Woody Allen

Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)

I read that this film is "deep" but not that deep to the point I took time to come out of it. Some of my fav quotes:

Show business is, is dog-eat-dog. It's worse than dog-eat-dog. It's dog-doesn't-return-other-dog's-phone-calls :lol:

I don't know from suicide, you know. Where I grew up in Brooklyn we were too unhappy to commit suicide

Last time I was inside a woman was when I visited the Statue of Liberty :rotfl:

Classic Woody. And great turn from Martin Landau.

Angelica Houston :evil: But its okay, minor annoyance, that's all.

Glad you enjoyed it groucho.
It is arguably the 'deepest' Woody film I have watched till date. Annie Hall is great but is very focused on the relationship alone. Here it is about the possibilities and more importantly the possibilities realized by others but not by oneself, the inability to learn from others as one has to live one's life oneself...all that was just extremely well done. And such weighty stuff done with humour !!!

When Cliff mentions that Prof. Levy committed suicide. Such a laugh-out-loud scene but arguably the heaviest scene in the movie too. Genius.

Looked up Angelica Huston.The one who played Dolores I see. I thought she fit the role quite well.

Great description of what the film is about, PR. Couldn't have said it better. Woody's lifelong obsession with love, life, sex & death & exudes well in this beautifully crafted script.

But it's really tough to pick out his best. And I will definitely shortlist this one.

Angelica is the great director John's daughter. She can also be seen in MMM. It's my problem actually, when I look at her I see female younger version of John Houston :oops:

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (1972)

Trip back to early Woody. No holds barred, straight to laugh riot materials here. This is Woody in Mel Brook's market segment, only its more adult. After this movie, you will not look at boobies the same way again :lol:

We can say "boobies" here, can we? :oops:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by groucho070

Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)

And Woody being Woody, throws in some human relationship issues, but the love triangle/Quadrangle thingy is not new.

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MMM was supposed to be Annie Hall .

The scene in the hotel room with an extremely paranoid Woody was (intruder a adikkalaamnu ready a iruppaaru..) :rotfl3: Pure slapstick

VCB again. Why don't WA fans recognise this? It is definitely not in Annie Hall's class, but definitely a great watch.

To date I have seen the following Woody films and MMM still remains my most favourite with Annie Hall coming a close second:
Of his more dramatic pieces I do prefer Hannah and her sisters...and I liked Woody's Fellinesque "Stardust Memories" more than I liked Fellini's 81/2.

Annie Hall
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Bananas
What's Up Tiger Lily
Sleeper
Love and Death
Interiors
Stardust Memories
Zelig
Hannah and her Sisters

I know I still have a long way to go and am missing a lot of his more popular works.

And old piece comparing Woody to Chaplin. Personal, but interesting how the writer tied things up.

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/09/27/mo...gewanted=print

September 27, 1992
FILM VIEW; Chaplin Blazed the Trail. Woody Allen Follows.

By Neal Gabler;
FOR ANYONE WHO HAS BEEN following the messy fracas between Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, and especially anyone who has seen his new film, "Husbands and Wives," the operative terms of the scandal are art and life. But whose art and whose life?

The answer seems self-evident. (Woody Allen's, you idiot! Who else's?) Yet as the public may observe for itself when Richard Attenborough's biographical film "Chaplin" is released at Christmas, the correspondences between Charlie Chaplin's life and work and Woody Allen's are remarkable -- so remarkable, in fact, that it almost seems Woody Allen has been sculpting his own life along the lines of Chaplin's. He has been playing Zelig to Chaplin, the greatest of American film icons, perhaps hoping to achieve the same results both professionally and personally.

Begin with the similarities between their careers. Recruited from a vaudeville troupe for the movies in 1914, Chaplin made his early reputation with inexpensive knockabout comedies that won such instant popularity that one observer described the phenomenon as "Chaplinitis." Chaplin was certainly funny, even if genteel critics found his comedy coarse and vulgar. The problem was that he was just funny.

At least that was the problem for intellectuals who, having taken notice of Chaplin's exceptional rise, began to bestow their blessing upon him. But to satisfy their own misgivings about popular art, the intellectuals wanted more than just funny. If Charlie were the latest avatar of the commedia dell'arte, if he were the absolute refinement of physical grace as well as the height of cinematic art, then he should dare to be tragic, too. Only that would legitimize him and levitate him from low art to high.

Uneducated and insecure, Chaplin may have taken up the challenge with too much relish. "The Elizabethan style of humor, this crude form of farce and slapstick comedy," he apologized early on, "was due entirely to my early environment, and I am now trying to steer clear from that sort of humor. . . ." From now on, he would be adding pathos to his range. His films would be "more subtle." He would, to use a phrase of Woody Allen's, be dining at the grown-up table.

There had been harbingers of pathos in other films, but it was in 1920 with "The Kid," a maudlin tragicomedy about an orphan and Chaplin's character the Tramp, that he was acknowledged to have made the crossover. For Chaplin, though, tragi comedy still wasn't enough to prove his artistry. With "A Woman of Paris," a 1923 romantic melodrama that he directed but in which he did not appear, he temporarily abandoned comedy altogether. That made him an artist.

At the same time, as Charles Maland of the University of Tennessee has detailed in his critical study "Chaplin and American Culture," Chaplin's public image was changing, too. Suddenly he was no longer just a lowborn, demotic performer getting laughs like his contemporaries Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. Interviewers never failed to mention that Chaplin read constantly. He told one he had recently read Shakespeare "from beginning to end" and was acquainted with "the works of George Eliot and other noted writers." Now, as an intellect and an artist, he could win the intellectuals' highest accolade: Charlie Chaplin was being called a "genius."

If all of this sounds vaguely familiar, it should, because in many ways it is the story of Woody Allen. He, too, began in the movies with inexpensive comedies that were just funny. He, too, won a considerable following -- though nowhere near as large as Chaplin's -- and he, too, began to be adopted by intellectuals who appreciated his deft humor. Like Chaplin, he seems to have accepted their judgment that being "just funny" wasn't sufficient, and like Chaplin he made the crossover to "more subtle" comedy in 1977 with his own "Kid," "Annie Hall."

But "Annie Hall" was, he told his biographer Eric Lax, "still the area of romantic comedy and 'relationships,' which I mean pejoratively." Like Chaplin, Allen needed a complete break from humor. "Interiors," an austere 1978 drama without a laugh and without Woody, was to be his "Woman of Paris," his bid to establish himself as a dramatist as Chaplin had. Having done so, Woody Allen was soon regarded not only as a serious artist and bona fide intellectual; he was being called a genius, too. It couldn't have been lost on him that among American film makers, only Chaplin had navigated the same course and only Chaplin would have comparable intellectual cachet.

One could detect Chaplin's spiritual guidance not only in the overall design of Woody Allen's career but in the themes of certain of Woody's films. Rebuffed by his audience, in 1952 Chaplin had made "Limelight," in which he played an aging performer trying to come to terms with his rejection. ("The heart and the mind -- what an enigma!" he says, anticipating Allen's recent proclamation about his situation: "The heart wants what it wants.") Apparently angered at his audience for demanding that he be just funny again, Allen made the mean-tempered "Stardust Memories" in 1980, so much like "Limelight." Similarly, the 1947 "Monsieur Verdoux," starring Chaplin as a guiltless murderer who justifies his crimes by appealing to the even larger crimes of society, anticipates Allen's 1989 meditation on guilt, "Crimes and Misdemeanors," which in turn anticipated his response to the moral hand-wringing over his relationship with Mia Farrow's 21-year-old adopted daughter.

There was another important respect in which Chaplin seems to have served as Woody Allen's role model: his relationship to Hollywood. To be regarded as a serious artist in a commercial medium meant declaring one's independence from Hollywood, where movies, according to Chaplin, were mass-produced. As a result, tucked away in his own studio, Chaplin self-consciously guarded the artistic process in a way no other commercial American film maker had or could. When he signed with First National Pictures in 1917, trading money for time and creative control, he announced, he was going to make "perfect pictures."

Within a few years, he formed United Artists with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D. W. Griffith -- another attempt to protect his creative prerogatives from the ordinary studio predators. Only Griffith had had anything like Chaplin's authority, and Griffith only briefly. But Woody Allen, at United Artists and then, when its executives decamped, at Orion, insisted on creative autonomy and got it, not because he was the most successful film maker but because, like Chaplin, he was regarded as one of the few authentic geniuses; and no one dared interfere.

But if Allen has drawn on the career, the image, the themes and the creative independence of Chaplin, he also seems, especially in light of recent events, to have drawn on Chaplin's life. For one thing, Chaplin had long been known for his collaborations with his wives and lovers. For another, Chaplin had always been attracted to much younger women. (Allen, despite quips about young girls, has been at pains recently to insist that his long-term relationships have always been "age appropriate.") Chaplin's first two wives, Mildred Harris and Lita Grey, were only 16 when he married them, and both relationships quickly dissolved.

In the case of Lita Grey, however, the dissolution didn't come without scandal. Her complaint against Chaplin (which she later admitted was exaggerated by her overzealous attorney) accused him of being "abnormal," "unnatural," "degenerate" and "indecent" -- allegations that sound like the ones made against Allen. Women's groups leapt to Lita Grey's defense. "Is this man permitted to run riot for the rest of his life amid the foolish little girls of the country?" asked one of her supporters, very much in the spirit of what I have heard women saying about Woody.

Chaplin's reputation survived that bout, but he was embroiled in another contretemps years later, when a young actress named Joan Barry filed a paternity suit against him. Symbolically, Chaplin became a moral pariah, just as Woody Allen is today for some people. The conservative press loosed its dogs on Chaplin then, just as the conservatives are attacking Allen now as an example of Eastern liberal immorality. "Woody Allen Is Clinton's Family Values Adviser," read one placard at the Republican convention.

If anything, though, the Barry affair shows the rewards of perseverance. While Chaplin's career did suffer from the negative publicity, his life was renewed. At roughly the same time as the Barry controversy, he met Oona O'Neill, the 15-year-old daughter of Eugene O'Neill, and fell madly in love again. "She worshiped him," Chaplin's son Charles Jr. would write, "drinking in every word he spoke, whether it was about his latest script, the weather or some bit of philosophy." In 1943, when she had turned 18 and Chaplin was 53, they married and remained together, blissfully by most accounts, until his death in 1977.

Allen may have borrowed from Chaplin's professional life, because Chaplin alone achieved the status that Allen has desperately seemed to desire. Why borrow from Chaplin's personal life? Perhaps because he couldn't aspire to be Chaplin without actually becoming Chaplin and because becoming Chaplin meant freeing himself from the sorts of moral restraints that bind ordinary people, not great artists. Geniuses, as both Chaplin and Allen's other inspiration, Ingmar Bergman, demonstrated, must play by different rules -- which makes Allen's behavior certification of his brilliance.

And there is a bonus. Chaplin wound up serene. Maybe this is what Woody Allen has in mind when he quotes his friends' reaction to his relationship to Soon-Yi Farrow Previn, 35 years his junior: "They say, 'You're a lucky guy. . . . You guys have terrific times together. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.' " No matter what anyone says about Allen and Soon-Yi Previn, Chaplin had been there first, and in effect, had sanctioned the romance as he had sanctioned so much else in Woody Allen's life and career.

Of course, no one knows how this tale will turn out -- whether Soon-Yi Previn will be Woody Allen's Lita Grey or his Oona O'Neill or neither. Whatever happens is tangled up in the skein of life and art. But in the end, there remains the possibility that "Woody Allen" may be the fascinating collaboration of two of America's pre-eminent film makers -- that in the end, whatever has happened, whatever will happen, may be their art and their life.

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Thanks for the post Groucho. Here's a pic that suits it

[html:fa498fce00]<img src =http://humanflowerproject.com/images/uploads/woody-allen-penn.jpg>[/html:fa498fce00]

http://humanflowerproject.com/images...allen-penn.jpg

:D Daymmm....someone was using that as avatar sometimes back. Can't remember....