watched take the money and run last night. ah woody, why did you have to go ingmar bergman on us? you were at your best when you were silly, tossing off sight gags and set-ups without punchlines. you were the natural inheritor of the marx brothers and vaudeville but that wasn’t good enough for you, was it? well, at least you didn’t go soft in the head like all those 70s comics. but why am i addressing you in the first person like this?
he’s obviously made some great films after love and death (annie hall, the purple rose of cairo, sweet and lowdown) so i don’t want to push this early silly woody vs. later serious woody thing very far (and annie hall probably belongs in the first group anyway) but when i watch these old movies i wish he still made things like that. no one else seems to have after he stopped.
Stardust Memories might just answer all your questions.
I was just going to mention stardust memories–one of his underrated movies where he addresses these criticisms overtly. and some of his recent movies are not bad–they’re just so slight.
Well, Stardust answered none of mine. I don’t begrudge the shift, just lament it; like Arnab, I think Take the Money and Sleeper are sublimely silly–and, aside from my nomination of Will Ferrell’s Anchorman, I’m not sure anyone makes those movies any more. So… it’s just a shame. Much as I liked Crimes and Misdemeanors or Hannah–great, great films both.
Hey, did anyone else get pissed at Arnab for his clubby epistle to Woody Allen? Fucker. Whatever happened to all for one? I’m talking to you, Gio. Don’t tell Simon or Li’l Pony.
Also, shouldn’t it be “Li’l’ Pony”?
the clubby thing really got to you, reynolds, didn’t it? why? too close to home or what? how about dropping it since it didn’t come up within this thread and we just get back to movies, eh? we can leave the passive aggressive stuff to the departments who do it better. or to Woody.
I love Woody Allen’s silly films, but I must say there are few comic writers/performers/directors who make good non-silly films. Jerry Lewis tried it with The Day the Clown Cried and it was such a disaster that he was never able to release it.
I think we should stress silly over funny, since his non-silly films can often be very funny. Manhattan is funny, but not silly. Both the silly and non-silly films may be comic, but not necessarily ha-ha funny. And both types of films may have an element of tragedy (plus and minus time). In short, I find all of his films keen. No, greater than keen. Cugat.
Woody’s writing remains, to this day, silly (The New Yorker stuff, that is). His pieces in “Shouts and Murmurs” never fail to crack me up. He can be as silly with the written word as he is with film. And I’ve never read anything by him that was not silly.
john, woody’s books side effects, and to a lesser extent, without feathers, were crucial stages in my development. on par with spike milligan in influencing my sense of funny. were these compilations of pieces he’d written for the new yorker?
hootie, you’re surely right about his recent films. in fact, one of them was quite silly–the one in which he’s the director who goes blind from stress–just not sublimely silly like the early ones. i think i have stardust memories on dvd; never got around to watching it.
i do like it when the two mikes fight. reminds me of all old times. though in those days they fought over whether laclau and mouffe were politically viable or not.
Yeah, I think most of the stuff in Side Effects, Getting Even and Without Feathers was published in The New Yorker. I think some pieces appeared in Playboy and The New Republic as well. I’m hoping another compilation comes out soon. His stuff continues to be extremely funny. And very silly.
Films post Love and Death: Annie Hall, Manhattan, The Purple of Rose of Cairo, Zelig, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Husbands and Wives, Sweet and Lowdown, Match Point; all excellent . . . at times funny but mostly sublime, darkly human and intellectually vigorous. Others: Radio Days, Broadway Danny Rose, Oedipus Wrecks, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Bullets over Broadway (“Don’t speak!”), Mighty Aphrodite, Deconstructing Harry, Smalltown Crooks, Anything Else; lesser than but still worthy, funny and certainly silly. And I really admire Interiors damnit. Name another American director with such a body of work??? Do we not want our artists to grow, mature, develop. If Will Farrell keeps playing variations on his roles in Anchorman and The Wedding Crashers for the next thirty years will anyone give a shit?
jeff, you misunderstand me–i am not opposed to woody allen’s growth/range. i just miss the old, silly woody. in fact, i do really like some of his relatively recent vicious movies which are perhaps the furthest away from silly: celebrity and deconstructing harry.
i do want to oppose the idea, if you meant it, of “growth” equating a move away from “silly”. and not just because some of his recent movies are still silly. i just wish he’d give us a really good silly one every once in a while as well. as john points out, it isn’t as if it has gone away from his writing. too many of his films now feel either like attempts to rationalize (or to mock our attempts to allegorize) the hyper-public events in his life, or to make extended sitcoms. i wish he’d go back and try his hand at shapeless again. his early, shapeless films are brilliant, and intellectually stimulating in their own way. and sometimes i think these are the quintessential allen films–the ones most different from what anyone else has done (as great as many of the late period films are).
I preferred Laclau and Mouffe when they were sillier.
I will second Arnab’s refusal of the opposition of “growth” to “silliness;” I’ll further add that I’d be pleased to see Ferrell doing consistently funny silly stuff over thirty years. No one gets pissed at the Marx Brothers for not making their Interiors (in fact, I bet most people are fairly pleased about that); perhaps another thread less about some artist giving up the funny for the serious than about the tendency to read the latter as more seriously artistic.
By the by, it took me 14 hours to figure out what “irl” meant. Does that get me off the club hook? O–shit! I brought it up again!
I apologize–I was rather irascible last night. I prefer to argue with Mike over this stuff anyway since nowadays I can’t even spell Lacow and Muff. what were they, some sort of vaudeville team? as for irl, I learned that from my students–got ya!
I don’t equate growth with overcoming silliness. I too revel in silliness. The Marx Brothers analogue doesn’t entirely work. Their great films were made over a nine year period during the 1930s and their work covers roughly two decades. Allen has been working as a filmmaker for forty years. The inspired zaniness that marks his early films can still be found but is it possible that such work is the work of youth (and I don’t use youth as a pejorative) as well as a man who was figuring out a medium before he actually mastered it. Small Town Crooks was a very silly film but it was inconsequentially silly whereas Sleeper is sublimely silly. Does that make sense. What other film artists/filmmakers have sustained that kind of silliness in their work from their twenties and thirties well into their seventies (I’d say television don’t count just to make things more challenging)?
Jerry Lewis.
i would say the marx bros. analogy does work. their work extends from vaudeville through the 40s, and through groucho’s work on television. they had two major problems with their films: 1) the studios imposed structure on them and 2) they couldn’t get writers as good as the ones they had in the 20s and 30s. their later movies are crap but they’re not qualitatively different, just not as well written.
and i think something like take the money and run or love and death shows as much mastery over a medium as does something like manhattan or sweet and lowdown.
I’m not so much a fan of Allen’s early films but that has less to do with aesthetics than it does with personal taste (that being said, I think you can find the roots of Interiors or Crimes and Misdemeanors embedded in Love and Death). That being said, what if Allen had released Annie Hall in its original incarnation as a comic murder mystery?
And John, have you actually seen the Nazi clown movie . . . I’m curious about it?
There are rumors that a print exists. A Cinema Studies professor at USC claimed to have seen it, but I doubted her (still do).
You can get some more info about the film here. There is a brief clip posted–but it’s only “behind the scenes” material from a Biography Channel special.
How did we go this long without this coming up?
Harry Shearer claims to have seen it.
“Harry Shearer, one of the very small handful of people who has actually seen the film in rough cut form described it in an interview on radio’s The Howard Stern Show as, “If you say ‘Jerry Lewis is a clown in a concentration camp’ and you make that movie up in your head, it’s so much better than that. And by better I mean worse. You’re stunned.†”
Beautiful art from the excellent Drew Friedman.
ooh . . . images! How did you do that???
And Arnab, do you think Woody Allen ever wanted to be the natural heir to the Marx Brothers and vaudeville? If you listen to the live recordings from the sixties, there is nothing vaudevillian at all about his humor. It’s dry and droll, pithy and ironic, subtle and askew. Still, he certainly makes jokes about the KKK and a mess ‘o catfish damn hilarious.
jeff, what do woody’s desires have to do with anything? it is what i want that counts. dammit. i don’t know about his stand-up work, but in his early films he is a master of physical comedy–which is something i don’t think he gets enough credit for (perhaps because his body is so un-lovely and the opposite of graceful). there’s a sequence in take the money and run where he’s getting ready for a date and preening in front of the mirror that sums it all up. these films have an antic feel and a love of language (and non-sequitur) that brings the marx brothers to mind for me, whether he likes it or not (and i bet he does).
i did watch stardust memories last night. like mike, i don’t think that film really gets at the heart of what i am lamenting the loss of (though i may be saying this in order to resist becoming one of the gargoyle fans portrayed in it). and i’m not sure that stardust memories doesn’t satirize in advance those who say, “i prefer your later, more serious films” either. it is very vicous though–i imagine a lot of his fans must have been traumatized by it when it first came out.
If he wanted to be the natural heir to anybody, it would probably be Bob Hope. I think Woody Allen has said this himself on a number of occasions. The persona he perfects in Sleeper and is modeled after Hope. The latter film, I believe, is an homage to Hope’s 1946 film, Monsieur Beaucaire.
And Hope was silly. He’s a nebbish romantic. He’s cowardly. He’s totally infatuated with himself. And he’s extremely witty. There’s a scene in Love and Death when Boris says he doesn’t want to join the Russian army. His brother Ivan grabs him by the neck and says “medals…we get medals,” and Boris says “Easy, Ivan. You’ve got to cut down on your raw meat.” Another says “My brother has a yellow streak down his back,” and Boris says “No it’s not down, it runs across.”
That’s Bob Hope.
I think he wants to be Ingmar Bergman’s brooding yet wacky autistic cousin or maybe Andrei Tarkovski’s cutlery maid. Though if I’m being less than silly, I might argue for Charlie Chaplin (in all phases of his career) or maybe even Nichols and May. Perhaps the secret love child of Anton Chekhov and Fanny Brice.
can anybody figure out why this page is linked to from the word “medals” in this post on likelihood of confusion–a legal blog? i don’t object, of course–i just want to be sure that the law is looking upon us with favour.
They cracked the code in my comment:
Comment 20, second paragraph:
“medals…we get medals”