Sally White, played by Farrow. White starts out as a cigarette girl in a swank nightclub. Here, a couple that performs as an upscale pair issuing golden words on radio has marital trouble: the male, seeming to me a bit like David Niven (though the couple seems to be Hispanic), has been having an affair with Sally. Herewith, a common Allen trope pops up: Sally says if he really loved her, he would leave his wife; but the man offers the excuse that his and his wife’s radio-show ratings are too high to do that.

A good deal later, on her own, Sally tries to get roles on radio, and has trouble because of her ditsy voice (which seems to go along with her frizzy-curls hair, which looks as substantial as soap suds). She undergoes voice lessons, and finally is on radio as some high-class, elegant-toned doyenne. She then appears to everyone, in real life, as if “to the doyenne manner born.”

It is in a late scene, at a New Year’s party (where Diane Keaton makes her brief cameo in this film as a singer), Sally is on a date with the man who, with Wallace Shawn’s bald head, voices the Masked Avenger. Having had a few too many drinks, Sally slips abruptly back and forth between her original ditsy, almost-screechy voice, and her more affected, poised doyenne’s voice, all of it inspiring in Shawn’s character a deeply puzzling look. Sally then takes her date up to the building’s roof, where she had had a tryst with the upscale man we saw her with early in the film. Thus rounds out a plot before-and-after situation, not as bawdy as you might think.

These details suggest this film is a rather wan, derivative effort of Allen’s. It is entertaining if you don’t want a lot of mental stimulation; but it is hard to work up enough enthusiasm for it to study it several times for a long “paper.”

Radio Days suitable as part of an “omnibus” approach to Allen scholarship

I’ve thought it’s useful for students or appreciative critics of Allen to consider his films in a sort of “omnibus” fashion, rather than (1) to look for a very select few “great artistic masterworks” or (2) to merely comb through his films for a big clutch of good one-liners or good story-bit encapsulations, as if no one film stands as a masterwork. So, to look at him from (for one omnibus combination) a nostalgia or creative-history perspective, you can combine Radio Days with the more “high-concept” Zelig (1983) and maybe with Bullets Over Broadway (1994).

Other omnibus pairings could be:

for New York/romance stories: Annie Hall (1977) with Manhattan (1979) and maybe also with Hannah and Her Sisters (1986);

for “perils of an artist” stories: Stardust Memories (1980) with Deconstructing Harry (1997);

for meditations on issues of deep moral choice: Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) with Match Point (2005);

and, for playful anachronism (or “time slip” or fantasy/realism intermixture) stories: The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) with Midnight in Paris (2011).

Other pairings could be suggested as I review more films.

##

End note 1.

In DVD packaging: quote from Stig Bjorkman, Woody Allen on Woody Allen (1993): “I think of Radio Days basically as a cartoon.”

End note 2.

Eric Lax, Conversations with Woody Allen (New York: Knopf, 2007), p. 38 (in an April 2005 interview): “So when you see Radio Days, my aunt takes me into town with her boyfriend and I watch them dancing, but none of that ever happened. I never went anywhere with my aunt and some boyfriend. Those relationships didn’t exist. That was pure drama for the story. …

“I’m relying on information in my life, but that’s why I say it’s not autobiographical. It’s much more exaggerated to make the story better.”

Movie break: At a crossroads in my hike through Woody’s dense career

[Edits 5/6/14. Edits 5/24/14. Edit 5/28/14. Edits 6/17/14. Edits 7/9/14. Edits 8/18/14.]

Here’s a quickie indication of where I’m going with my Woody Allen reviews.

As I pretty much intended, I have touched on nearly all of his films from his “major phase” of 1977-86 (as defined by my “Director’s dossier” on him, viewable here; and see the list at the end of this entry). In coming entries I will continue to look at his career, but more selectively. I will have some essay-like statements to make about him that are apart from particular films, hopefully in an entry or entries coming very soon.

Films of his I either definitely will review or am likely to review include (and some reviews will be short [and some are already posted]):

Radio Days (1987) (the review is here)

Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) (the review is in Part 1 here and Part 2 here)

Husbands and Wives (1992) (Part 1 of the review is here; Part 2 is here; and Part 3 is here)

Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) (the review is here)

Bullets Over Broadway (1994) (the review is here)

Mighty Aphrodite (1995) (to come)
Deconstructing Harry (1997) (to come)
Sweet and Lowdown (1999) (my truncated review is here)
The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001) (my review is the first half of this)
Hollywood Ending (2002) (my review is the second half of this)
Anything Else (2003) (my review is here)

Match Point (2005) (my review is here)

A few others, as conditions allow

Intermission: Bits by Woody, gathered here like flotsam

Here are a few quotes and other things that relate to the Woody Allen movies I’ve already reviewed, which either would be cumbersome to put with the appropriate review, or which I forgot to include, or which stand well as “afterthoughts.”

Related to Stardust Memories (1980) (see my review here):

Bearing on the issue that the movie wasn’t about himself but was a fictional concoction:

“The audience in the movie was just an exaggerated depiction of what somebody [e.g., the film’s Sandy Bates] who couldn’t appreciate his success might imagine under the pressure of being a hit and yet still being unable to stave off life’s tragedies or have a real love relationship.”

—Allen in Eric Lax, Conversations with Woody Allen (New York: Knopf, 2007), pp. 231-32

Epigraph I wanted to put with my review of Broadway Danny Rose (1984) (see my review here) and neglected to, due to a clumsy error in handling my Word files:

“Not only is he a great agent, but he really gives good meeting.”

—a bit player in Annie Hall (1977), in a scene with Hollywood and music-industry movers, shakers, and miscellaneous others at a party at the mansion of music producer Tony Lacy (played by Paul Simon); yes, I believe the quote is accurate, and it definitely is meant to satirize agent/producer/insider pretenses and lingo

##

Films I’ve already covered:

Sleeper (1973) and Love and Death (1975)

Interiors (1978)

Manhattan (1979)

Stardust Memories (1980) 

A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982) and Zelig (1983)

Broadway Danny Rose (1984)

The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Movie break (Quick Vu): A blurring of lines between fantasy and reality sets up an epiphany for a Depression-era woman: The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)

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

Also fits this series:

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

[Edit 4/22/14.]
 

Subsections below:

The film takes a cue from Allen’s story “The Kugelmass Episode”

The place of Purple Rose in Allen’s history

Technical aspects show us interesting values and craft; some criticism

Farrow’s character adds juice; a summing up

I have seen this film only twice: once, in 1985, when it was in the theater, and once just this month (March 2014), when I had to return it quickly because of a short lending-time (due to the system of varying lengths of lending times from the library system I often use—too complicated to explain further here).

I apparently saw it in the spring of that year, probably at a theater in Washington, D.C., and that was a period when, roughly speaking, things were no longer quite as rosy as the spring I graduated (1984). I have recalled little enough of Purple Rose from 1985 that I would have said until recently that I couldn’t say much about it, not that I had disliked it. But some images and brief situations in it came back to me as I watched it this winter.

Perhaps the most distinctive image—most memorable to me on re-viewing, and perhaps most pleasantly startling to new viewers—is also what encapsulates the theme of the film: a character (Tom Baxter) from a black-and-white late-1930s semi-genre feature emerges from the screen (he is played by Jeff Daniels, and is an earnest naif of an archeologist, in hokey pith helmet) and comes to meet and be a spontaneous consort of sorts with a rather sad woman in the audience, a Depression era housewife, unappreciated by her loutish husband, and played by a rather poignant Mia Farrow.

This film is intelligently written—with various funny lines anchored by the fantasy/reality premise just suggested—and its techno aspects (with both B&W imagery and somewhat melancholy color, the latter for real life) are well done. (The cinematographer was Gordon Willis, in his last film for Allen. By the way, Stuart Wurtzel debuts here as Allen’s production designer; Mel Bourne, present for many of his previous films, had left his fold.) This film captures a number of Woody Allen’s attributes in a rather neat and carefully enough articulated package without, I think, being a terribly prepossessing work.

The film takes a cue from Allen’s story “The Kugelmass Episode”

The theme of a fictional character and a “real person” meeting up and joining forces in some activity or set of adventures is actually something Allen wrote on in a short story titled “The Kugelmass Episode.” This was originally published in the 1970s in that major venue for respectable short fiction, The New Yorker; it was later included in Allen’s collection Side Effects, published by Random House in 1980 (this was the third of Allen’s books of collected small items). (In this regard, Allen proves to have been, by 1980, taken seriously by editors for his fictional and other belletristic work in the way his late-1970s films suggested he wanted to be taken. He also can be considered similar to humorist S. J. Perelman, who wrote both for respectable-enough literary publishers and for the movies, such as one or more films by the Marx Brothers.)

“Kugelmass” is written—as short stories best are—with a bare-bones “factual” approach and pared-down dialogue. Allan provides a readily Jewish-dialect way of speaking among the characters (it reads somewhat like a boiled-down version of Joseph Heller in shtik mode, a la parts of Good as Gold and much of God Knows); it thus gets its situation and humor across to the gut readily. The plot mainly involves a man, with an unhappy marriage, seeking solace via the (to us, amazingly simplistic) contraption already built by another man, where, if you go inside a simple-looking wooden box and the man does something control-related, the passenger inside is transported to a fictional locale/story of choice. The important ingredient: throw in the book with the desired story—in this case, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (a ratty paperback will do). Poof! You’re back in 19^th-century France with Madame Bovary. (And professors in the present day will start noticing a new character in the novel they hadn’t seen before.) I would suggest you seek out and take in this readable story, and it would help you digest Purple Rose better.

Also, the idea of a mixture of the fiction-related world and reality shapes a much later film by Allen, Midnight in Paris (2011), where the mixing (as I understand it; I haven’t seen the film) is between a “real person” and authors of major fiction, in Paris. For this, Allen won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, while it was nominated for other Oscars.

I guess you could say that, regarding the trope of a real person meeting a fictional (or fiction-making) personage as a story’s “web of premises,” among the notable, prolific U.S. directors (with a strong bent at writing, not in producing huge-budget epics), if any is good at this sort of thing, Allen is (or at least he’s published or released noteworthy work under the premise several times).

The place of Purple Rose in Allen’s history

In 1985, though Allen probably couldn’t know where his career would be going in 20 years, he was already cresting with, if he wasn’t already past, his strongest (or at least most original) films. (Of course, his mentality at the time, as for any creative person, would likely not have been that he was clearly at or past his peak; he probably was of the mind to be thinking of what his next work would be, and what chances he could scout up to get it made and released. You’re only as good as your next chance.)

Some notable films of his were still to come, but fans and critics who feel he generally fell off in quality after Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) or Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) may well say that Purple Rose was, at best, one of the train of works (not the best) in his “major phase.” (As it turns out, it is one of the three of his films that he said, within the past several years, had come closest to his original vision for them. The other two are Stardust Memories [1980] and Match Point [2005].)

Purple Rose contains an obvious element of nostalgia, not a mawkish sort; it does raise the more serious-minded question of what might happen to someone if he or she got too lost in fantasy, even if in the Depression era, when a grim lower-middle-class life left few options for “getting away to a better world” other than the local movie house, where “champagne comedies” (or whatever term it was that Allen has used in comment on this film) were for the enjoying.

But the film seems also to look toward his later years when he would weave a work rigorously evocative of a past era, especially some bygone time of the 20^th century (such as Bullets Over Broadway or The Curse of the Jade Scorpion), and he would play with some clichés or standardized tropes within that time and set of values, or more or less celebrate what he views as laudable but long-gone social and cultural values. Another way to put it, maybe: with such films, he looks at what the old days (or average folks’ dreams or struggles from then) could maybe tell us (or allow us to appreciate) about life today, especially what good we’re missing.

Technical aspects show us interesting values and craft; some criticism

Purple Rose has a neatness and charm shaped by its premises that don’t mean it is an especially gripping film, in its overall story. It is compact, just enough apt to follow implications in its comical plot to serve its premises, but is not especially drawn out per ideas as a two-hour, exquisitely richly imagined film might be. Among those who might prefer it among Allen’s less satiric work are today’s fantasy/sci-fi lovers, who might savor its way of developing a story’s “body” and details from imaginative premises. (One line I wrote down from it tends to show what the writing tries to do with the story premises: “What good is perfect [i.e., Mia’s character’s view of Tom Baxter] if a man’s not real?”)

Among the numerous characters/actors in this film, there is Danny Aiello as the loutish husband of the leading female in real, full-colored life, Mia’s character; there is Edward Herrmann, present within the B&W film (among miscellaneous other characters) as a tall, dashing gentleman you could picture striding elegantly in late-’30s films; and in the B&W film, there is a female, played I believe by the actress Zoe Caldwell, who as the B&W actress is playing an elderly, stately countess [?]; the actress now, with the film stopped, is in a kind of unexpected repose.

You see, because of Tom Baxter’s defection, the film has come to a long halt on the screen where Mia’s character has watched, and the numerous B&W characters are idling beyond the flat boundary of the movie screen, complaining, interacting with the astonished full-color audience, etc., like live, discomposed actors on a stage, pending a resolution of Tox Baxter’s having defected. The arch dowager type (played by Zoe Caldwell), among the fictional actors on the B&W screen, has the tartest lines to offer at times, like any old person who generally doesn’t care how tactful she is anymore and, for the present moment, doesn’t care for the inconvenience.

One of the concerns I have about a movie like this—which I wasn’t able to view enough times this year to get a full measure of—is that, with a sci-fi type premise like a mixing of two worlds, the problem can easily be that, as much as it opens up story possibilities to you (and as Allen does you can wring humor out of it), there also may be implications you don’t consider or don’t handle well enough. For instance, in Purple Rose, it turns out (from what passing characters say), in semi-response to what has happened in Mia’s character’s location, that several theaters in different locations across the country have the same film come to a halt, and as part of this, there are different types of defection or “going on strike” by the B&W film’s actors, or such. The whole phenomenon is obviously becoming a nationwide crisis, hence the bigwigs in the film studio powwow nervously to come up with a solution. There’s a business threat posed by this, of course.

The logical problem I see with this is, why are the films in other cities having “breakdowns in normal functioning” when the only film that had initially this, where Farrow’s character was, was in direct, “magical” response to the woman’s losing herself in the world of the film? Were there analogous “other-life wishers” in these other locations that triggered the breakdowns there? I seem to recall this wasn’t the case. If not, why were the other films going screwy in some sort of sympathy with the one at hand? There is obviously some possibility here for authorial comment on the way sheer distribution of pop-culture product is a dimension in how the fantasy/reality issue for viewers may play out or be assessed, but I don’t know how well Allen’s story squares with this. (Again, a further viewing may modify my criticisms here.)

Meanwhile, it is a good touch to include the plot element of the actor (Gil Shepherd, which turns out to be his stage name) who is behind the defected fictional character Tom Baxter, also played by Daniels, getting involved in the mix, and with Farrow’s character (with her picking the fruit of what this means for her in the story). Both Tom and Gil are in certain scenes together. (Amusingly, at one point Allen even has Gil reveal his own real name to Mia’s character, something like Herman Bardabeedee [sp?].)

As Allen has said, once he had this element of the actor getting involved as he wrote the script, the whole story came together.

Farrow’s character adds juice; a summing up

Apart from my qualms about the fantasy structure, I think Farrow’s performance here is nice; it is one of her best for Allen, and her award nominations for it (mentioned near the end of my review of Broadway Danny Rose) attest to this. When I view Farrow in several of Allen’s films, as first struck me rather strongly in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (see my review here), I saw glimmers in her of the character of Rosemary Woodhouse, of the Roman Polanski film Rosemary’s Baby (see my 2013 review here).

Farrow is an actress of rather limited range, I think (that is, in her serious roles); she’s apt to show some of the same styles of self-expression across characters, in a way that makes them definitely more similar than different. She’s quite nice for a certain type of character, especially of the dream-chasing waif, of which her Rosemary Woodhouse is perhaps the most vivid example. Purple Rose is concocted, I think, to cater to her strengths in this regard. She is a key feature that makes this film touch us. Aside from her, Purple Rose might seem a mere genre exercise, or a rather dry technical tour de force.

Interestingly, Allen shows he makes a warm place for family involvement and group creativity in this film, to the extent he has Mia’s sister Stephanie Farrow portray a coworker in the diner at which she works (Stephanie was also in Allen’s Zelig [1983]). And in the end credits, it is noted her sister Prudence Farrow (the inspiration for The Beatles’ 1968 song “Dear Prudence”) is listed as being in the art/production department, or such.

And we find that, in Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), even Farrow’s mother is a character with screen time in a number of scenes; meanwhile, there are bit parts in Hannah for some of who would later comprise the huge brood of children, adopted and otherwise, for whom Farrow would be the mother and home provider.

##

I did appreciate how Purple Rose was wrought, more in 2014 than I did in 1985, which may reflect in part my being more mature (as a person and writer, perhaps). But the one viewing I did this year didn’t bowl me over. If I saw it again, maybe I could say more with analytical enthusiasm. The Leonard Maltin compendium gives Danny Rose three stars and Purple Rose three and a half, while the Videohound compendium (generally reflecting a younger audience demographic) reverses the ratings.

On these two films, I would agree more with Videohound, in part because Danny Rose, with its earthy premises and characters and more standard Allen comedy—especially in this day of scams uncovered behind every other door—seems (in story structure as well as in its content premises) just to jibe with today’s reality more (if that isn’t a “current-time-based” way to criticize a work), or (from a more abstract viewpoint) it makes its points less coyly.

A comment on the report by attorneys representing Gov. Christie’s office in the GWB scandal, esp. re Bridget Kelly

I have heard news items on aspects of the report presented as the outcome of the legal investigation into the governor and his office by attorney Randy M. Mastro and others, released yesterday, March 27. More of interest here, I just read a news item on the New York Times Web site on how the parts of the report on Bridget Anne Kelly spoke in strongly personal and even sexist terms (in the view of the Times writers). I am eager to read more, not only on this aspect but on other aspects of the report; and of course I look at all this GWB scandal with regard to what I know of “politics” of the New Jersey style, especially in the work arena. In some ways, in my opinion, this scandal is the kind of dirty Jersey playing you’d more likely see at a crappy business than in highest levels of state government.

Where the report deals with Ms. Kelly and yet claims that it need not have interviewed her, but that it was sufficient to rely on documents, on this I have the same thought as I had about the larger report, when it was repeatedly remarked in news items yesterday that the legal investigation by the report’s authors did not include interviews with any of the principal people (Kelly and David Wildstein) who the report claims were the ones responsible for the bridge lane closures (Bill Baroni and Bill Stepien also weren’t interviewed—see here): Typical lawyer precept: rely all on documents, don’t think you need to have any intuitive or personal grasp on the matters at issue, derived from contact with the principal people about whom there were central allegations. These attorneys would have made good Soviet functionaries.

Moreover, in the U.S. justice system, anyone boned up on it knows that interviews, in-person testimony, and so on are essential to the working of a “trial,” which is the final “court of recourse” in many legal matters. Where “witnessing-type facts” are concerned, documents, though important, may not be enough; personal witnesses able to be interrogated (or subject to cross-examination) are crucial. So in no regard was this report the outcome of a “trial.” (Granted, the central players the report pins blame on chose not to be interviewed, as was their right under the advice of counsel. The report should then have had the discretion to state its limitedness in this regard, rather than be presented as a kind of final word.)

In my experience, in any difficult situation involving an abuse of some kind of power, even if a female involved were arguably “unstable” in some sense (and regarding Ms. Kelly, in my closely reading on her part in this mess, instability was not the first character aspect I would have sought out as significant for explaining her role; my first choice would have been conformism in line with authority she believed in), it has long been my policy to be as even-handed as possible, even if some rhetoric I presented at some stage of the “inquest” sounds a little more “sexist” than some would like. In the most difficult “investigations” I’ve been part of where a major player (if not malefactor) was female, I have tried to have evidence representing the female’s spontaneous view as much as possible. Sometimes this is reflected in documents of some sort, and in situations where a kind of clear-enough conspiracy is involved, it becomes a tricky art to tease out strongly relevant documents from ones that reflect more personal foibles that aren’t very relevant to the issue at hand. When one is limited to just documents, you try to marshal documents that give the fullest and most relevant portrait you can. This doesn’t seem, at an early stage of my review, to be what the Mastro report did with Ms. Kelly.

Dark-ish remarks I have presented in specific matters—even remarks that may seem vaguely misogynist—are just me adding “grumpy grace notes” partly to salve my sense of being old and tired (and having an atypical experience of significant women, to put it very generally), and to exercise a little humor that obviously may not appeal to all, as I deal with an array of ongoing challenges; but in no way would they be the essence or central “pillars” of a finding in some big issue.

All things considered about Gov. Christie’s career, how he’s handled this Bridgegate investigation—and Ms. Kelly in particular—isn’t entirely surprising. And of course, the full investigation is still underway.

Movie break: Woody makes more-whimsical films, well tooled within his “major phase”: A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982) and Zelig (1983)

Under the series:

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

(This series was sketchily outlined, originally under a different name, near the end of this entry. A “keynote” blog entry on this series is to come.)

Also under the series:

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

Subsections below:

I. A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (Semi-Quick Vu): A partner-switching romp in a pastoral vein

Midsummer shows a change of direction, and maybe a reflection of broader culture-warming

A story neatly serves the rural-locale peregrinations of colorful characters

Some of the funnier, less-tendentious one-liners

One-liners on the issue of love

Allen’s philosophy and the question of love

A beautifully photographed film—perhaps Allen’s best in this regard

II. Zelig (Quick Vu): A mock-historical doc on a “human chameleon”

A technical marvel that aims parodic darts at the American will to pop-culture crazes and ephemera, and the Jewish drive to assimilate

For culture vultures, an “intelligentsia fest”

I. A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (Semi-Quick Vu): A partner-switching romp in a pastoral vein

It’s interesting to look at old films, as much as you thought you knew the artist/director, from later years and detect patterns in them that weren’t evident at the time (at least to you when you were a naïve college student). For instance, Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy—which I never saw when it came out, though I seem to recall the ads and/or the flavor of the reviews—strikes me as having a surprising lot in common, on technical levels, with a few of Allen’s earlier films, all of which are fairly different from each other: Sleeper (because of, in Midsummer, the close attention to sometimes-quirky period detail, even featuring Allen in a flying machine), Love and Death, and even the significantly more refined (than Sleeper and L&D) Manhattan.

I wouldn’t have thought this comparison stuff from what I heard about Midsummer in 1982, and if I had, I might not have wanted to see it for that reason, because it would have seemed a step back; but seeing it now, I’m pleasantly surprised by it.

Among its ways it echoes qualities of previous work, Midsummer uses, as soundtrack music, pieces of composer Felix Mendelssohn (including a wedding theme under the opening titles), and in this general respect, it seems more like Love and Death (which featured Prokofiev) than any other film of his between the two. Yet Midsummer seems such an advance beyond Love and Death, in ways I’ll look at. Technically, it seems about as well crafted as his other work since his tide-turning Annie Hall (1977).

Meanwhile, on some other levels, Midsummer seems as if it were “retro” in Allen terms…well, let’s take a closer look.

Midsummer shows a change of direction, and maybe a reflection of broader culture-warming

In short, Midsummer represents a big tonal shift away from Allen’s more frankly personal-issues films (i.e., amid whatever else, dealing with despair and meaning in life amid interpersonal busy-ness), from Annie Hall (1977) through Stardust Memories (1980). Yet Allen’s big stock of better-movie-making tools is in play here, with his production “A team” including cinematographer Gordon Willis (doing some of his best work for Allen here) and production designer Mel Bourne. In a way, Allen is arranging features he’s already well used, in a new-seeming combination.

It’s possible Allen (“in the project-planning back room,” with his agents and producers) felt some pressure to provide more audience-friendly work. Meanwhile, whether this film also reflected any sense he independently acquired (orienting any will to pander to the audience) of a “change in broader culture,” as I’ll look at in my future “keynote” entry on the series “Morning Becomes Reagan,” is unclear. (After Allen had worked with United Artists through several films, ending with Stardust Memories, the distributing studio for Midsummer was Orion partnered with Warner Brothers, which partnership I believe was behind Zelig also; Orion, alone, would distribute Allen’s films over the next several years.)

Actually, both of Allen’s early 1980s films that I review in this entry, in their content, do show some closer attention to nicely articulated articles of culture—while the films still have some of the 1970s earthiness he could embody—as he turns to the more ideal, and to the more poetic (as did, in his own way in 1982, director Francis Ford Coppola, to be considered below).

And looking back, I would say that is one way I can characterize the 1980s, which to an extent seemed this way even at the time, as the decade went on: that is, the decade seemed newly poetic, in culture that at least college kids would embrace. (This though maybe I was too young to conceive of it quite as neatly as I do here.)

The 1980s, especially in pop culture, and by late 1984 or early 1985, seemed to feature a return to the poetic in the way that 1960s pop culture had been a time of playfulness and poetry, though that period—ending in the late 1960s with social turbulence over the Vietnam War, etc.—preceded the blistering realism, questioning, and paranoia of the 1970s.

Even if this makes the case rather too broadly, Allen’s early 1980s movies certainly show him aiming more to a “college student ideas-infatuated” mentality, whether or not this was dictated by market considerations posed by his alliance with big studios that were to distribute the films (Orion and Warner).

A story neatly serves the rural-locale peregrinations of colorful characters

The script seems almost as if it was edited by someone other than Allen (an unlikelihood, I think), as it largely traces the interests of the storyline, which features partner-swapping that is busier than that of Manhattan, though the time is about 1900, not 1979. Meanwhile, Midsummer is less realistic than Manhattan in this regard, seeming somewhat like a farce without entirely being so. Also, there is less focus on zingy one-liners such as grab you by the lapels in his late-’70s films. In all, the script is like B+ Allen work, somehow taking the best approaches of his last several films while somehow being “its own creature” and on the inoffensive side.

There are three couples: Leopold (played by Jose Ferrer), a pompous professor of philosophy who is the oldest of them all, who is esteemed in his field (at least in his own mind), and is about to get married. The woman he is to marry is Ariel Weymouth (played by Mia Farrow, her first time with Allen here). They are going to meet for a leisurely weekend (before Leopold and Ariel’s wedding) at Leopold’s cousin’s country house; the cousin is Adrian (played by Mary Steenburgen), who is married to Andrew (played by Allen).

Andrew had worked on Wall Street, and had left under perhaps a cloud, or on the basis of disillusionment; he is now utilizing his talents at inventing things, including a pedal-operated flying contraption he uses to fly around their rural area. This quaint detail reminds me a bit of the weird development in the animated Peanuts features where Snoopy, already an amazing polymath of a hound, flies around like a helicopter with his ears spinning like propellers. 

A plot source of trouble comes early on: Andrew and Ariel had once had a relationship, and Andrew is shocked/spooked that she is coming to his house.

There is a yet a third couple, a doctor friend of Andrew’s, Maxwell, played by Tony Roberts, a longtime acting associate of Allen’s (also in Annie Hall, Stardust Memories, and Hannah and Her Sisters [1986]). Maxwell is accompanied by his nurse/office assistant Dulcy, played by Julie Hagerty, here employing the same “dopey female” voice as she did in the laugh-a-minute Airplane! (1980), but as in the earlier film her voice turns out to belie some earthy smarts that leave people a little foolish to underestimate her. Maxwell and Dulcy are the randiest couple to make the scene, and are the source of much of the true farce of this story. And though they come to the country house looking to have a different physically-oriented partnership than they do professionally back in the office, they will soon find that they want to partner with one or more of the others there.

You can sort of see already that a lot of the story will involve hectic/clandestine partner-switching, with both the comic potential and the occasional philosophical aside about love (the real thing) coming into the mix. If you think this film sounds a little bird-brained, I think it’ll surprise you that it’s a little smarter than it may sound, while it’s not among Allen’s top-grade work.

Some of the funnier, less-tendentious one-liners

Among the one-liners (such as they are; some quotes may be paraphrases):

* Dulcy, on arriving at Andrew’s place and noticing with some delight a hammock on the property, to Adrian: “I lost it in a hammock. You really have to have good balance.”

* Andrew explaining his Wall Street line of work, at the dinner table: “I take care of people’s investments until there is nothing left.” (Amusing for its pre-Madoff prescience.)

* Another Andrew remark on his career/nature: “I’m not a poet, I don’t die for love, I work on Wall Street.” Understated as satire, to be sure.

* In a very early scene, Leopold—in his college class, amid a philosophic discussion that sets the not-too-crucial thematic tone as to whether there is more to the world than atoms and other empirically identifiable matter—intones in response to a questing student: “I did not create the cosmos, I merely explain it.”

* Later, when Maxwell is confessing his anxiety to Andrew about Ariel being about to be married to a “pompous ass,” Andrew says, “Well, at this time [tomorrow, or some other day], she’ll be Mrs. Pompous Ass.”

Funny, both this line and the Leopold one just above I recall seeing performed before, as if I saw the whole film before. But I didn’t remember the entire film as I viewed it this winter, and it seems to have been many years since I saw it (at maybe a film festival, or such), and I have a feeling I saw it under distracted circumstances, or I left partway through.

One-liners on the issue of love

The partner-swapping situations allow occasions for philosophic remarks on love, and—in terms of either Allen’s rather pessimistic-if-not-entirely-heartless eye, or a bigger chance this film had to comment on love—these seem a little on the tepid side:

* Andrew at one point: “Sex alleviates tension, and love causes it.”

* “The best opportunities happen only once.” (One of the females says this. Not terribly original or gripping, as to love or otherwise.)

* Incidentally, the philosophic question is offered, at least by Ariel, of, Can you have lust for someone without also being in love with the person?

* Maxwell goes through an especially strong period of anxiety, regarding wanting to have sexual relations with someone present who is not to be his mate before marriage prevents the ability to do it (this of course operates for him on both abstract and grippingly concrete levels). (Leopold, for his part, has basically the same idea.) “Marriage is the death of hope,” Maxwell says at least once; this idea comes up in the story a few times, maybe out of the mouth of someone else, too. In these guys’ eyes, true hope—at least in terms of sex/love—can only be had if one has a fling before marriage “cuts it off permanently.” So, in view of this, Maxwell is like a frat boy, almost, in wanting to have a fling with Ariel before Ariel’s marriage to Leopold prevents such a thing.

* A little more incisive and more in line with Allen’s storylines and views is when, after he has had a roll in the hay (almost literally) with Ariel outdoors somewhere, Andrew says, “You really do learn an awful lot about yourself through love-making,” while both he and Ariel seem a little on the sickened, or disillusioned, side.

The likes of Allen’s later (and clearly better) film Hannah and Her Sisters would suggest that, when he is most full-blooded and least facetious in his writing—if Midsummer is indeed considered an example of his being facetious—he conveys that love can have a place in life, being a place for reconciliation, and a reflection or embodiment of contentment and hope.

This film, in terms of its story saying much about love, seems on the half-hearted side. It is amusing, and pleasant enough (if you can envision this along with the jaded-seeming one-liners), but it doesn’t offer brilliant insights. Not as I thought, anyway, after having watched it twice (three viewings would have been better).

Allen’s philosophy and the question of love

One of the things I find puzzling about Allen’s philosophy, where it encompasses love, is how he makes remarks about it as if—if I’m reading him right—true love only happens once; or maybe his idea is that an “access” (or “rush,” to use the more teenage word) of love is only when it really happens, and that is only once. Is this what he believes (unless he is presenting it just as articles of the shallowness of the characters here)?

(By the way, this is not to suggest that this philosophic point has much or anything to do with his later family issues, of 1992 and after, regarding his future wife Soon-Yi Previn and others. I am looking just at his ideas in this film, as resonate with a few other films not far removed from it in time. I think the ideas here—particularly on love—are a little abstract and arguably sophomoric, though this film admittedly seems to have been written in part to be a sort of inoffensive product out of Allen’s fold, not with a lot of pointed remarks, such as are found in Stardust Memories.)

At the end of Sleeper, he has a line that, if I recorded it right, is that (as I note in my review of the film) the most important things in life only come “once,” sex and death, and at least you’re not nauseous after death. I recorded this as a sort of pithy final one-liner capping that film, but—as I was puzzled about, a bit, at the time—what he means by ‘love coming only once,’ I’m not sure. I don’t know if he means the truest of true love, or a sort of mystically regarded experience of true ecstasy. And if this is his view, I wonder, is this concept also echoed in Midsummer, especially in what riotously happens to Leopold near the end, where he dies at the height of passion during intercourse (with Dulcy—it just happened, you know), with a smile on his face?

People could be turned off by Allen’s consciously existentialist points in his films (maybe considering them a sort of perverse dogma): the remarking on despair, the reminders of a need for courage, the questions about the existence of God. Even if someone didn’t like these remarks, he or she could still enjoy a lot of his films for their humor (just as one can enjoy the warmly humorous side of a lot of religious people). In this regard, it would be like, in concrete dealings with someone, “filtering out” that person’s expressions of religious belief or “testaments of faith,” when he or she offers these a little too often—the religious enthusiast who (manners-wise) can be said, in the U.S., to be a little rude to the extent that not everyone wants to hear that stuff every five minutes outside church (or an A.A. meeting).

And yes, I do think an existentialist can be considered not terribly different in a general sense from a devout adherent to a religion; in fact, in the annals of existentialist philosophy, exponents range from the atheist Jean-Paul Sartre to the Catholic thinker Adrian van Kaam, the latter of whom was associated with the University of Pittsburgh. You could easily say that Allen’s reminders of his existentialist beliefs are his ongoing itches to address religious questions, which someone who doesn’t fully share could either ignore when appreciating what else Allen has to offer, or may find such a grating “tic” that it turns the person off Allen’s work entirely.

If Allen’s point is that Leopold happened to get lucky in the love department by dying right when he was in sexual ecstasy—and notice how, atypically for him, he includes the whimsical—and obviously non-materialist, non-scientific—detail of a weird device that Andrew has invented to “see spirits” or such, and to foretell the future—then Allen seems to cap this off with his “fairyland” detail of having Leopold’s spirit fly off like a glowing firefly or such, metaphysically allowed to do so by the circumstances of his death.

As a fanciful mode by which Allen has a character die in a rather optimism-suggestive way, this is rather nice; but if this detail is actually underscoring Allen’s idea that love in its truest form somehow only comes in a single “shot” for any one individual, I find that an item of “philosophy” that’s not even typical of the usual forms of existentialism, to the extent I understand them.

Am I reading this point of Allen’s right (and hence criticizing it right)?

Interestingly, it is Allen’s character Andrew, the whimsical inventor, who is most apt to remind people, and believe, that there is more to life than meets the eye.

A beautifully photographed film—perhaps Allen’s best in this regard

You would enjoy Midsummer, if not for the more philosophic points in its script, then for the simple play of the plot, and especially for the photography. There are nature shots (as of birds and animals—and not dopily or sentimentally framed) and, light- and color-wise, well-composed shots. This goes to show that if Allen could be prevailed on to get out of NYC and take the risks of snuggling up to crickets and bees in a summertime countryside, he can actually capture a good film in the process.

Midsummer historically can be considered as turning in a very sensual way (especially pictorial) to its love theme, similarly in a very broad way to what Francis Ford Coppola did when he turned from national trauma that he treated in Apocalypse Now (1979) to the visually rich but plot-limited One From the Heart (1982), which Coppola felt was a turn to a positive topic he thought U.S. audiences could use next. As it happened, the latter was a box-office disaster for Coppola, making only a small percentage of its enormous cost; and though people may have had the impression that the super-long-production Apocalypse is what initiated Coppola’s financial problems that ran over many years, it was not. It was One From the Heart that did it.

Anyway, One From the Heart—though I haven’t seen it—was probably not as successful in artistic terms as Midsummer was, in its more modest way, for Allen.

II. Zelig (Quick Vu): A mock-historical doc on a “human chameleon”

A technical marvel that aims parodic darts at the American will to pop-culture crazes and ephemera, and the Jewish drive to assimilate

Zelig, more than any of Allen’s other films from the time, obviously harkens back to Take the Money and Run (1969), as a faux documentary. Yet it is far more well-tooled than the earlier film, and among its talking heads, it features many noted intellectual leaders of the time.

This film is so obviously meant for entertaining that I may do well just to say “Check it out and see if you like it,” rather than analyze it much. It seems that the film was in some state of preparation for close to three years, to judge from promo copy included in the DVD (distributed by MGM’s DVD division) for the later film Broadway Danny Rose (1984).

For culture vultures, an “intelligentsia fest”

One thing I like about Zelig is that, among its talking heads who gamely provide some fictional commentary in line with Allen’s story precepts, there are notable intellectuals some or all of whom are deceased now:

Susan Sontag, fiction writer, essayist, and all-around belletrist, author of Against Interpretation and Illness as Metaphor, the latter of which I read and was influenced by years ago.

Irving Howe, a “public intellectual” of the old kind, a writer of socialist bent who could provide very useful explanatory essays such as an afterword appended to a modern reprint of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy.

Bruno Bettelheim, an old-time (Freudian) psychiatrist, especially of troubled children.

Saul Bellow, a major 20^th-century American novelist and Nobel Prize winner; he authored Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift, and More Die of Heartbreak, among other works. It’s nice to see him, in his relaxed/elegant way, play along with the Zelig precepts in remarking, as was historically true, that the Nazi movement allowed someone to get lost in what the political circumstances allowed—as he says, “the immersion in the mass and anonymity”—which the character Leonard Zelig, fictionally, does.

John Morton Blum, a professor, the only name among these I don’t know.

There are what seem to be a couple of real-life old newspaper professionals also among the talking heads.

The narrator is a dry, urbane British sort, in place of Take the Money and Run’s authoritatively sonorous Jackson Beck.

There are so many fun “special effects” and nice details to this film, you should just see it. Among the details is a song titled “Chameleon Days,” sung—with “poo-poo-pe-doo”—by Mae Questel, who in real life voiced Olive Oyl and Betty Boop of the 1930s cartoons.