(Nervous throat clearing) There was a time when I knew all the Woody Allen movies. I have fond memories and have had a great many laughs from watching his golden period of comedy productions: “Play it again, Sam,” “Take the Money and Run,” “Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex,” “Love & Death,” “Sleeper,” “Annie Hall,” “Manhattan,” “Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy,” “Stardust Memories,” “Purple Rose of Cairo,” “Zelig,” “Hannah and her Sisters” “Radio Days,” “Alice,” “Mighty Aphrodite” and “Bullets Over Broadway.” Quite an outstanding late 20th century film repertoire, with homages to his beloved New York City in color and black and white, the music of Porter and Gershwin, and lots of witty jokes about s-e-x and his personal favorite musing and lifelong fear, death—the last two subjects the only things he believes in to paraphrase his character’s last line in “Sleeper.” Come on, I was hardly alone in perceiving the little guy as a comedy genius, not necessarily sexy yet his movies afterwards seemed to cast a spell of lovemaking.
Before I knew anything about Woody Allen, other than his trademark unattractive black frame glasses and nervous comedy bits, there was a TV game show featuring a trio of celebrity couples. In “Tattletales” the wives would answer questions, and their husbands guessed the answers then vice versa. In a circa 1981 episode, the question for the ladies was “Who would you rather sleep with: Ronald Reagan or Woody Allen?” The women, all seasoned actresses, answered hands down “Woody Allen.” At the time, I could not fathom the two choices.
Reluctantly I’ve been watching HBO’s “Allen v Farrow” (an ironic title since it seems to be the other way around). So now I’m confronted when recalling Allen’s movies with the mind of a much older woman and through the prerequisite 21st century MeToo gaze. There’s even a sick feeling when hearing a film expert, a former fan who purposely and thoroughly studied Allen’s body of work including nonpublished manuscripts, submits that the filmmaker habitually wrote about a young woman or a much younger female in love with or sheepishly pursuing Allen or an older man. Guess Allen didn’t realize he couldn’t play 30 or 40 the rest of his life and get away with love scenes with women in their 20s, college girls, or like in “Manhattan” a high school student played then by 16-year-old Mariel Hemingway.
Casting perspective on a generation
When I first heard about the ugly ‘p’ word associated with Allen by his former lover and leading actress Mia Farrow, I didn’t know what to think. The ‘p’ word became public rumor right after Farrow inadvertently discovered Allen was having an affair with her adopted teen-age daughter. Farrow and Allen never lived together but kept separate New York apartments, not unlike ‘free floating life rafts’ to paraphrase a line by Allen in “Annie Hall,” which is said because his character did not want to live with his girlfriend Annie but wanted to continue their adult relationship while living separately. The implication was Allen’s character, twice divorced like the actor in real life, was immature.
The ‘p’ bomb was dropped by Farrow regarding another adopted baby that Allen agreed to father. The allegations are he had an ‘intense’ relationship with this one child, a curly haired baby girl. Somehow in their unusually close relationship, allegedly a line was crossed—and there are witnesses including the now grown daughter herself. She is adamant Allen on more than one occasion sexually abused her when she was a little girl. Allen’s team of lawyers countered that the allegations were coached by Farrow in revenge for his admitted affair with her teenage daughter.
Someone bring me a martini, to paraphrase another classic Woody Allen movie line in response to a sordid romantic triangle in which his character finds himself.
The news died down when Allen was never charged with a crime, which it appears the HBO doc is implying should have occurred. But the investigation was in the early 1990s. We’re a more woke generation now in 2021. We think we’re real, can see the ugly truth in everything, have reached the Age of No BS.
Still. Like millions of former and closet Woody Allen fans, I do not know him. There was a time I thought I’d come close to meeting him. I was in NYC in December 1991 and planned to go to Michael’s Pub where I heard he played clarinet. I called and found he plays on Monday nights, and I was there on a weekend. Nevertheless, I shot pictures of the Big Apple in black and white film because of Woody Allen. Two collages of pictures remain on my bathroom walls, perhaps exactly where they belong.
Through the years, I’ve occasionally caught an Allen movie on TCM usually around Oscar season or when they do a tribute to New York City or an era of fine comedy writers. After all, Allen wrote for Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” along with Mel Brooks and Neil Simon. And like other fans, I admire the film work of art and comedy … but quietly ponder if Allen is just a dirty old man and should have gone to prison.
The Beautiful People
When the story came out about his romance with Soon-Yi Previn, Farrow’s adopted teen daughter, any fan would think of “Manhattan.” In the movie, his 40-something character wrestles with dating a high school girl. With her fresh young face and girlish voice, she tells him she thinks she’s in love with him. They have a chemistry, many things in common, as if she is more mature than her high school age and even wise beyond her years. Yet he knows this relationship is, well, wrong. He breaks up with her to date someone his age, but then that woman dumps him. As creative therapy, his character records a list of things he loves. The last thing he says to himself is the face of his former too-young girlfriend. He thinks he screwed up dumping her and literally runs to get her back. But it’s too late, and he has to accept it.
I also thought about other love interests in Allen’s movies and how their figures have always been slim and their appearance waifish. In armchair psychoanalysis, I wonder if the writer is attracted to younger females, those who are not yet womanly in shape, have yet if ever developed a figure that says across the screen “Va-va-va-voom! Now here’s a grown woman, no doubt about it.” Mia Farrow and Diane Keaton, two of his co-stars and his former real-life girlfriends, were slim and trim and able to play younger women, not girls, for a couple of decades in Woody Allen movies.
The MeToo movement asks us to ignore the other side of an age-old story: Sometimes a young female thinks she’s in love with or, if more secure than insecure, goes after an older male. Like it or not, this relationship (that we used to think was none of our business) has not only been the subject of art for centuries, it’s also common in life and coupling. There is an age when a man should not date or pursue a female. There is right and wrong, and the law makes it clear age wise. But men have gone after younger females way before “Peyton Place.” We even had a President who on more than one occasion dumped his aging wife for a younger model. Men who can do.
Are we going to banish everyone who had anything to do with the older man and the younger female in real life and in works of fiction? That would include Harrison Ford now and the director Stephen Spielberg. Remember that scene in “Indiana Jones” where during one of Dr. Jones’ college lectures on anthropology, a female student bats her eyes closed with the legible words “Love You” painted on the lids? Then there’s the storyline about Jones and his former dalliance with the daughter of a colleague. The two former lovers meet up some years later in Nepal where she is still angry at him, telling him what he did was wrong and he knew it because she was just a child. And Mr. Man tells her she knew what she was doing. She wants an apology, and he apologizes. Then she pushes for more remorse, and a put-out Indiana Jones responds he can say he’s sorry only so much. The movie has a happy ending in that the two sorta get together, and we learn in a sequel made decades later they had a son.
It’s just so hard for me and maybe others to believe Woody Allen, the little weasel whose comedy centered on sex and romantic relationships, is a pedophile. Then again, throughout his celebrity he notoriously shunned interviews and maintained a very private life. What could have been his reason? In his movies, his characters always make clear his disdain for the pretension of show business.
In the end Allen married Soon-Yi. They have been married a few decades and raised kids. The couple lives and travels together as husband and wife. They have indeed grown old together, contrary to the early Woody Allen movies when his characters doubted such a normal life possible because he was too neurotic. Whether their love is real or their marriage a ploy to kill rumors about alleged depravity remains unknown. Because none of us knows this man or any of these people. Allen insists even in his end-of-life memoir that this girl Soon-Yi entered his life and eventually there was an attraction. When all of this was blowing up in his face and nobody could believe the legendary Woody Allen was really in love with such a young girl who had absolutely nothing in common with him, having been a poor orphan across the world, he replied pitifully, “The heart wants what it wants.”
Somebody cue September Song—because that’s what I hear whenever reminiscing about a Woody Allen movie.