A Very, Very Resilient Little Muscle

“How the hell do I know why there were Nazis? I don’t know how the can opener works!”

One thing I like about Woody Allen is that, for the most part — and unlike so many of even my favorite movie directors — he tries to create complete, psychologically complex female characters. It doesn’t always work, but I appreciate the effort. Martin Scorsese, to pick just one example, has made some of my favorite movies ever, but no more than a handful of female character with more than two dimensions.

Mia Farrow, Dianne Weist, and Barbara Hershey star in Hannah and Her Sisters as Hannah and… her sisters, Holly and Lee. Hannah is married to Michael Caine’s Elliot, and her ex-husband is hypochodriachal comedy writer Mickey, played by — well, you’ll never guess. But Allen wisely casts himself here as a kind of comedic Greek chorus figure, and not the leading man. The sisters’ various relationships, with each other and with a number of different men, make up the movie’s many plot threads, particularly Elliot’s doomed secret affair with Lee. (Michael Caine is one of the very, very few actors who could pull off this role without leaving you loathing the character, although I still end up having less sympathy for him than Allen’s script seems to). The great ensemble of complex, distinctive, well-drawn characters is the real strength of Hannah and Her Sisters – one of my favorite Woody Allen movies after Annie Hall and Manhattan, and one that he clearly poured a lot of care into.

The movie is packed with cameos, and future stars in small roles – Julie “Marge Simpson” Kavner plays a producer on a comedy show that also employs, for one or two lines each, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Lewis Black, and John Turturro. Allen must have had one hell of a casting director. Sam Waterston plays a slimy-suave architect who dates both Holly and her friend April – who’s played by Carrie Fischer. J.T. Walsh and Daniel Stern make appearances, the sisters’ parents are played by the late, great Lloyd Nolan and Maureen O’Sullivan, and Lee’s pretentious older artist lover is the awesome Max von Sydow. A very very young Soon-Yi Previn even shows up at the end as a “Thanksgiving Guest”.

Woody Allen, even in his youth, was always something of a grumpy old man – he never warmed up to rock and roll even a little bit, and after complaining about Bob Dylan in Annie Hall, here he grouches endlessly about having to sit through the “noise” of a punk band. Everyone in this movie loves opera, jazz, classical music, fine art, and Cole Porter; only Diane Weist’s insecure cokehead listens to musical genres that developed since 1950. But if you can overlook those rather anachronistic character touches in a movie that’s otherwise very much of its 1980s New York setting, you find some very believable, recognizable people. No one in this movie is a villain; everyone is just trying to muddle through, with varying degrees of success. And Allen’s script is big enough to find some sympathy for everyone.

Much like Mia Farrow’s character in Purple Rose of Cairo, Woody Allen’s Mickey essentially has his life saved after a half-hearted suicide attempt by movies – in this case, the Marx Brothers, who convince him that even if life is meaningless and God nonexistent, we might as well try to enjoy ourselves while we’re here. I never found it especially convincing that he and a suddenly transformed Dianne Weist end up blissfully together at the end of the film (with her sister’s/his ex-wife’s blessing), but I do buy into the moral a bemused Allen expresses in the final scene – “The heart is a very, very resilient little muscle, it really is.”

In a way, it’s the same message Allen had for the audience at the end of Annie Hall – a message I like so much that when my dad asked me to read something at his wedding last month, that’s what I picked. We need the eggs.

Granted, all of this might be a little easier to fully embrace if Allen’s own private life hadn’t taken such a creepy turn in the 90s, but never mind; as is so often the case, you have to separate the man’s personal life from his creative one if you hope to ever enjoy a movie without conducting a moral audit of its director. Which is something that I think Allen, or at least the desperate movie-loving character he plays here, would entirely agree with.

After visiting with Danny Rose, Woody Allen’s most optimistic creation, perhaps it’s best to begin our exploration of The Purple Rose of Cairo with Woody’s take on the film, from Conversations with Woody Allen by Eric Lax:

When I first got the idea, it was just a character comes down from the screen, there are some high jinks, but then I thought, where would it go? Then it hit me: the actor playing the character comes to town. After that it opened up like a great flower. Cecilia had to decide, and chose the real person, which was a step up for her. Unfortunately, we must choose reality, but in the end it crushes us and disappoints. My view of reality is that it is a pretty grim place to be, (pause) but it’s the only place you can get Chinese food.

This should prepare you for the sadness that accompanies a viewing of this film and the sorry state of the lead character, Mia Farrow’s Cecilia.

Set in New Jersey of the 1930s Cecilia is buried beneath a country-wide Depression that has claimed the humanity of her husband Monk, a dastradly Danny Aiello, and, with the help of Allen’s longtime collaborator Gordon Willis, drained the color from the world around her. Woody recollects:

I deliberately wanted her to come out [of the theater] to a very unpleasant situation for her. Gordon was able to do that. I described to him coming out of the movie theater and it suddenly being the real world in all its ugliness.

Cecilia waits tables and trods beaten paths to broken door frames amid drab New Jersey browns. She finds solace at the local movie theater, where, in a neat reversal of the color-coding of The Wizard of Oz, the black-and-white of the fantasy world on screen is a veritable wonderland of richness and possibility and the colors of reality are stifling.

Woody Allen doesn’t appear in this film, and if you squint really hard, I guess you can see some of him in Cecilia. But I think that “looking for Woody” in the films in which he does not appear is sometimes a mistake. And it does a disservice to Mia Farrow’s performance. Woody Allen does not hold a patent on neurotic behavior – I found Mia’s Cecilia to be an original. Her beaming recollections of the previous night’s cinema smoothly countering her fumbling dishes at the diner.

But you can’t break dishes during a Depression. Her job lost and her two-timing abusive husband a constant oppression, she returns again and again to the cinema to lose herself in the latest bit of romantic escapism on display: The Purple Rose of Cairo, featuring an explorer named Tom Baxter, of the Chicago Baxters, whose import to the film is of some contention. Regardless, Cecilia fixates on him to the point that he notices. Upon her fifth viewing, Tom decides to approach her – by walking out of the screen and into the theater.

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We’re getting into a definite type of situation here…

My mother took me to see Jason Robards and Collen Dewhurst in Long Day’s Journey Into Night on Broadway for my seventeenth birthday. We went to a Wednesday afternoon matinee in late June, 1988. Before the show I interviewed for a summer job as a messenger at Sound One, at the time the biggest post-production film company on the east coast. Sound One rented out a majority of space in the Brill Building, the city landmark on 49th Street and Broadway.

The Brill Building in the 1930s and Today (New York Times)

The Brill Building was one of the homes to the music business dating back to the Tin Pan Alley Days. Neil Diamond, Laura Nyro and Carol King worked there in the Sixties. By the time I arrived, there were a just few holdovers from the music business—Paul Simon had a suite on the 5th floor—but it was mostly about film. Martin Scorsese had his offices there, so did Paul Schrader, and Lorne Michaels’ company, Broadway Video, ran most of what Sound One didn’t.

It is a small building, only 11 stories. Today, a skyscraper hotel sits to its right on the southwest corner of 49th street. Another skyscraper is across the street on the east side of Broadway between 49th and 50th. In 1988, there was a pornographic movie theater across the street on Broadway, another one on 49th between Broadway and Seventh Avenue, and yet another one on the east side of Broadway between 49th and 48th. 

I got the job and spent many days during the hot New York summer walking between the Brill Building and the Technicolor lab down on 44th Street, between 8th and 9th Avenue, passing by hookers with bruised arms and legs and over empty crack vials in the cracks of the sidewalks.

There was one guy left over from the old days of the music business, guy named Benny Ross. He owned “St. Nicholas Music,” which had a dusty office on the sixth floor. St. Nicholas was famous for publishing Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer. Benny was a nice man, shrunken little Jewish guy, always ready with a handshake and a kind word. “Hi,howareya?” He’d come upstairs to Sound One and get a cup of coffee and eat a slice of pound cake and schmooze-up whoever was in the vicinity. And he’d take the new messengers into his stuffy little office and offer up any of the dozens of free promotional records that were sent to him.

Benny was from the Old School, the vanishing show business world that is so affectionately depicted in Woody Allen’s 1984 comedy Broadway Danny Rose. Woody plays Danny Rose, a lovable lowlife theatrical manager, whose best act is Lou Canova, an Italian lounge singer. According to Sandy Morse, who edited all of Allen’s movies from Manhattan through Celebrity, they found Nick Apollo Forte, a real-life singer who plays Canova, in the 99-cent cutout bin at Colony Records, downstairs in the Brill Building. They were mixing the sound for Zelig at Sound One, came across a couple of Forte’s records and knew they had their man.

Broadway Danny Rose is all of a piece, a pastrami-on-rye sandwich shot in grainy black-and-white. It’s Allen’s gift to Mia Farrow and a fine tribute to the Broadway Area, from Damon Runyon through Sid Caesar, the Catskills all the way to the Joe Franklin Show.

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Woody Allen Week

The quirky, complex Woody Allen has had, amongst his many dimensions and vocations,  a 40-year career as a movie writer, director and actor.   With about 60 movies to his credit in one way or another, it might surprise folks to read that he considers Zelig (1983) one of his six favorites.

Zelig was remarkable for its time, a feature-length, theatrical  “mockumentary”.  Prior to Zelig, Allen’s own 1969 release “Take the Money and Run” and Albert Brooks’ 1979 film “Real Life” were probably the most recognizable mockumentaries (even before that term was coined by Rob Reiner for his “This Is Spinal Tap“).  Spinal Tap may have been the more mainstream, commercially-popular example of the genre upon its initial release in 1984. However, Zelig placed its subject in a historical context, and the subject’s actions had an impact on world affairs.  This weighty undertaking was then combined with the standard mockumentary “inside joke” humor, fanciful examples of whimsy, and an actual love story, and encompassed all of that within a technical expertise that predated the digital film-making techniques available beginning in the early ’90s.  Its a heady endeavor for a movie that clocks in at a mere 79 minutes.

Set primarily in the 1920s and ’30s, Zelig tells the fictional story of one Leonard Zelig, a seemingly ordinary man who is discovered to have the unique ability to take on the physical characteristics of those around him.  While the premise might seem too thin or flimsy for a feature-length movie (Forrest Gump, anyone?), Allen presents and portrays Zelig as a damaged soul, who seemingly finds acceptance through his “chameleon” nature, albeit with severe (and severely funny) consequences.

Vincent Canby noted this satisfyingly broad palette in his review:

Yet ”Zelig” is not only pricelessly funny, it’s also, on occasion, very moving. It works simultaneously as social history, as a love story, as an examination of several different kinds of film narrative, as satire and as parody.

Co-star Mia Farrow is brilliantly understated in her role as Dr. Eudora Fletcher, a psychiatrist who wants to help Zelig with this strange disorder. She futilely attempts to hypnotize him, and here the film has some of its most riotously dry and funny scenes, with her and Zelig arguing over whether Zelig himself is a doctor.  Allen’s trademark stand-up intonations, timing and vocal patterns imbue the scenes with pure joy.  (4:00 mark onward).

Eventually, she succeeds in hypnotizing him, and through this discovers that he yearns for approval so strongly he physically changes to fit in with those around him. Fletcher’s devotion to finding a cure for Zelig eventually pays off, but not without complications; now Zelig develops a personality which is violently intolerant of other people’s opinions.

I mentioned that this is in fact a love story, as Dr. Fletcher does fall for the lonely, misunderstood, unloved Zelig. While real-life stories of doctors having relationships with their patients may incur scorn, here the storytelling is subtle enough, and the suspension of “reality” legitimate enough, that this “taboo” is overlooked.  Fletcher’s fierce determination to cure Zelig is set against her unfulfilling romance with a man much higher on the social scale.  But something in Zelig, and something about Zelig, beguiles and enchants her to the point of choosing him.

Meanwhile, because of the media coverage of the case, both patient and doctor become part of the popular culture of their time.   Here the technical wizardry and cinematography really come to fore, as Allen’s character seamlessly interacts with the political and socialite stars of the day, from Fanny Brice to Adolf Hitler.

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Just a quick teaser for what’s coming next week, when we cover one of the Wood Man’s greatest periods, the early Orion run: Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters and Radio Days.

I was always interested in gangsters and people don’t associate me with that because of their image of me on the screen. They think I’m more intellectual than I am, because I wear glasses and I’m built slightly.

But the truth is I came from the streets of Brooklyn. I’m not educated–I mean I was thrown of college in my freshman year. My father was always, you know, a cab driver or a pool hustler. He ran a pool room. He worked for Albert Anastasia for a while, taking bets at Saratoga. I had always had an interest in and a feeling for that.

I’m not a gangster, but I’m more of that world. I’m more the guy that’s home with a beer in his undershirt watching the Television set, than I am pouring over, you know, the Russian novelists. I mean, I’ve read things over the years to keep up with my dates, but the truth of the matter is my heart has always been at the ballpark.

Woody Allen to Richard Schickel

Say Word, Woody!

[Photo Credit: Eclectic Commons]

Since July 4th was Louis Armstrong’s birthday (and even if it wasn’t his official birthday, play along), let’s dedicate the rest of the week’s beats to him. Here’s one of Woody’s favorites: