Woody Allen does Ingmar Bergman again

It's been about three years since I did a post on Woody Allen's movie Interiors, which he was open about making on the grounds that he wanted to make a film in the style of Ingmar Bergman. Allen would revisit Bergman a few years later, although this time with a fair bit of Anton Chekhov mixed it. That movie is A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy.

José Ferrer plays Leopold Sturges, a college professor sometime in the early part of the 20th century. The end of term is about to come up and everyone is about to break for summer, with Leopold telling his fellow professors that he's about to get married to a young woman named Ariel (Mia Farrow) and embark on a summer tour of Europe. But first, he's going to see he cousin Adrian (Mary Steenburgen) out in the country.

Adrian is married and a long-suffering wife to a dreamer of an inventor named Andrew (Woody Allen), the sort of garage-workshop inventor who could come up with new things still in that era, although it doesn't particularly look like most of Andrew's inventions are very successful. They've also reached a point in their marriage where they've stopped having sex, which doesn't seem like a big deal to mention for a 1980s movie but, since the movie is set around 1910, is something you'd think the characters of the day wouldn't mention.

Adrian and Andrew have been expecting Leopold and Ariel, as well as another guest, their doctor friend Maxwell (Tony Roberts). Maxwell is a ladies' man, and has had a string of girlfriends, with Adrian and Andrew expecting him to bring his latest girlfriend. He does, although it's not what people might have been expecting, since he's literally just started a relationship with his nurse Dulcy (Julie Hagerty).

Now, if you've seen the early Ingmar Bergman film Smiles of a Summer Night, you'll have some good predictions of what's going to happen next. When Ariel shows up, Andrew realizes that he met Ariel some time back, and that he might still be in love with her, although of course it would be unfaithful of him to try to start up a relationship with her. And then Maxwell and Dulcy arrive. Maxwell immediately discovers that he too is in love with Ariel, and that the Ariel/Leopold marriage has no real shot of working out. Complicating matters is that Adrian talks with the other women about how to spice up her love life again, while Leoplold thinks he might be falling for Adrian and/or Dulcy.

All of this has the vibe of the aforementioned Smiles of a Summer Night, but also reminded me of the film adaptation of Chekhov's The Seagull that I watched late last year. I'm sorry to say that what Woody Allen does here doesn't quite work. I think that's because of Woody putting himself in the cast. This was still the point Allen's career when he had the screen persona of the nebbish, neurotic city type, and I don't think that works for A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy. If he had been able to cast other people and not himself, and write to their strengths and personalities, I think the movie would have worked better.

Reading other reviews of A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, I see that it's generally considered of one Allen's lesser films. Having watched it, I can see why. Although it's got some lovely cinematography, in terms of story it's just not up there with Allen's other work.

Not Zaftig

Many years ago -- it might even have been when I was in college -- I saw the Woody Allen movie Zelig. It finally showed up on TCM several months back, and recently I got around to watching it for a second time to be able to do the post here.

Zelig is a mockumentary, purporting to tell the tale of Leonard Zelig (Woody Allen), a man who was a sensation in the late 1920s but fell out of the public eye. Zelig came to fame because he was a literal human chameleon, being able to change to match the group of people around him. At a society party out on Long Island, he appeared like a rich Republican to the party guests; to the hired help, however, he could fit in as a working-class Democrat. He could even take on some of the physical traits of Asians.

Naturally, all of this interests a lot of people, from the general public who make him a minor celebrity, to famous people who, now elderly, talk about him to a modern-day documentary filmmaker (Susan Sontag and Saul Bellow are among the cameos). But it also intrigues scientists. Fortunately for them, Zelig's problems mean that he winds up getting admitted to a psychiatric hospital, which allows Dr. Eudora Fletcher (Mia Farrow) to treat him, and film the treatments.

Along the way, Zelig falls in love with Dr. Fletcher, and the feeling is mutual. But outside pressure breaks up the relationship, causing Zelig to flee. People keep thinking they see Zelig somewhere, since his ability to fit in makes it a natural for people to think they see him. However, it's only when Dr. Fletcher and her colleagues watch a newsreal of the early days of Nazi Germany that they're convinced they really have found Zelig.

Zelig is interesting in that it was made in the early 1980s, so well into the phase of Woody Allen's career that started with about Annie Hall and marked a decided shift in tone in Allen's oeuvre. However, it often feels much more like Allen's early work. After all, Allen had already made one mockumentary in Take the Money and Run.

Zelig is also a technical achievement, in that Allen combines modern-day footage with vintage material, putting the Zelig character into the 1920s and 1930s at a time before computer editing made this a lot easier. As for the story, I don't think it works quite as well as I thought it did the first time I saw it. And for me, it certainly doesn't work as well as Take the Money and Run. But it's still a worthwhile watch and, unlike the films of some other auteurs, doesn't overstay its welcome. Zelig is definitely worth a watch if you get the chance to catch it.

Midnight in Paris

Another relatively recent movie that I've got on my DVR from when it showed up in TCM's 31 Days of Oscar is Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris.

The movie starts off with an extended, dialogue-free montage of Paris. Then, when the opening credit show up, they're accompanied by a dialogue by an engaged couple, Gil (Owen Wilson) and Inez (Rachel McAdams). Gil is a screenwriter who seems to be more in love with the city of Paris than he is with Inez, and would love to stay in Paris to work on his novel. They're on a vacation with Inez' parents, as Dad is on a working holiday. When they're at a restaurant, who walks in but two of Inez' old friends, Paul and his wife Carol. Paul and Carol, whom Gil doesn't know at all, are there because Paul has been asked to lecture at the Sorbonne, and they invite Gil and Inez to go with them to Versailles the next day, which is another source of tension between them.

The conflict continues, until one evening at a restaurant. It's a late evening, and Paul, Carol, and Inez want to take a taxi back to the hotel. Gil, however, is so in love with the city that he'd rather walk back to the hotel and soak in the atmosphere. While Paul is on one of the narrow streets, a vintage car pulls up and the passengers invite Gil to get in with him. Eventually Gil does, and the car takes all of them to a bar that seems like it's as out of the past as the old vintage car that drove them there is. Everybody else is dressed like they're from the 1920s, and old Cole Porter songs are playing.

And then Gil notices that the pianist looks surprisingly like Cole Porter himself. Surely that can't be possible, but then other similar folks from the age when the "Lost Generation" was in Paris show up, starting with Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Obviously, this confuses Gil greatly, since he's from 2010 and there's no way this can possibly actually be the 1920s, no matter how much they drop names like Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), and Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody). Perhaps somehow, Gil really has been transported to the 1920s.

This is all exceedingly complicated for poor Gil, since there's no way anybody's going to believe that he spent a night in the 1920s. And when does he get sleep anyway? F. Scott Fitzgerald introduces Gil to Ernest Hemingway, who offers to share Gil's manuscript with Gertrude Stein. But as Gil leaves the building, he finds it's no longer a 1920s building.

At least, not until the following midnight. He gets picked up again, and this time meets Picasso's mistress Adriana (Marion Cotillard), who starts a relationship with him and like Gil has an interest in the past. Except of course, the past for Adriana is a different past than for Gil. And how is Gil going to resolve his relationships with everybody back in 2010?

Midnight in Paris was for me, a charming little movie. Sure, it's unrealistic, but the movie makes no pretense of being grounded in reality. It's just a fun little story that to me didn't feel like it was trying to do anything profound. Just sit back and enjoy this little fantasy.

Annie Hall

Another of the movies considered an all-time classic that I haven't blogged about here before is Annie Hall. I recorded it back in March when TCM ran it as part of 31 Days of Oscar, but never got around to watching it. I noticed in looking through the schedule that is has two airings on TCM in the coming week, one tomorrow (Nov. 27) at 6:15 PM, and the other on Dec. 2 at 1:45 PM, so I figured now was a good time to watch it and do a post on it.

Annie Hall is, I think, really the blossoming of Woody Allen playing neurotic New York types, with more emphasis on the neurosis than on the comedy surrounding his character the way that things like Bananas or Sleeper did. Here, Allen plays Alvy Singer, a comedian obsessed with death and still thinking about the love of his life that he lost, one Annie Hall (Diane Keaton). As Alvy starts thinking about Annie, cue the flashback....

Well, not quite. Annie Hall isn't a straight flashback story, although a lot of it is in what would normally be considered a flashback. However, it doesn't feel like a normal flashback in that the story of the relationship isn't told in a straight line from meeting through to breakup. Instead, the flashbacks go back and forth in time, while they're frequently broken to return to Alvy in the present day breaking the fourth wall and talking either to the viewer directly or to people on the street.

As I said, Alvy is a New York comedian, with a best friend in Rob (Tony Roberts), a comedian himself who ultimately gets an offer to do a TV show out in Los Angeles. That's a place that, as we'll see later in the movie, is much different from New York. As for Annie (Diane Keaton), she's originally from Wisconsin and still has family out there, but she's come to New York to make it as a singer mostly; she eventually gets discovered by another singer, Tony Lacey (Paul Simon) and moves out to Los Angeles, putting a strain on the relationship.

In and around all this, we see how the two actually met (at a tennis club), how they decided to move in together, and then how they decided to move apart before the ultimate breakup and then, like the end of The Way We Were, running into each other by chance some time after the breakup.

Annie Hall is the sort of move that I think isn't quite for everybody, but more for people who are really into the whole idea of the art of making movies, especially less commercial movies. If you look at it that way, it's easy to see why critics and the in-the-industry people who make movies and vote on the awards would love this. There's urbane humor and situations for mature people, along with the techniques of breaking the fourth wall and the non-linear storyline that demands the viewer's attention. For people who consider themselves more casual fans or, like myself, non-film school types, I think I'd recommend other of Allen's work first. Other films, where Allen playing a neurotic character doesn't take over the film, work better.

Radio Days

I mentioned a few weeks back that Woody Allen's Radio Days was coming up on the TCM schedule, and that I was looking forward to watching it and doing a review on it here. Since then, I did watch it, so now you get the obligatory review.

Radio Days is the sort of movie that won't really get the more normal sort of synopsis I give here, one that give away a fair amount of the plot up until the climax. That's because Radio Days is a movie that doesn't really have that sort of straightforward plot, instead being a movie that's more a series of vignettes. Woody Allen narrates as adult Joe, who grew up in the late 1930s and 1940s (the adolescent Joe being played by Seth Green). Joe is looking back on his adolescence, and how the radio programs of the day shaped it, these being the days before TV became a thing.

Joe lives in Rockaway Beach, Queens, in a middle-class disproportionately Jewish neighborhood, or at least what passed for middle class in the late 1930s when the middle-class wasn't as well to do as it would become. Indeed, Joe lives with his extended family. In addition to his parents (Julie Kavner and Michael Tucker), there are his grandparents, a married aunt and uncle where the uncle keeps bringing home fish, and maiden aunt Bea (Dianne Wiest), who keeps dreaming of finding a suitable man.

Everybody has their favorite programs on the radio, although the most prominent two are young Joe's love of the superhero The Masked Avenger, and his mother's listening to morning show of husband-and-wife team Roger and Irene, a show that's roughly like a radio version of the old Regis and Kathie Lee on those episodes when Regis Philbin's real-life wife was sitting in for an absent Kathie Lee. Of course, one of the movie's subplots is that Roger and Irene's marriage isn't quite the idyllic life that it's portrayed as being on the radio show, as Roger is seeing a young cigarette girl Sally (Mia Farrow) who would like to break in to the radio businesses. (Irene has a lover too.)

Along the way, World War II intervenes, but not too severely as this is America and the east coast was never seriously going to be invaded despite people thinking they say U-boats on various occasions. A fair portion of the movie is a coming-of-age story for young Joe, but there are subplots involving the various men Aunt Bea is trying to meet; the lives of some of the radio stars; and the mystery of what Joe's father really does for a living as he always seems to have one get-rich-quick scheme after another.

As I said, there's not much of a plot here, as it's more about vignettes. But the vignettes almost all work, even if now and then they seem a bit too neat and tidy. Then again, life memories edited to fit into the running time of a Hollywood movie have a way of doing that. The vignettes also technically cover too much time, going from at least the "War of the Worlds" broadcast in October 1938 to New Year's Eve 1943; this again is something you don't really notice as you're watching the movie, however.

Overall, this Radio Days is more of a love story to Woody Allen's childhood, or perhaps the childhood of someone who would the age of an older brother, but the rosy memories are still entertaining even for someone like me who was born decades after Allen. I really enjoyed Radio Days, and think you will, too.

Interiors

I've had the Woody Allen movie Interiors sitting on my DVR for almost a year now, as I think I recorded it during last year's 31 Days of Oscar when it was in April because of the Academy's moving the ceremony thanks to the coronavirus panic. In any case, I recently got around to watching Interiors so I could do a post here on it.

Geraldine Page plays Eve, the matriarch of a upper-middle-class family. Eve is an interior decorator, with a sense of style that tends toward a lot of white; at the beginning of the movie she's got some ideas for her daughter Joey (Mary Beth Hurt). Joey has done some writing but hasn't really decided on what to do for a career; currently she's living with Mike (Sam Waterston), who is doing research on Marxism. (Plot synopses suggest they're not married, although I don't recall any dialogue in the movie that definitively says whether they're married or just living together.)

Joey has two sisters. Renata (Diane Keaton) lives in New York as do both Eve and the parents; she is a published poet whose husband Frederick (Richard Jordan) is also a writer. The third sister is Flyn (Kristin Griffith); she doesn't show up so often largely because she's an actress who has to go on location to do the low-budget movies, TV shows, and commercials that she appears in. It won't get her to the A list, but it seems that at least it will pay the bills.

We get a sense from the way Eve just waltzed right in to Joey's apartment and started moving stuff around to re-decorate the place that she can be a bit demanding. She's so demanding, in fact, that her husband Arthur (E.G. Marshall) has decided to leave the house and engage in a "trial separation". That trial takes him on a vacation to Greece, and devastates Eve, who acts as though she relied on Arthur quite a bit.

Things are about to get quite a bit worse for Eve, however. Arthur returns home from Greece and announces that he met a nice American widow there, Pearl (Maureen Stapleton). Pearl is everything Eve is not, gregarious and mildly bohemian in that she's learned how to do card tricks and the like. It's easy to see why somebody like Arthur who spent 30-odd years with a woman like Eve would suddenly turn to a person like Pearl. Eve responds to the announcement that Arthur wants a divorce so that he can marry Pearl by attempting to commit suicide.

If there was a rift between Arthur and Eve, there are also rifts between other members of the family. Renata worries about Joey's apparent aimlessness, while Joey has issues with the way her parents treated her and Renata differently. Renata and Joey both also have problems to deal with with the respective men in their lives. That's going to become even more of an issue when Arthur and Pearl decide to have a small wedding ceremony, for family only, in the family's beach house out on Long Island. Eve shows up some time after the actual ceremony, leading to the film's finale.

Interiors is a movie that seems to sharply divide people in their reviews. It's easy to see that the acting is good, as is the direction and production design. But at the same time, it's incredibly difficult to identify with the various characters in the movie, which is almost unrelentingly depressing. Some critics have suggested this was Woody Allen trying to make an Ingmar Bergman movie, and that's not an unfair description. (My first thought for the color scheme was reminiscent of Track of the Cat, but of course Bergman's use of ever more red in Cries and Whispers is fairly similar to the disproportiontely white color palette in Interiors.) It's quite talky, and for a long time it feels as though the movie isn't really going anywhere.

I didn't dislike Interiors to the extent that some people might, but I also definitely didn't like it as much as those who praise it clearly like it. So this is one that you absolutely need to watch for yourself and draw your own conclusions about. Interiors is not a movie for everybody, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, or an insult to the people who find it's not for them.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Another of the movies that I recorded off of one of the Showtime channels is Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona. It's going to be on again, tomorrow (Nov. 5) at 8:15 AM on Flix, and again on Nov. 15, so as always, I made a point of watching it so I could do a review here and free up some space on my DVR.

With a little help from a narrator who gives us voiceover throughout the movie, we learn right away what the title means. Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) are two people and good friends from college. Barcelona, of course is the city in Catalonia known for its architecture and being somewhat different from the rest of Spain. Vicky is working on her master's degree which has to do with Catalan identity, which is part of the reason she's going to Barcelona for the summer before returning home to New York to get married to Doug (Chris Messina); she's also got an aunt Judy (Patricia Clarkson) who lives there with her husband. Cristina doesn't seem to know what she wants to do with her life after having made a short film.

Barcelona being known for that architecture and being a tourist haven, it's unsurprising that the two young women want to go see the city, its sights, and its bustling cultural scene. One day they're at a gallery, wher some of Juan Antonio's (Javier Bardem) works are being exhibited. Later that evening, they all wind up at the same restaurant, albeit with different parties; the two women by themselves and Juan Antonio with a bunch of artist friends. Cristina keeps looking over toward Juan Antonio, who finally comes to their table with an interesting proposition. He's planning to fly to Oviedo in the northwest of Spain for the weekend, and is inviting Vicky and Cristina. The only thing is, he's leaving in an hour or so, so they need to decide right now.

Obviously, we wouldn't have a movie if the two women didn't accept, or at least we'd have a very different movie. They do accept, and as Juan Antonio is showing them the sights of Oviedo which are just as lovely as Barcelona, Cristina finds herself falling in love with Juan Antonio. The only problem is that she has an ulcer which gets aggravated by all the wine she's been drinking, leaving her laid up in bed for a whole day. Vicky, who wasn't so excited about flying off impulsively, since she's got a fiancé back in New York after all, has to go around town just her and Juan Antonio. And wouldn't you know it, she finds herself falling for Juan Antonio too, since he's just so charming.

So there's already the basis for an interesting love triangle, but it's about to get a whole lot more interesting. Vicky, as I already mentioned, has a fiancé, and it turns out that he's got some impulsiveness himself. Since Vicky is going to be spending the entire summer in Barcelona, why doesn't Doug fly over there, work in the company's Barcelona office, and take a weekend off to get married to Vicky in romantic Barcelona before having the big splashy show of a wedding back in the States in the fall? Obviously, it's going to be tough for Vicky to say no.

And then there's Juan Antonio. He's divorced, having had a tempestuous relationship to Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz). However, she suddenly calls up Juan Antonio in the middle of the night because her current relationship with an architect has gone south. She finds that Juan Antonio has an American girlfriend, and there's that tempestuousness.

Whether or not you like Vicky Cristina Barcelona is going to depend in part on what you think of Woody Allen, but more importantly what you think about these particular characters. Thankfully, Allen only directed, so we don't get the annoying neuroticism and unrealisticness of some of the characters Allen played in movies from Annie Hall onward. On the other hand, all of the characters we see are making some pretty big screw-ups with their lives that lead to a lot of complications and potential heartache after the ation in the movie ends. It's easy for somebody detached from the proceedings to see what might happen, but the viewer has the inability to shake some sense into these characters.

As for me, I actually liked the movie despite the sometimes frustrating characters and despite the fact that I'm not the biggest fan of Allen's work. Not that I'd actually want to live with any of these characters, of course. But a 90-minute movie about them works just fine.

Bananas

Probably like a lot of other people, I had seen the Woody Allen movie Bananas when I was college-aged, since some of the individual scenes were fairly famous gags. But in the 13 years I've been doing this blog, I never did a post on it. TCM ran it some months back, so I DVRed it and finally got around to re-watching it to do a post on here.

The movie stars off with a coup in the fictional banana republic of San Marcos, somewhere in Latin America, as narrated by the ABC's Wide World of Sports reporter Howard Cosell. Seemingly unrelated to this is Fielding Mellish (Woody Allen, as if you couldn't tell). He works as a product tester and is a fairly meek man barely getting by in life. One day the young woman Nancy (Louise Lasser) comes to his apartment door, and it changes his life.

Nancy is one of those "socially engaged" types, campaigning for whatever the cause of the day is. The current cause is the revolution in San Marcos, which has the coup leader, Vargas (Carlos Montalban) becoming increasingly dictatorial, to the point that there's a new group of rebels looking to overthrow him. Nancy has a petition regarding getting the US to take action to deal with San Marcos for Mellish to sign, but Mellish seems more interested in bedding Nancy. Nancy figures this out, and wants to break off the relationship since Mellish doesn't show any initiative.

Mellish figures that the best way to win Nancy back is to become socially involved himself, and go down to San Marcos to investigate the situation for himself. Vargas sees in this an opportunity. He can have Mellish killed and blame it on the rebels, which will certainly win him sympathy in the United States. Mellish is just incompetent enough to have enough Mr. Magoo-type calamities befall Vargas' men, with the rebel leader Esposito's (Jacobo Morales) men capturing him instead. But since Vargas says Mellish has been killed anyway, there's not much for Mellish to do but to fall in with Esposito's men.

Eventually, through a comedy of errors, Mellish gets installed as the president of San Marcos, and has to return to the US to try to get the US to give San Marcos foreign aid. However, his real identity is bound to come out, and being a mercenary abroad might be legally problematic for him.

Or at least, all of that is the ostensible plot. In fact, Bananas is more of a series of set pieces hanging on a rather threadbare plot. If you're looking for a coherent story, you're not going to get it here. If you're looking for humor? Well, that depends on your taste in humor. A good portion of the movie still works well, although I have to admit that on the whole I didn't find it quite as funny as I had remembered 30 or so years ago. Certainly, some of the scenes still work, perhaps most notably when Mellish is trying to buy a porno magazine. But in the scenes where he has to be the neurotic sort that is the hallmark of Allen's movies from Annie Hall and beyond, it's not nearly as funny, at least not for me.

Hannah's sisters and her

A couple of months back, TCM had a tribute to the late actor Max von Sydow. One of his films they ran is one in which he's got a supporting role is Hannah and Her Sisters. It's going to be on again, early tomorrow morning at 4:00 AM (or, I suppose, overnight tonight depending on what time zone you're in).

Mia Farrow plays Hannah, one of three daughters in an acting family which is getting together for another Thanksgiving dinner. Patriarch Evan (Lloyd Nolan in his final film) and Mom Norma (Maureen O'Sullivan) do love each other even though they have their squabbles. Hannah is married to Elliot (Michael Caine), not an actor by any means, with a couple of kids. Hannah used to be married to Mickey (Woody Allen), a writer for a sketch comedy TV show.

Hannah's life seems the most in order, as each of her sisters seems to have bigger problems. Lee (Barbara Hershey) is unemployed and living in a sparse studio with her much older artist boyfriend Frederick (that's von Sydow, not that you couldn't figure out which role he was playing since he had a very distinctive look). The other sister, Holly (Dianne Wiest), is trying to get gigs on Broadway or in commercials or anything acting-related, but to shis point she's been rather less than successful, and is reduced to working as a caterer with her friend April (Carrie Fisher).

One Day, Elliot is in a different part of Manhattan for a business meeting but arrives early and has time to kill, so he decides to look for an independent bookstore to browse in. Who should he run into, however, but Lee, who claims to be on her way to her AA meeting? She knows where there's a good bookstore, and after spending some time browsing together, Elliot buys Lee a book of e.e. cummings poetry. The two wind up having an affair, meeting in out of the way hotel rooms.

Holly sees a couple of guys, too, but the relationships don't go so well. Hannah, after her divorce from Mickey, decides to help Mickey and Holly both out by setting the two of them up on a date, but that first date goes disastrously. Then there's an architect whom Holly and April meet at one of their catering gigs. He takes them out to show them the architecture of Manhattan, and Holly even thinks of going out with him, but he can't really decide between the two women.

This being a Woody Allen movie, we also have to talk about his character in more detail. This is another of Allen's nebbish, neurotic types, thinking both that he's got a deadly tumor in his ear and realizing that, as a non-observant Jew, he's got a crisis of faith in wondering what will be after he dies. So he considers joining other religions.

There's quite a lot going on in Hannah and Her Sisters, some of which is quite good, and some of it not as good. Nolan and O'Sullivan shine as the elderly parents in their Thanksgiving scenes together. The Hannah-Elliot-Lee triangle also works well, with all three actors doing a good job and Caine picking up a Supporting Actor Oscar for his part. And as with any Woody Allen movie, people who like New York City will like the photography of New York as it was circa 1985.

Ironically, however, for me, it's the presence of Allen that's one of the weak spots for me. I have to admit I'm not a huge fan of his neurotic shtick from about Annie Hall on, so I tend to be a bit biased against him as an actor. But the contrast in Hannah and Her Sisters was for me even starker than in some of his other movies. We get it, Woody, and it's not as funny as you might think it is.

Allen and Farrow were a couple at the time the movie was made, and some of their children get small roles as Hannah's children. (IMDb also says that Mia Farrow's own apartment was used as one of the sets.) Considering what eventually happened in the Allen/Farrow relationship, some people might find it a bit off-putting. But I didn't find myself thinking about that at all.

When I checked, Hannah and Her Sisters seemed to be out of print on DVD, although it is on Amazon Prime streaming. That's a shame, since the movie is really worth a watch for the performances of pretty much everybody but Woody Allen.

Manhattan

Another of the movies I finally got around to watching recently to do a blog post on is Woody Allen's Manhattan.

Allen plays Isaac, a writer living in late-1970s New York with a screwed-up personal life. He's got an ex-wife Jill (Meryl Streep) who has come out as a lesbian and is living with her female partner. Jill, meanwhile, has written a book about her relationship with Isaac, which is to become a best-seller, at least amongst the set of people that forms Isaac's (and Woody Allen's) cultural milieu.

Isaac, for his part, has met Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) and started a relationship with her, which wouldn't necessarily be a big deal except for the fact that she's only 17 while Isaac is in his mid-40s, shades of the controversy that would pop up in Woody Allen's own personal life some decades later.

And then, to top it off, Isaac has a best friend Yale (Michael Murphy) with his own personal problems. Yale has a wife, but he's also got a mistress in Mary (Diane Keaton). And when Yale introduces Isaac to Mary, Isaac and Mary start up a relationship of their own, despte the fact that Isaac still has feelings for Tracy.

Along the way, everybody meets and talks, and meets and talks some more, with various bon mots thrown in and some sort of resolution between Isaac and Tracy being provided in the film's final scene.

I suppose whether you like Manhattan is going to depend entirely upon whether you like the films of Woody Allen, especially those starting with Annie Hall, or not. I enjoy some of Allen's earlier movies, like Sleeper, Bananas, and Take the Money and Run, and also enjoyed the later Purple Rose of Cairo (which of course doesn't star Allen; he only directed). But I've never been a fan of the "neurotic Allen", so Manhattan is one that I'm rather ambivalent about.

Allen made the conscious decision to film in black and white, and the cinematography is certainly a notable part of the movie, with a bunch of striking images of New York City of the era. That's a big plus, although of course for me it wasn't enough to overcome the plot problems.

Still, if you like Woody Allen, I think you're definitely going to like Manhattan. If you haven't seen any of his movies, I'd suggest starting with the earlier stuff.

The Purple Rose of Cairo

I notice that the Woody Allen movie The Purple Rose of Cairo is going to be on TCM tomorrow afternoon at 2:15 PM. So this morning was the perfect time to sit down to watch it again and do a blog post here.

Mia Farrow plays Cecilia, a struggling waitress in New Jersey in 1935 who lives with her husband Monk (recently deceased Danny Aiello), an unemployed factory worker (remember, this being 1935, there's a depression on). It's not much of a life, so to deal with the humdrum existence, Cecilia likes to go to the local movie theater for some escapism, seeing a movie called The Purple Rose of Cairo multiple times.

She's about to start seeing the movie more, because she finds that Monk is cheating on her while a dispute with her boss at the diner gets her fired. So after leaving Monk she decides to spend all day at the theater watching this formulaic movie. The plot of the movie-within-a-movie, such as it is, has some socialites going on a trip to North Africa where they meet adventurer Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels) and bring him back to New York.

If the movie-within-a-movie is less than exciting for those of us who have watched a ton of 1930s movies, imagine how it must have been for the actors who had to do take after take. So one day, while Cecilia is watching the movie for the umpteenth time in a row, something strange happens. Tom Baxter decides he's tired of this lame story, and decides to step off the screen, having seen the way Cecilia eyes the dashing young adventurer! The two then run out a side door of the theater.

Now, this doesn't seem to be a fantasy or dream sequence, because odd things start happening at the theater. The other characters in the movie-within-a-movie start complaining about the absence of Baxter, and start showing up as though they're actors on the set back in Hollywood, between takes. And other patrons in the movie theater start complaining about what they're seeing, since they paid to see an actual movie after all.

News of this all hits Hollywood, where Gil Shepherd (Jeff Daniels again), the actor who plays Tom Baxter, is horrified because of this and what his character's refusal to keep doing the story will mean for his career. So Gil heads off to New Jersey to try to find Tom, meeting Cecilia along the way since she's more or less protecting Tom. As for Tom, he begins to have problems since he's still not a real person despite having stepped off the screen....

It's an interesting premise, and one that's handled pretty well by Allen and the actors. Daniels, with the double role, has the most to do here and shows again that he's actually a capable actor. Farrow is good as well, although I find it difficult to think or her apart from the personal problems in her relationship with Woody Allen. Watch for Van Johnson in a small role as one of the characters in the movie-within-a-movie; I also could have sworn one of the complaining patrons looked and sounded a bit like Broderick Crawford, although IMDb and Wikipedia say no. I think fans of 1930s movies will really enjoy Allen's homage to the genre here.

The Purple Rose of Cairo seems to be out of print on DVD, although you can watch it at Amazon streaming if you can do the streaming thing.

I've never been a big fan of Sleeper

I see that Woody Allen's Sleeper is on tonight at 8:00 PM on TCM. I saw it once, well over a dozen years ago, and to be honest I've never had a desire to see it a second time.

Sleeper is well enough known that you probably all know the basic story already. Woody Allen plays Miles, a man who dies in the early 1970s and gets cryogenically frozen, in the hopes that scientists in the future will be able to solve his medical problems and bring him back to life. Two hundred years later, medicine has advanced to the point that this is possible, so Miles is brought back to life.

Of course, there's all sorts of culture shock, and that provides much of the humor for the first half to two-thirds of the movie. The historians get a warped view of 1970s America from Miles, while he's shocked to find that things like nutritional science have changed in the intervening 200 years. And then there are future things like the "Orgasmatron".

But the other half of the plot is where I found problems with the movie. The future world is a dictatorship, and Miles has to flee because the future would people want him for nefarious purposes of their own. Those fighting the dictatorship want him, as well, as he's the one person who really can take down the dictator, something having to do with the dictator's nose. When the plot moves to getting the dictator's nose, I found that th emovie really lost whatever steam it had built up. It's not as irritating as Annie Hall and the rest of the nebbish Woody Allen stereotype, but you can see the seeds of it.

But, of course, there are a lot of people who like Woody Allen movies and who will like Sleeper.