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

to dance with Fred.” Woody Alien: New Yorker, p. 214.
    7. Christopher Ames, Movies About the Movies (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1997), pp. 116, 119.
    8. Arnold Preussner, “Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo and the Genres of Comedy,” Literature/Film Quarterly 16, 1 (1988), p. 42.
    9. I’m not alone among Allen critics in conferring such ultimate status on Purple Rose: Richard Schickel described it as “one of the best movies about movies ever made” (Time, March 4, 1985, p. 85), while Ralph Tutt argued that, whereas Crimes and Misdemeanors readily acknowledges its indebtedness to other films, Purple Rose “transcends homage and genre. It gives us a bona fide auteur working independently in the seriocomic mode most congenial to his talent” (“Truth, Beauty and Travesty: Woody Allen’s Well Wrought Urn,” Literature/Film Quarterly 16, 1 [1988], p. 108). In conversations for Lax’s biography, Allen affirmed that he considered Purple Rose “the best film he’s made” (p. 371).
    10. Bjorkman, p. 210.
    11. The “final solution” implications of Shadows and Fog and its allusions to Night and Fog are explored in detail in Mashey Bernstein’s “‘My Worst Fears Realized’: Woody Allen and the Holocaust,” Perspectives on Woody Allen, ed. Renee R. Curry (New York: G.K. Hall & Company, 1996), pp. 218–36.
    12. At a time when so much of American film could be characterized by the title of the Jim Carrey film Dumb and Dumber, it seems particularly anomalous to see sophisticated reviewers carping with Allen’s evocation of Kafka, Brecht, German Expressionist film techniques, and similar references to the history of film and ideas in Shadows and Fog and his other films. Seldom did the negative reviews of Shadows suggest why the movie’s numerous allusions to film and literature were false or ineffective; David Denby’s New York description of Shadows and Fog as,”in art-world jargon, postmodernist pastiche” (“Fogged In” [review of Shadows and Fog], March 30, 1992, p. 58) typified the accusation-constitutes-indictment mentality of reviews written by the movie’s detractors. Allen’s films have proven particularly susceptible to the sort of review which manifests little interest in evaluating the movie responsibly or illuminating its concerns for readers but perceives it instead as an occasion for self-indulgent displays of the reviewer’s verbal cleverness. Richard Schickel’s Time review was much more explanatorily helpful: “ Shadows and Fog is most obviously an exercise in style, a beautifully made tribute to the expressionist cinema of 1920s Germany. It’s all here: a homicidal maniac stalking the menacing night streets of a nameless, timeless city; a circus and a brothel populated by fringe figures who, naturally, are less hypocritical socially and sexually than the police, the church and the bourgeoisie; a score that features the music of Kurt Weill; lighting and a camera that pay homage to the whole Weimar school of cinematography” (March 23, 1992, p. 65).
    13. The only human activity unaffected by the presence of death is—not surprisingly, given a Woody Allen film—sex. “There’s only one thing men will brave murder for,” one of the prostitutes argues, “the little furry animal between our legs.” That the brothel is aligned with the art-allegorizing circus is suggested by the response of one of the prostitutes to Irmy’s assertion that she is a sword swallower in the circus: “A sword swallower? That’s my specialty too.”
    14. Woody Allen, “Death (A Play),” in Without Feathers (New York: Ballantine Books, 1983), p. 106. Perhaps because the release of the film made it seem a less effective first draft of Shadows and Fog “Death (A Play),” like “God (A Play),” isn’t included in The Complete Prose of Woody Allen, which otherwise reprints the complete contents of Without Feathers, Side Effects, and Getting Even .
    15. The Purple Rose of Cairo