The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen by Peter J. Bailey Read Free Book Online

82); J. Hoberman saw the film as “a smart, absorbing, inventive movie, with startling intimations of greatness. Woody Allen hasn’t simply caught up to his ambition, in some ways he has run past it” (Village Voice, October 17, 1989, p. 87).
    10. Consistent with her Reconstructing Woody project, Mary P. Nichols argues that Judah’s closing monologue contains manifestations of lingering guilt, proof that he’s deluding himself in declaring himself “home free.” In support of her moral ameliorist reading of Allen’s films, Nichols cites Sander Lee’s argument that Judah’s need to disburden himself to others of his “murder story with a very strange twist” will ultimately lead to his arrest for murder. Nichols, pp. 158–59, 239.
    11. It’s worth noticing that the contemporary Manhattan of Crimes and Misdemeanors is not the “expressionistic New York,” the idealized city of Manhattan, Manhattan Murder Mystery or Everyone Says I Love You . Sven Nykvist’s camera visualizes it as a dark, if relatively clean, urban assemblage of apartments, never for a moment pausing to offer a composed image of the cityscape.
    12. Wendy’s indictment of her husband sounds very much like Sandy Bates’s indictment of his “stupid little films” in Stardust Memories, the two movies dramatizing a dismissive attitude toward comedy which gets reversed in the earlier work but not in Crimes and Misdemeanors .
    13. William Buder Yeats, “The Second Coming,” Selected Poems and Two Plays of William Butler Yeats, M.L. Rosenthal, ed. (New York: Collier Books, 1962), p. 91.
    14. Blake, Woody Allen: Sacred and Profane, pp. 183–84.
    15. Girgus, p. 124.
    16. In his characterization of Cliff, “Woody Allen is tweaking his own highmindedness,” Pauline Kael argued, “yet he also appears to be revealing himself more nakedly than in his other movies. He appears to be saying, ‘This is who I am’” (Movie Love, p. 202). David Denby described Cliff as “a witty man yet also one of the bitterest studies of failure ever put on film” (p. 124).
    17. Lester’s popularity with the public epitomizes an attitude Allen has consistently expressed about popular reaction to his own films. “The best film I ever did, really,” he told Tom Shales, “was Stardust Memories . It was my least popular film. That may automatically mean it was my best film.” Tom Shales, “Woody Allen: The First 50 Years,” Esquire, April, 1987, p. 95.
    11. Everyone Loves Her/His Illusions: The Purple Rose of Cairo and Shadows and Fog
    Epigraph quoted in The Purple Rose of Cairo, p. 373.
    1. Michiko Kakutani, “Woody Allen: The Art of Humor,” p. 221.
    2. Allen got stalled in writing the screenplay of The Purple Rose of Cairo, the solution being the introduction of Gil Shepherd, the actor who plays Baxter, into the plot. Bjorkman, p. 148.
    3. Sam B. Girgus sees the movie characters’ fate as partaking of the film’s concern with freedom of choice: “Allen’s way of resolving the extended joke about the escaped character dramatizes the deeper point regarding the moral dimension of narrative that must include responsibility for endings. Unable to participate in the writing of their own stories, the characters are fated to either slavery or destruction.” The Films of Woody Allen, p. 86.
    4. Monk’s incessant crapshooting with his friends suggests that he is seeking remedy for his condition through the very cause of that condition—gambling with money in a game of chance which will ultimately wipe out all of the players.
    5. Lax, p. 27.
    6. Graham McCann’s description of Cecilia’s habitual posture staring up at movie screens very effectively summarizes her character: “Cecilia’s face seems to have become fixed in this position, gazing up at people and things: she lives in a state of suspense engendered by an obsession with other people’s stories. Her days are spent waiting—for her husband to assault her, for her employer to fire her, for Ginger