Part 1: Annie Hall: “Walking out, my friend Rick, thirty-plus years [Manhattan] resident said, ‘I had forgotten how Jewish a film it is.’ I really hadn’t noticed. But I’m the wrong guy to ask. It’s like saying to a fish, ‘Do things around here seem really wet to you?’ ”

Part 2: Play It Again, Sam and The Purple Rose of Cairo: “Being funny might just be the great aphrodisiac (take that, jowly, shambling war criminal, Henry Kissinger!). Being a pale, translucent, unphotosynthesized schmendrick didn’t matter as long as you were smart and funny.”

Part 3: Mighty Aphrodite and Manhattan Murder Mystery: “This is becoming chore-like already and I still have twenty-three films to go.”

Part 4: Love and Death and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask): “We’re becoming quite the little tribe. … There is me, the white-haired Hummer (meaning man who hums, not hypertrophic military vehicle repurposed for a greedy consumer market), the surly cinéaste, the old woman in the maxi-length down jacket, the fellow who could be doing some sort of Marcel Duchamp Dada experiment on his own body, so conspicuously ill-fitting is his … no, I will go no further with this unkindness.”

Part 5: Bullets Over Broadway and Everyone Says I Love You: “Everyone Says I Love You is a sloppy insult whose cracks and flaws are spackled over with fistfuls of money and sundry diversions in the form of real estate porn.”

Part 6: Radio Days and Broadway Danny Rose: “Radio is more visual than film in precisely the same way that smell evokes memory in an exponentially more complex manner than a picture can. That each voice and song and commercial is a madeleine for Allen is conveyed in every frame.”

Part 7: Bananas and Sleeper: “Bananas’ credits—yellow letters in an inflated ballonish font against a black background routinely pierced with bullet holes while Marvin Hamlisch’s bumptious score plays—are pre-auteur Woody.”

Part 8: Husbands and Wives and Hannah and Her Sisters: “Sidney Pollock—probably a completely nice guy in real life—projects an unpleasant jerk energy. The kind of aging Jewish swinger who still thinks he’s God’s gift to women.”

Part 9: Wild Man Blues and Sweet and Lowdown: “The holiday season is over and the New Year under way. The only ones who can now come to a movie in the middle of the day are officially those firmly in my cohort: the old, the halt, the lonely.”

Part 10: A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy and Another Woman: “What binds these two together is what keeps coming up in Allen’s work: that damned anhedonia; the cerebral intellectualizing that masks a terror of feeling, that incapacity to give oneself over to joy that can leave one a vicarious observer to one’s own life (can you tell he’s hit a nerve?)”

Part 11: Manhattan: “It is at least in part a movie all about hair, both Temporal (Diane Keaton’s not entirely successful late-70s perm) and Divine: the birch plank of Meryl Streep’s mane. … But it is Mariel Hemingway’s impossibly silken horsetail chignon that reigns supreme.”

Part 12: Take the Money and Run and What’s Up, Tiger Lily?: “Throughout her cameo it appears as though [Louise Lasser] has an actual pimple on the end of her nose! It is completely endearing.”

Part 13: Interiors and Stardust Memories: “The symbolism of it is as subtle as a blackjack to the base of the skull.”

Part 14: Zelig and The Front: “Zelig is a story of assimilation, of deep cover, of Jews in America.”

Part 15: Deconstructing Harry and Crimes and Misdemeanors: “The Strand Bag-oisie has come out in full force for the finale.”

Rakoff’s reviews appeared in Tablet Magazine’s predecessor publication, Nextbook.org.

So A. took a new name, according to my cousin—their boys played together—a foursquare North American moniker that could be shortened to one syllable, suitable for barking on the sports field, at a hockey rink, across a sea of office cubicles. It’s a typical assimilative immigrant trajectory, but I couldn’t help feeling partially responsible.

I learned this in autumn of 2003. The summer was over, and with it the heat-induced coma of the season. The weather had turned clear and cool, with air that “gave steel to one’s thoughts,” as the writer Leonard Michaels put it. As surely as the pomegranates find their way onto the grocery store shelves, my newly steeled thoughts inevitably turn to notions of guilt and forgiveness. That’s not entirely true. A. had been on my mind, on and off, for close to 30 years. I had tried to find him on more than one occasion, but the name change had left the trail cold. I mentioned casually to my cousin that I’d like to contact him, got an address, and sat down to write, my homemade version of slichot.

“The reason I’ve been trying to find is you is an embarrassing one for me, but something that has been tormenting me for many, many years. I was incredibly horrible to you the summer we were together. Defensive rationalizations—that I was a child, that I was filled with self-loathing—have never really washed with me, and I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to make things right and apologize to you. No kid deserves to be the object of cruelty, least of all you at that age. I remain deeply ashamed and deeply sorry. I have no doubt that you remember all too well what a complete asshole I was. Certainly, I’d never forget it. I’ve tried to grow up to be an adult who isn’t an asshole and as such, it has seemed vitally important to me for some time that I manage to reach you and apologize. I hope this letter serves as some small measure towards that goal.”

As I recall, he looked like an angel. (Why this misty “as I recall?” Three decades later and the wounds I inflicted still feel fresh. Enough with the coyness.) He looked like an angel; copper-haired, green-eyed, slender, freckled, with startlingly white skin and a long, almond-shaped face. And if being the object of undeserved cruelty and rancor had the counterbalancing effect of conferring virtue, then he would have been, in fact, an angel. His misfortune, like that of all victims, was finding himself lower on the pecking order than an insecure bully. I helped to make a stranger feel unwelcome and unsafe. Forgive the caginess. No one was killed. There were no elaborate hazing rituals, no forced nudity, no knives. It didn’t rise much above the level of summer camp teasing. I don’t want to go into specifics. I’m ashamed, for one, and I’m not trolling for absolution.

A woman I used to know, raised a Southern Baptist, once spoke about Sunday mornings in church, where every week, the same abusive husband would stand before the congregation and, wracked with weeping, confess that week’s lapse towards wickedness, plainly visible on the contused and purple face of his suffering wife. This public apology and self-flagellation were the necessary requirements for forgiveness granted by the congregation in the name of God Almighty. The man would leave church that day with his slate clean, and, presumably, his consciousness raised as to the intrinsic shitheadedness of battery. But there he would be the following Sunday—along with his wife, her bruises having been refreshed during the week—recriminating himself, tearful and begging pardon of his sins once again, which once again would be given. There was never a Sunday, in my acquaintance’s recollection, where he hadn’t beaten his wife and where he was not forgiven.

My friend Sophie tries to be my Baptist congregation, chalking it up to youth and stupidity. “If you didn’t suck at age 12, then you suck now. It’s that simple.” It’s nice of her to say so, especially since I knew Sophie at age 12, and she didn’t suck then and she certainly doesn’t suck now. But what I love and value about the days and customs of slichot is the rigor and required honesty. Neither one’s friends nor God get a vote. Only the injured party makes that decision. I’ve tried to imagine how it would feel to receive that letter. Time would accordion and that summer would no doubt come flooding back with an unpleasant freshness. A. would remember the callous, smart-ass ringleader, and feel mildly shocked to find himself no more inclined to grant clemency than he was as a boy. He might even feel angrier, being made to revisit such unpleasantness, and attendant to this anger, a warming blush of superiority, perhaps. A satisfaction that the writer should still be troubled. Here he was, after all, with a wife and child, having moved on, and here was I, fixated on events three decades prior. I had pointedly made sure to leave out of the letter any preening details that might indicate that, aside from this thorn of guilt, I had an otherwise rewarding life. Him thinking me a loser for still dwelling on something long-past seemed a necessary component of a right and proper apology.

But this is all conjecture. I never heard back from him. Probably he rightly surmised that it had nothing to do with him anymore. There would be little he could say at this point. Better to let me twist. Which I do.

This is my final post and, sadly, my thoughts just aren’t large enough. I had hoped to go out with some approaching a bang, a summation, some bit of cleverness or wisdom or synthesis…something to match, in even a fractional way, the brilliance of the work. (I have noticed, if trying to speak of something wholistically, that whenever any of his characters in any of the 28 films I watched, reaches for a cigarette, they are always from a soft pack. Hmmmmm… What does it all mean? How’s that for original scholarship? Where’s my adjunct professorship, motherfuckers?) But it’s no use. I am completely bested by the final double feature of the festival.

First up is Deconstructing Harry, which I am embarrassed to say I missed when it was first released. It’s really one of the best examinations of what it means to be an artist, particularly a writer (in this case Allen playing novelist Harry Black), and have people around you and in your life who might have, shall we say, feelings about being used for material. It’s precisely why I don’t write about my own family. The film begins with Richard Benjamin getting a blowjob from his wife’s sister, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. We then realize that these two are the mere stand-ins in Harry’s fiction. Benjamin is Allen himself and Dreyfus the let-me-sing-a-Ring-Cycle’s-worth-of-praiseworthy-songs-to Judy Davis. The truth of their affair has come out and ruined her life. She has come over to wreak revenge. Brandishing a gun, she derides Harry with the very words with which he is no doubt routinely praised: “You’re so fucking verbal!”

Harry himself is a nice departure for Allen. A pill-popping drunk with a penchant for light bondage and whores, he has a filthy mouth and a Teflon conscience. Unrepentant, he calls Davis a “world-class meshugeneh cunt.” When his wife (Kirstie Alley in a knock-out performance as a psychoanalyst, a huge paradox given Scientology’s whacked-out stance against psychiatry) takes him to task for sleeping with one of her patients, he defends himself by asking where else he’s going to meet someone since they never go out. Harry is all rational pragmatism and horniness. “He’s betting everything on physics and pussy!” says his vehemently Ba’alat T’shuva sister, Caroline Aaron. When he’s consoling a friend with angina (the consistently charming Bob Balaban), he rejects the spiritual in favor of science. “Between air conditioning and the Pope, I’ll take air conditioning.”

So will I. (Coincidentally, in yesterday’s New York Times, filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi, in talking about her documentary about evangelical Christians, was quoted as saying, “I believe in the culture war. And you know what? If I have to take a side in the culture war I’ll take their side, because if you give me the choice of Paris Hilton or Jesus, I’ll take Jesus.” It’s one thing for a credulous private citizen to swallow that bucketful of bullshit and believe that this is, in point of fact, the actual dialectic choice behind the rhetoric of the culture war. After all, the voluble gasbag-ocracy of the right has its own news network and a federal administration to make just this case. But as loathsome and talismanic-of-everything-that’s-wrong as I find Paris Hilton, myself–and I do; I have a rantlet about her on page 85 of my on-sale-everywhere book–she was not, last I checked, trying to legislate my library choices, my bedroom, or make sure that I will never enjoy the rights of even a civil union. For a documentarian, essentially a journalist at the end of her journey and data-gathering, having synthesized all of her information to still come to this conclusion is downright embarrassing and can only lead me to the conclusion of my own that Ms. Pelosi must be some kind of reductive all-the-characters-smoke-soft-pack-cigarettes idiot {and remember please, as a deeply partisan fellow, I’m predisposed to be sympathetic to the daughter of the new Speaker}.)

In the end, all of Harry’s people, both real and imagined, gather around him at a party where Rodgers and Hart’s I Could Write A Book plays (a song from Pal Joey, a musical whose main character is a similarly amoral but loveable prick). “I love all of you,” Harry says. “You’ve even saved my life at times…Our lives consist of how we choose to distort them.”

Crimes and Misdemeanors’ version of this final statement is the more dire and deeply consequential “We are the sum total of our choices.” The moral question grappled with is not the comparative non-issue of who do we “kill” with our art but the actual taking of a life, in this case Angelica Huston playing Martin Landau’s desperate, hysterical mistress (in a demonstration of that old armed-with-a-hammer-everything-looks-like-a-nail truism, the film seems to me, in part, a remarkable portrait of lonely women. Huston’s character is heart-wrenching precisely because she loathes her own increasingly irrational behavior more than anyone. Another version, albeit played for laughs, is the wonderful Caroline Aaron playing Allen’s sister again. Divorced and on the market, she is humiliated and tearful as she relates the story of a date that turned into an unwitting and non-consensual exploration of scat, and not the Ella Fitzgerald variety).

Once again, I was too young the first time I saw it. I liked it, but had no capacity to grasp its moral scope. (A few years ago, I was talking to a young woman I knew and asking her what kind of fellow she was looking for. When I listed “kind” as a requirement, she gave a start of surprise. It really wasn’t something she cared about at that time in her life, age 22. Two years later, she understood. Thank god for aging.)

The film is gymnastically brilliant in the way it juggles the plot and characters. It is structurally a butterfly, the two wings joined at the center by Man of Science, ophthalmologist Martin Landau, versus his patient, Man of God Sam Waterston, a rabbi slowly going blind. So how does the film answer its charge of “We are the sum total of our choices?” Landau, who gets away with murder, is unbothered for the most part. There are some bad moments, but on balance, he’s doing fine. “We rationalize. We deny. Otherwise, we couldn’t go on living.”

Crimes boasts another Martin, as well. Martin Bergmann, a renowned psychoanalyst who “plays” Dr. Louis Levy, a philosopher whom Woody’s character is filming for a documentary. We see Levy’s face, grainy and sagacious, speaking to us from the small screen of the Steenbeck editing machine. His world view is, given the film, appropriately dualist, both consoling and chilling. The universe is a cold and unforgiving place, an anarchic system that cares not one jot for any of us. And so, he says, we invest it with our own feelings, applying our own moral structures. What Levy (and I suspect Bergmann himself; the words he speaks are his own, I think I recall hearing) finds so heartening amidst all this cold and atomized dark matter, is how steadfastly we keep trying. Once more into the breach we rush headlong to make connections, to fall in love, to feel that we and our actions reverberate in some way.

And then Allen has this character kill himself. “I’ve gone out the window,” is his terse suicide note (not unlike actor George Sanders–of All About Eve Addison DeWitt fame, for you non-homosexual readers–whose final missive before he dispatched himself read, “Dear World, I am leaving you because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool–good luck.”)

The blind rabbi dances with his daughter at her wedding, the murderer goes home with his wife, his belly full of good food and liquor. He’ll sleep well, too. And so it all goes on. Back and forth we shunt, between meaning and its utter nullification.

When I told a friend that I saw Woody Allen himself, she wondered if perhaps I was hallucinating (I know a psychologist who treated an adolescent Lubavitch girl once who said in her first session, “There’s nothing wrong with me. If all the men didn’t come at me, day and night, with their penises exposed, I’d have no problems.”), or if it was an impersonator, which would only be fitting, in light of today’s movies, both about imposture.

Zelig is extraordinary for many reasons: its prescience (it anticipates the faux-documentary, having been released a year before Spinal Tap); the sheer technical feat of incorporating Woody Allen into all that marvelous stock footage (nowadays, every schmendrick with iMovie can do as much, but in 1983 this was really remarkable); and its anticipation of all of that endless post-modern academic interrogation of the nature of the Self. Allen assembled a group of talking heads, both fictional and real—Susan Sontag, Irving Howe, Saul Bellow, Bruno Bettelheim—all of whom seem to delight in aping for a movie what they do in real life by expounding on the fictional Leonard Zelig, the human chameleon whose highly elastic mutability, both characterological and physical, made him as famous in his day as Lindbergh.

Zelig is a story of assimilation, of deep cover, of Jews in America. Irving Howe says as much. And Howe also, in summing up Zelig’s life, might just as well be talking about Allen himself, or any artist who tries to sustain a creative existence with something approaching longevity, when he says, “Everyone loved him. Then they stopped. Then they loved him again. The 20s were like that. Has America changed that much? I don’t think so.”

The Front is Woody as hired gun actor only, playing Howard Prince, small-time bookie and bar-and-grill cashier who helps out his friends, blacklisted writers, by allowing himself to pose as the author of their TV scripts, work that would otherwise never get made due to the Red Scare that had the networks flushing out fellow travelers in the 1950s. Andrea Marcovicci of the Cleopatra nose plays Allen’s girlfriend. Woody himself is good, but miscast. Howard is meant to be a penny-ante operator. Unprincipled, unpoliticized, and unschooled. The Front is essentially the story of his gradual education in the nature of writing and the evil that men do. But Allen projects too much nervous intellect to seem credible. Still, the film has an extraordinary presence in the form of Zero Mostel as Hecky Brown, a lovable Jackie Gleason-esque comic whose life is destroyed by the witch-hunt. And when the final credits roll, listing director Martin Ritt, writer Walter Bernstein, and Mostel himself, among others, and the dates of each of their respective blacklistings, you cannot help but cry. I couldn’t, at least.

I’m sorry. That’s all I have to say today. Schematic and stupid, I know, but the experience of seeing the man walk by in person had me needing a drink last night (a lie, really. The white wine came by on a tray and I took some), which has left me today with the lingering depressive melancholy of alcohol, and the phantom throb of headache, which made watching a double feature in my cheap Lenscrafter $49.99-and-under-rack eyeglasses a little difficult. Time to pop some more Tylenol and ready myself for tomorrow, the final day.

The symbolism of it is as subtle as a blackjack to the base of the skull. See the rooms of a strangled spirit! A dwelling, certainly, but not a home (pace, Mr. Bacharach). Such rigidity, such chilly perfectionism will reap naught but sorrow for all who enter. Look no further than those whack-job daughters: Diane Keaton a self-absorbed, chain-smoking windbag; Mary Beth Hurt crippled into inaction by feelings of inadequacy. No wonder E. G. Marshall wanted out of that marriage. Look around you and don’t make the same mistake! Beware this House of Horrors!

Dr. Caligari’s decorator has a lot to answer for, as I recall. External environment as visual shorthand for internal goings-on was an old device even back in 1978 when Woody Allen used it here in Interiors. (Interiors. Hmmm. Inteeeeriiiiiooooorrrrs. The stuff that dwells inside. Get it? Oy.) But Eve’s apartment has always struck me as worth noting because it may very well be the last time that this particular set of visual cues—a lack of adornment and a punitively spare and unyielding adherence to things being ordered just so along with a startling dearth of books, all rendered in a palette whose apogee of color excitement is oatmeal (Yahoo!)—was a semaphore for a soul dangerously on the outs with itself.

We all know that baseness might lie like a coat of varnish upon the hard surfaces of the black leather-and-chrome couches and coke-dusted glass coffee tables of murderous Yuppie scum. And evil still nestles itself in the folds of the severed ear on that emerald lawn in front of the chintz-and-gingham suburban house where the festering lies and rot are ready to crack open at the first pair of rose petal-extruding nymphet breasts that come down the pike. But the largely uninterrupted surfaces of an apartment like Eve’s, which once served as an indictment of an atrophied consciousness, are now just the default trappings of almost every shelter magazine, the Calvin Klein home collection and the Design Within Reach catalog. It is Maureen Stapleton’s red dress, back then meant to be a vibrant manifestation of the Life Force, that would now be considered vulgar. Not for the first time, Woody Allen got it right and the rest of the world got it wrong. And I say this while still not liking Interiors very much at all. The pretentiousness, the narcotized affect, is as chilly as an Alex Katz painting, with a similar goyische naches, anti-Semitic-by-omission Easthampton Waspiness obtaining to it all. Many of Allen’s more serious films have an almost foreign language feel. Interiors, for example seems like it was dubbed into English from the original Thorzine.

“Mother was always cleaning,” says a smoking Diane Keaton. Mary Beth Hurt, speaking to Eve, talks of feeling “rage” towards her. These are just two of the psychoanalytical bombshells of the movie. It’s like watching children clomp around in the grown-ups’ clothing. (Martin Sherman, the histrionic writer of Bent as well as last year’s execrable Being Julia, I think it was called, wrote a movie about a decade back called Alive and Kicking wherein a gay psychiatrist falls in love with a ballet dancer. At one point the shrink calls his lover on his behavior, telling him “now you’re taking out your anger on me.” This prompts the dancer to scream back, “Oh spare me your psychological mumbo-jumbo!” Taking your anger out on someone? Such impenetrable jargon! Ah well, there’ll always be an England…) But as stultifying as it can be at times, Interiors does boast a remarkable performance by Geraldine Page as Eve. Even at his most mannered, Woody Allen remains one of the greatest ever writer/directors for women.

Anyway, blah blah blah (as I once taught my adult English students in Tokyo to say. I also taught them the conversational suffixes, “You can’t miss it,” when giving directions, and the rhetorical interrogative, “or what?” as in “So, are we on a date, or what?”). I’ve written about the whole crock of aesthetic austerity already, in my last book (Buy my damn book people, available everywhere at a very reasonable paperback price. Please. The pipes in my bathroom, now in their irretrievably rusty seventh decade, are in direst need of replacing).

Interiors received its fair share of critical drubbing when it was released, but more than mere bad reviews, it also marked the first—emphatically not the last—time that the public experienced its disappointment in Allen as something approaching a personal betrayal. How dare he not be funny (or more correctly, How dare he be quite this unfunny?) Stardust Memories was, in some ways, a response to the response. It begins with Allen’s character Sandy Bates trapped on a train he is desperately trying to exit. Across the tracks is another railroad car filled with beautiful revelers—including a young Sharon Stone—while Sandy’s third class carriage is filled with an assortment of freaks and meeskeits. He claws at the windows in an effort to escape. Groucho’s aphorism meets our grim history: I would never want to be trapped on a train that would have me as a passenger.

Allen got a shellacking for Stardust Memories, too. Charges of “contempt for his audience,” if I remember correctly. Not entirely fair. It’s an amazingly beautiful film. If Allen indulges in a parade of faces made up and shot in ways that render them almost Arbus-like at times, it’s nothing that Fellini didn’t do all the time. It’s a truism that performers are often shy, or loathe themselves (and by consequent extension, those foolish enough to love them). There’s a moment in The Entertainer when Laurence Olivier gets an appreciative rise out of his audience and his gaze is one of utter disdain that they have so thoroughly bought what he was selling. Sandy is actually exceedingly long-suffering in the face of the constant intrusion, and he is downright Talmudically noble when he runs into an old classmate who drives a cab and feels like a chump at their difference in social station. Look, Allen tells him, I told the jokes. Society overvalues humor. It’s just dumb luck. It’s a lovely, lovely, smart movie. Extraordinary to see him pull off something like this after the rehearsal that was the film that preceded it.

I could have devoted the entire post to Charlotte Rampling’s face, with those beryl eyes and an upper lip that looks like she’s simultaneously pushing it out and eating it from the inside. She stands in for Mariel Hemingway’s Tracy as the thing that makes life worth living. “I guess I’m a little on the beautiful side,” she concedes in the understatement of the century. It is a wonder of geometry (the face, not the understatement).

The blog is almost over. Only two more days and I am getting worried. What will I do with my days?

Although, to give it its due, Take The Money And Run really holds up. It’s still hilarious. A well-constructed documentary into the life and mind of career criminal Virgil Starkweather (Allen), from his early days of stealing gumball machines and playing in the marching band (cello), to his numerous crimes (an illegible hold-up note that foils a bank job) and failed prison breaks (a revolver carved from soap that disappears into a handful of suds during his rainy night escape). The filmmaking is assured but touchingly seat-of-the-pants, which has as much to do with the budget as the years before the aesthetic tyrrany that reigns today that would deny someone like Giulietta Masina a career because she is as goofy looking as a female Keaton (Buster, not Diane). The congenitally hilarious Louise Lasser is one of Starkweather’s former neighbors who never once knew that a criminal mastermind was hiding in plain sight in their midst. “I actually believed he was an idiot,” she says. Throughout her cameo it appears as though she has an actual pimple on the end of her nose! It is completely endearing. Virgil meets and falls in love with a laundress played by crazily young Janet Margolin. She is all of 26 years-old in this. Poor thing died in 1993 of cancer at the age of fifty. The last thing I remember seeing her in was a muddled thriller called Last Embrace from 1979 with Roy Scheider that had to do with turn-of-the-century Lower East Side brothels and the young Jewish immigrant girls who were enslaved in same. I remember watching it as a teenager and being struck by nothing so much as the incongruity of Jews and sex, Scheider’s enviable chest and ropy biceps notwithstanding. My befuddlement wasn’t anything so large as internalized anti-Semitism, as much as a deeply localized self-loathing. I was thinking only of myself (what else is new?). I was tiny, uncomfortable in my skin, incipiently gay. Being Jewish and sexy seemed as essentially unmarriageable a combo as being Jewish and Republican.

Of course, I’m wrong. In the last year alone I’ve come across two men who go for what one of them refers to as “Heebcake.” And in the culture at large, there was a time when the People of the Book were seen as the very embodiment of id: all those melon-breasted, raven-haired Rebeccas and Allen himself as the living response to my fallacy. “Back When We Were Sexy,” might actually be the most fitting title for today’s, ahem, entry.

The opening credits for the 1966 What’s Up, Tiger Lily? make hay of the era’s Swinger aesthetic, with a cartoon Woody, all glasses and proboscis, pulling the text from the navels of Japanese go-go dancers. It’s a direct cashing in on the success of the previous year’s What’s New, Pussycat?

Tiger Lily is an extended sketch. A redubbing of a B spy thriller from Tokyo. I had forgotten, however, that the film screws itself at the very beginning by opening with a sequence wherein Allen lays out what we are about to see. Nothing like explaining a joke to really make it soar. (Which brings me to my two favorite jokes of late:

First:

Knock knock
Who’s there?
Control Freak, okaythisisthepartwhereyousaycontrolfreakwho?

And second:

A man is reading the paper on a Sunday afternoon when there’s a knock at the front door. Answering it, he sees there is no one there. Spying a snail on the front step, he picks it up and throws it back into the flower beds. Ten years later, another Sunday, another newspaper, another knock. He answers the door. No one there, but a snail, who says “What the fuck was that about?”)

Anyway, I can’t stay for the second feature (an oddly red-tinted print). I have to run home to wait once more, fruitlessly once more, for Earthlink. Three months into it, my phone calls still drop out at the most unforeseen and inopportune moments. If there were anything other than cold machinery involved, I’d describe it as deeply Freudian.

As a 15-year-old, I took the requisite summer trip to Israel. We passed groups exactly like ours everywhere we went. What my group consoled ourselves with— fallaciously in retrospect—was that we were somehow materially different from the other American teens who yearly overrun the country. We were young socialists, after all, working on kibbutz not as lifestyle tourists, but with an actual eye to moving there for good, living out the remainder of our days in socialist-collective utopian bliss. Militantly secular and (we thought) devoutly anti-materialistic, we wanted nothing to do with the God-fearing kosher stylings of the Izod-worshipping diaspora strivers. Or so I thought until we reached The Wailing Wall where more than a few of the girls in our group were overcome. One was consumed with weeping for a dead grandfather, another dramatically could not advance to the stone face as she was sure it was emitting sparks. I remember being appalled and disappointed at this Salem-like hysteria. It’s just a fucking wall, I thought. How embarrassing, then, to realize that I have virtually the same reaction as those teen girls to the Gershwin-scored montage of the fucking walls and spires of New York City that begins Manhattan. Like many immigrants, I cannot be objective about the city and its role in my life. I habitually give it almost exclusive credit in the forming of my character, as if I moved here at age seventeen as protoplasmic and inert as one of those human larvae in The Matrix. Still, to paraphrase the movie, I idolize the city all out of proportion. And like all great loves (and I’ve said this many, many times before) I have been contending with some disappointment over the last few years. As if my once interesting boyfriend suddenly became a Wine Bore. What do the young kids who dream about moving here picture themselves doing? Going to the sample sale at Manolo Blahnik? I don’t even want to think about it.

But the city has always been drunk on ambition, connection and real estate (although there was a time when young people with dreams of making art could still move here). The bohemianism of Manhattan is at a very rarefied level: ERA fundraisers in the garden at MoMa, simple grocery lists filled at Dean & DeLuca. Joan Didion, in a 1979 New York Review of Books article, writes about the film “…toward the end, the Woody Allen character makes a list of reasons to stay alive. ‘Groucho Marx’ is one reason, and ‘Willie Mays’ is another. The second movement of Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony. Louis Armstrong’s Potato Head Blues. Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education. This list is modishly eclectic, a trace wry… and notable, as raisons d’être go, in that every experience it evokes is essentially passive. This list of Woody Allen’s is the ultimate consumer report, and the extent to which it has been quoted approvingly suggests a new class in America, a subworld of people rigid with apprehension that they will die wearing the wrong sneaker, naming the wrong symphony, preferring Madame Bovary.”

It’s a typically astute observation on Didion’s part (as a self-conscious teen, I was not above filling my knapsack with a curator’s eye so that, should I buy the farm in front of a bus, some EMS technician, going through the personal effects next to my lifeless corpse might unpack the Mishima novel, the small kit of watercors, etc., and think “What a waste.”) but it’s also a curiosity since, reductively stated, “Joan Didion in The New York Review of Books” might just as easily be added to that list of cultural shorthand. It’s like being guided through a Picasso exhibit by one of the Demoiselles d’Avignon. And then of course Woody Allen completes the list by saying, “Tracy’s face,” and you can virtually hear the screech of the brakes. Earlier in the movie, Allen describes Mariel Hemingway as “God’s answer to Job.” That the Almighty, in copping to all the suffering and horror of the world, could point to her and say, “Yeah, but I can also make one of these.” And watching her on screen, with her eyebrows like gypsy moth caterpillars, he kind of has a point.

And her hair! It is at least in part a movie all about hair, both Temporal (Diane Keaton’s not entirely successful late-70s perm) and Divine: the birch plank of Meryl Streep’s mane (and seeing her, the greatest living actor in the world, so young, so strikingly lovely and already so compelling that you cannot watch anyone but her when she’s on screen. The book her character writes in the movie, Marriage Divorce, and Selfhood, sounds suspiciously like ex-New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey’s recent tome). But it is Mariel Hemingway’s impossibly silken horsetail chignon that reigns supreme. I remember being at camp as a 12-year-old, reading the girls’ Seventeen magazines in which unfathomably clear-skinned, cute girls—this was the mid-to-late 70s, the absolute heyday of Brooke Shields at her Pretty Baby height along with her other teen girl model cohort—were always shown laughing with faces smeared in bright green skin masks, or with cucumber slices over their eyes (still laughing), or coiling their hair up in playful ways that seemed both effortless and impossible: use pencils to wear it up in this kicky twist. Or better yet, add an actual desk chair for a terrific back to school look. And there she’d be, walking through some leafy quad with some equally lovely boy. It wasn’t just their beauty that was a foreign country (although it seemed as other-worldly to me as that scene in Bread And Chocolate when the Italian migrant workers, absolute untouchables in Switzerland, forced to live in a chicken coop, look out through their wire windows and watch the blonde teenage children of the local land-owners as they skinny dipped). It was also the unoccluded pleasure of it all. The desire identified, owned up to, and fulfilled.

I knew enough not to confuse a magazine spread with reality. There is a reason girls like Mariel Hemingway get cast in movies, after all (she is also, it must be said, a fucking remarkable actress, at least in this film and in Personal Best). But reality—actual reality—kicked me in the teeth when, seven years after summer camp, as a college junior away in London, I spent Christmas break in Paris. For two hours of work a day, the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, hard by Notre Dame, would give you a bed for the night. I was feeling pretty damn pleased with myself, sitting at that little desk fielding questions, the answers to which I had no idea. The bookstore was labyrinthine and foggy with cat hair. To relieve ourselves we had to go to the toilet in the café nearby and to the public baths for actual ablutions. How authentic, how bohemian, how ridiculously cool it all seemed. Until one day, in walked a boy with whom I went to college. He was the one who made the connection. I had never seen him before, or perhaps it was that staring into his flawless face, or at the brilliance of the white broadcloth of his perfectly rumpled Oxford shirt was like looking directly at the blazing sun. Even his name, Mark Marvel (his real name), seemed to perfectly evoke that whole mid-80s-new-romantic-Brideshead thing he had going. It was as if the cast of Rodin’s “Thinker” that sat outside the East Asian Studies Library where I spent most of my time had come into the store and sidled up and asked me, “Do you go to Columbia?” Small world, we mutually declared.

“So what are you going to do for the holiday?” he asked me.

Do? I thought? Aren’t I already doing it? I’m here, in Paris, “working” in a bookstore, smoking cigarettes, sleeping upstairs under a coverlet of navy velvet, a midnight sky festooned with a Milky Way of dander. I didn’t understand the question. Why? What was he doing.

“Oh, I’m going to Sardinia to see my friend Isabel Fonseca. Do you know her? I bought her this bottle of brandy.” Brandy? How did he know about brandy? That same year, I had walked into a liquor store in London looking for a hostess gift and said that I wanted a nice bottle of something brown. “Maybe some good gin?” I inquired. What did I know. I didn’t learn how to drink until years later when hatred of my job in publishing essentially medically required it. As for Sardinia, I was at sea. I knew it was near Sicily but briefly confused it with Corsica as Napoleon’s birthplace.

And there it was, all over again. The girls of Seventeen magazine, Mark Marvel, Mariel Hemingway’s hair, all of it conspiring and leading me to that same conclusion that so often rings in my head: the referendum on the ways in which I am found wanting, leading to the chronic conclusion I shall never catch up. As I’ve gotten older and the race is no longer open to 42-year-olds, I’ve simply replaced the word “catch” with “measure,” and it has worked just as well. I still hope I get to live in Manhattan when I grow up.

I was trying to figure out why these two films were programmed together. I’d never seen either—a real treat to have such a virgin experience. One I knew by reputation as a comic romp and the other as a Nordic and serious affair. I figured it might be because of their respective debts to Bergman (Midsummer to Smiles of A Summer Night and Another Woman to Bergman’s more prototypically melancholic work, like Persona or Face to Face). Having now watched—and kind of loved—both, I think what binds these two together is what keeps coming up in Allen’s work: that damned anhedonia; the cerebral intellectualizing that masks a terror of feeling, that incapacity to give oneself over to joy that can leave one a vicarious observer to one’s own life (can you tell he’s hit a nerve?) Yesterday in Hannah, Woody’s character resolves to kill himself but naturally, the gun slips. Despairing but alive, he walks the Upper West Side until he ends up at the Metro, watching Duck Soup (The Marx Brothers singing “Fredonia’s Going to War,” to be specific, a number that always makes me think, however briefly, “Poor Zeppo.”). In a direct nod to Sullivan’s Travels where the chain gang forgot their troubles and got happy while watching a cartoon, he realizes that “…It’s not all a drag…I should stop running from my life and enjoy it while it lasts.”

M.N.S.C. (whose title is a reductive misnomer, promising little more than Laugh-In-style ribaldry when in fact it’s an artful and lovely film) is shot in the countryside, lensed by Gorgeous…I mean Gordon Willis. Scored with Mendelssohn’s rendition of Shakespeare’s Dream (one of my very favorite ballets), it is a paean to summer, with its trembling buds, industrious bees, and loping fauns. Even I, who experience reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder when the mercury climbs above fifty and who panics when hit with direct sunlight, yearned for an invitation to a country home for an indolent weekend (in truth, I’ve turned down virtually every invitation I have ever received, and I received many of them for years until people, quite rightly, stopped asking). Set at the dawn of the 20th century, Woody plays a Wall Street broker and part-time crackpot inventor, married to Mary Steenburgen, whom I have always adored but who acts almost every role on a slight delay, as if her heart pumped Nyquil instead of blood. Equally beloved and equally diffident Julie Hagerty—whom I miss terribly—is Dulcy, the over-sexed nurse who has come up with Tony Roberts, best friend and doctor who can’t keep it in his pants. And Mia Farrow is the ethereal Titania (although here named Ariel, just as appropriately), due to marry pompous ass Jose Ferrer the very next day (an interesting presence, he, since in Wild Man Blues, Allen downplays the importance of receiving a lifetime achievement award by pointing out that Ferrer won his Oscar for Cyrano the same year that Brando portrayed Stanley Kowalski, an upset in the moral order perverse enough to render all accolades everywhere suspect forever after), to the distress of both Allen and Roberts, who both adore her.

There is talk of the existence of a Spirit World, the coexistence of or schismatic relationship between Love and Lust, serial thwarted trysts in the woods surrounding the house. Eventually Ferrer expires at the peak of ecstacy and his soul is converted to a green glow of pure essence. He joins the other numinous fireflies, those lucky enough to die at that most beautiful of moments, as they hover, bump, and whiz through the forest, Pucks and Peaseblossoms each and every one. He urges his surviving castmates to seize each opportunity, to throw themselves wholeheartedly towards connection, to risk failure and heartbreak, because to miss feeling something, good or bad, would be a far greater tragedy.

This double bill is the true Melinda And Melinda, a film in which Allen attempted to tell the same story, once as comedy, the next as tragedy. If Midsummer’s was bathed in the golden light of an endless June, Another Woman’s beige sobriety comes from the shortening days of autumn in a very Stockholm-ish Manhattan. Everyone, Gena Rowlands’ philosophy professor Marion Post to Ian Holm as her husband to the reliably fabulous Martha Plimpton are all the same color: the least gooey caramel imaginable. (Almost seventeen years ago, when I was a publishing pariah, I was making a delivery to Doubleday where I saw Mrs. Onassis herself, waiting for the elevator. From her hair to her drum tight skin to the swags of cashmere that swaddled her frame, she was a vision in mocha. A walking sepia print.)

Marion has taken an apartment down in the Village in which to write her book, unmolested by distractions, until she realizes that she can hear through the vents the conversation coming from the therapist’s practice next door (Allen would use overheard therapy again in Everyone Says I Love You as well as in Alice). One patient in particular, at least her plaintive voice and sad story (Mia Farrow) penetrates Marion’s own carefully maintained carapace. It sends her back, churning up long-buried love, old betrayals (Sandy Dennis has a scene so deeply fabulous that the experience of it jumps senses and becomes as satisfying as if one were eating food. I can think of no higher praise than that). Rowlands is goaded to action by this disembodied stranger. The voice through the grate might as well be her own. The film is replete with cool-blooded Hanseatic references: Rilke poems and Klimt paintings and a haunting and repeated version of Kurt Weill’s Bilbao, but because I am an idiot, I was instead reminded of how as a young boy, reading about the break-up of Sonny and Cher in Time magazine, Cher said something like, “People keep asking me if I left Sonny for another man, but I left him for another woman. Myself.” And I thought to myself God, that is profound). When the composed Rowlands—who has perhaps never looked more beautiful—finally breaks down, it is absolute floodgates. As shocking as watching a moment of illicit passion.

“It was a dud!” says eighty-year-old Loud Talker seated beside me to his friend. “I thought it would be funny.” But he’s wrong. It is beautiful. Today at least (and yesterday, certainly, and tomorrow when I see my beloved Manhattan) I can only feel something approaching awe. Woody Allen makes me want to stop being afraid. He makes me want to work hard. At art, at love, at all of it.

It’s a shame that it should seem so arduous this evening. Perhaps that’s because of how marvelous today’s bill was. It’s always easier to grind an ax, certainly, but it’s also the fact that I’d almost rather just sit quietly and let the experience percolate. I’m further disinclined to let this blog (I’m sorry, I still feel a repellant thrill of hatred for that word in relation to myself. No matter: if a certain degree of self-loathing isn’t welcome here on a New York-based Jewish literary website, where then, I ask you?) descend into film reviews, and since today’s films were numbers seventeen and eighteen, I fear I might have used up all my insights. I’ve documented the crowd (although today the theater was packed to capacity. Doesn’t anyone in this town work?), I’ve made my Fosse-choreography-taken-in-large-doses-is-like-watching-the-tacky-dance-routine-at-an-auto-show observation, and I’ve weighed in on Allen’s prolificacy, although that will come up again, I’ve no doubt. I am starting to groove on the very repetition of the exercise, however. The ritual of it all. The daily walk to and from Film Forum, and the immersion in the body of work. As I’d indeed hoped, the internal logic is asserting itself. The closest thing I can liken this to is an extended fast I once did over the course of a few weeks. A kind of insular calm has set in (although that might be the films I saw today and the fact that it is nearing my bedtime).

I’m also moved to repeat that journalist’s pronouncement to me about not wasting Henry James on the young (see the Radio Days entry, if you remotely care). Films I dismissed in my 20s I now see in a whole new light, viz Husbands And Wives. What I remembered about it from the first time around: the hand-held camera work was literally nauseating; that Judy Davis, a bolt of errant energy, is an astonishment and every time she narrows her eyes to show her character’s gimlet-brained incapacity to stop thinking too much about everything, I was in heaven; that Sidney Pollock—probably a completely nice guy in real life—projects an unpleasant jerk energy. The kind of aging Jewish swinger who still thinks he’s God’s gift to women. I remember being horrified by a scene where he manhandles his girlfriend into a car, and more horrified when the audience had laughed.

All these recollections turn out to be accurate. But the film is terrifically good, too. Mia Farrow, back to her Rosemary’s Baby gamine ‘do, is more and more turning into the true revelatory find of the festival for me. She is just a marvelous actress. My friend Rick often argues that he thinks Diane Keaton sometimes just “behaves” and he’s often not sure if she lacks serious craft (then again, Rick loathes Gene Kelly, so grain of salt). But Mia Farrow keeps turning in touching, nuanced, measured, and frequently hilarious performance after performance. I had completely forgotten Juliette Lewis’ existence in the movie as a ticky Sutton Place Lolita. Fantastic. Asking for a proper kiss from Woody Allen’s character in honor of her 21st birthday, he jokes, “Why do I hear $50,000 of psychotherapy dialing 911?” Even watching former president of Yale Benno Schmidt as Farrow’s first husband say, “she’s what I call ‘passive aggressive’”as if he were proferring an absolute jewel of arcana only served to charm me. My youthful opprobrium for Husbands And Wives merely proves the adage I have inverted to my own purposes to never trust anyone under thirty.

Interiors (about which more when it shows next Tuesday) might be argued as being the maiden voyage of Allen’s serious (as opposed to comic) interrogation of all those Big Picture questions of love, hatred, and the ties that bind. But in that film he does so with all the sophistication and finesse of a four-year-old boy wielding the chunky blue plastic hammer from his Ingmar Bergman My First Toolkit in his chubby little fist, smashing at everything in sight. (For the very best example of this kind of annoying pseudo-intellectual therapy speak, listen to Nichols & May’s brilliant routine from their Improvisations to Music album where one of them indicts their family’s emotional distance by claiming that “there was proximity but no relating.”) By Hannah And Her Sisters just a few years later, Allen is a master with the hammer and the film an absolute masterpiece, with perfect acting, most notably Dianne Weist’s Holly (her first Allen-derived Oscar), who judders and lurches in mid-80s thrift store cutie-pie outfits, looking all the while like the overhead lights have just been turned on too bright. I can’t write a review. It would be like “recommending” Paris or describing the pyramids, it is that canonical, and I am unworthy. Or perhaps that’s just bedtime beckoning.

“I used to think Tommy Dorsey was a cat.”

“A cat?”

“Yeah. When I was seven years-old, some family I knew had a cat named Tommy. I thought that was Tommy Dorsey. I dunno. Hey, how come you didn’t become a disc jockey? You could have. You had a famous personality.”

(Not pearls, I’ll admit, but it passed the time. The best example of GVMS {Gerontological Volume Maladjustment Syndrome} occurred when my friends Joel and Kate were in grad school in Ann Arbor. They went to a midday showing of Damage. The man of the aged couple behind them couldn’t hear, asking his wife what Miranda Richardson had just said. The wife responded without preamble, yelling loudly to the entire theater, “Fuck me, Peter!”).

I didn’t see Wild Man Blues when it came out, which was around the time when my disappointment in Woody Allen was at its apogee. I have no doubt that if I had, I wouldn’t have appreciated it. I was braced for some kind of hagiography, a la Errol Morris’ somewhat problematic documentary about Robert MacNamara. What I hadn’t known is that Barbara Kopple had essentially made a small concert film about Allen on a mini-tour through Europe, playing the New Orleans jazz that consumes him almost as much as film. The Europeans adore him. “[They] like pictures that drone on. I’m good at making pictures that drone on,” he conjectures. There’s a psychological term for this kind of self-deprecation: Mom. “You did a lot of things, but you never pursued them,” his mother says to him over brunch back in New York. “It’s just very hard for people in show business to make a living….Don’t think for a moment that you are what you are by yourself. You had a lot of help.” “This has truly been the lunch from hell,” he jokes.

I read somewhere that the original working title for Annie Hall was Anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure. I sympathize completely. Arriving in Madrid, he is told that the house where they are performing has a capacity of 1,800. He is stunned that such a crowd has shown up. “Theoretically this should be fun for us,” he half-jokes to his bandmates. There he is later, on a vaporetto, scudding across the water as the magnificence of Venice passes in the background. A faster boat passes, creating a wake and Allen grimaces involuntarily as his own craft yaws uncomfortably. A look flashes across his face and it’s a face I know intimately; I don’t even have to look in the mirror to know when I am making it. It’s the face that says I know that the entire rest of the world agrees that this is lovely but are there adequate life jackets/fire exits/oxygen in here? And can we go home yet?

But it is when he is playing that I am overwhelmed by a rush of what can accurately be described as love for Woody Allen. To see the effort and concentration of his playing, the pulsing of his jaw and temples as if there were umbrella staves pushing up from under his skin, or the attentive humility with which he sits and listens to banjo player Eddie Davis play Rock of Ages . As he himself says, there is no cerebral element to it, it’s sheer feeling and the reverence he displays is so real and so touching (not to refer back to previous blog entries too much, but it’s precisely the kind of reverence missing from the musical numbers in Everyone Says I Love and, conversely, exactly music’s alchemical capacity to change one that he so beautifully evoked in Radio Days).

His humble love for the music also seems to carry over into the way he speaks to people. He is almost unfailingly gracious and polite and deeply thankful to his audiences. A truly scary crowd of a thousand fans have assembled outside his hotel in Bologna and he steps out to say hello. Hounded by a paparazzo during the day, he mutters privately about wanting to “kick his fucking teeth in,” but when talking to the man, he is supremely reasonable. It makes me want to forgive him almost everything, well, that one thing, at least. He even cops to it when he introduces his wife as “The notorious Soon-Yi Previn,” who, it must be said, comes off as funny and frank and caring and just a pistol of a girl (“You should tell the band that they were good last night and not speak only to Eddie Davis. You tend to latch on to one person,” she gently admonishes him. When he is writing out laundry instructions to the hotel staff, she looks over his shoulder and reminds him, “Remember you’re not signing an autograph.” She’s never seen Annie Hall, “Never got around to it,” and she has never read his writing).

I decide not to stay for Sweet And Lowdown. I never really bought Samantha Morton’s ersatz Giulietta Massina wide-eyed innocent non-character. Her eyes, while blue enough, just didn’t speak the volumes to me that they were meant to. She seemed to be just another passive female putting up with shitty behavior. A woman who literally can’t say boo to a goose. And creating a silent character—or rather not creating a character—is like having a character who knows nobody, thereby removing the writer’s task of creating interactions. It seemed a cop-out of sorts, and I was feeling so in love with Woody, so grateful to him, so inspired that I didn’t want to harsh my toke, as the kids say (do the kids still say that?), preferring instead to channel Helen Sinclair, Dianne Wiest’s Bullets Over Broadway character who, in an effort to preserve the perfection of a moment, claps her gloved hand over John Cusack’s mouth and implores him repeatedly, dramatically, “Don’t speak.”

In 1970, Woody Allen—and the city that spawned him—are still in a state of grace and blissful innocence. These were the golden years before all higher concerns were supplanted by thoughts of real estate. His character, Fielding Melish, a products tester, lives in a modest walk-up. The joke is how many deadbolts he has on his door but I had almost as many on the door of an apartment I had on 109th street (even an old police lock, those bars that pinioned into a hole in the floor, just like Fielding has).

Much of the material in Bananas feels nascent, and much of it is clearly taken from his stand-up, including a sequence where he is the analysand lying on the couch. I confess I don’t remember the specifics of that scene since Allen chose to photograph himself from between his legs, a strangely overt crotch-shot, but it leads to his relating a dream sequence of Allen as Christ, being borne along by black-clad pallbearers through the deserted canyons of Wall Street. They find a parking spot, but get into a brawl with another team of Grim Reapers who claim they saw it first. There is more than one extended Groucho riff—a self cross-examination in a courtroom requiring much loping in and out of the witness box—and a take on Chaplin at his most ingratiating as Fielding tries to wheedle his way out of a beating at the hands of a hoodlum played by what looks to be a high school-aged Sylvester Stallone. A charming Louise Lasser as perhaps the first of his hyper-articulate and discursive self-doubters. Near the end of the movie, they walk along the Brooklyn promenade discussing love, sex, and death. A few years later, the conversation will move just across the river to the Seaport on the other side of the bridge where he will tell Diane Keaton that love is an inadequate term for how he feels. He “lurvs” her.

The seeds of later movies are all here, in a most gratifying way. I recently watched Almodovar’s Law of Desire (holds up after twenty years and remains extraordinarily sexy) and the concerns and narratives that weave through all his work are on display: the Church, the sexuality of children and the parameters of abuse and consensuality, the colorized Douglas Sirk female characters, and most notably the beauty and nobility of obsessional love. It can be downright moving to watch how an artist mines and mines and mines material, refining it each time. At my friend Jackie Hoffman’s house I recently watched the first Bugs Bunny/Elmer Fudd cartoon. Neither character is gelled yet, not their voices or their looks or their personalities. The cartoon is a bit of bore, actually, and seems hardly worth it. Executives today would have killed the franchise in its crib, and while it’s hardly 3,000 dead, it would have been a loss.

Words to live by while watching Sleeper which, as a child, struck me as a film whose funniness and futuristic coolness held no equal. I saw my friend Tim at Bananas but he beat a retreat immediately after, warning me that Sleeper doesn’t hold up. He is largely right, as it turns out. Some of the jokes about the future—the ascendancy of hot fudge and steak as perfect nutrition, the endurance of Keane paintings and Rod McEwen poetry—are pretty funny, but there’s a self-intoxication to his antics with Diane Keaton as they pose as doctors sneaking into a medical facility, as he does his Blanche Dubois to her somewhat average Brando. Certainly the children in the audience are loving it, as is the fellow beside me who is almost prostrate with laughter at the fairly lame and increasingly airless antics.

Perhaps it’s developmental, like those old cognitive experiments they used to do to determine that sensory input could influence the actual structure of the brain, burning the neural pathways needed to process the self-same information. By depriving cats of horizontal images at the very moment they were developing the capacity to see such things—ditto with vertical stimuli at their developmental phase—scientists were able to raise some felines who routinely bumped into table legs while others brained themselves with the tabletops. I’ve heard that younger folks are crazy about Napoleon Dynamite a movie that approached Chlamydia test torturousness for me.

But I am full of tender feelings as this strange and beautiful year closes and a new one begins. The words “We must forgive young work,” ring through my head. Otherwise, no one would attempt anything.

When I was fourteen years-old, a friend of my parents, although a serious journalist, a woman not remotely lacking in a sense of humor—despite the Vreeland-esque, aphoristic, guillotine-sharpness of her following pronouncement—said to me, “I wouldn’t waste Henry James on anyone younger than twenty-five,” when she heard what we were reading in my ninth-grade English class. I can’t say I disagreed with her. The Turn of The Screw did very little for me back then (whereas now, I could coitainly use one….rrrrrimshot!). Radio Days is just such a surprise, where adulthood yields a bounty of appreciation. I liked it well enough when it came out in 1987. It had seemed amusing, if not a tad close an homage to Amarcord. But I had no memory of the movie’s near perfection.

Maybe its due to my middle age, my nostalgist’s love for New York, or just an ever-present personal fragility of late, but near the film’s beginning Woody Allen shows us the waves crashing in upon a stormy and rainswept Rockaway as a piano rendition of Weill’s September Song plays (it wasn’t always this romantic but “that was it at its most beautiful,” he says in the supple voice-over), and I stay misty-eyed essentially for the whole film, even through some marvelously funny stuff.

The film is a forked creature, with one side being the story of Allen’s own childhood growing up in a bustling, multi-generational household of his mother’s family, while on the other is a cultural survey of the radio stars of his youth: the crime-stopping heroism of the Masked Avenger; Roger and Irene, the Lunt-like couple purring tales of opening nights and Rialto gossip; and the apocryphal tales of Sally the Cigarette Girl (a stellar Mia Farrow). The radio serves as the lifeline for both sets of characters. Solace for one, employment for the other.

Visual depictions of radio generally just show the artifice of it all. The ungainly headphones and bulbous, depending mics. The snood-wearing close-harmony singers, and those dissembling Foley artists, shaking their tin sheet rain storms or consuming family barns in infernos of crackling cellophane while coconut-shell horse teams furiously clop to the scene. And Radio Days certainly has its share, but the thing that is so lovely, perhaps loveliest about radio—a medium I’ve done a fair amount of work for and, as my television has no cable and lives out the majority of its days in the closet, save for the odd viewing of Broadway Danny Rose on Channel 13, a medium I listen to a great deal, as well—is its sensory potency. Despite the fact that you can’t dance on it (as gigglingly observed by lovably bubble-brained Mia Farrow), radio is more visual than film in precisely the same way that smell evokes memory in an exponentially more complex manner than a picture can. That each voice and song and commercial is a madeleine for Allen is conveyed in every frame.

Another marvel is how unapologetically Jewish a film Radio Days is. Compare it to that anti-Semitic-by-omission piece of drek Avalon, also essentially a memory-film—although Barry Levinson imbued his family with not actual Jewishness so much as a box-office-hedging general ethnic quality (you know, a propensity for voluble argument along with a concomitant lack of boundaries, all wrapped up in pronouncing “turkey” as “toikey.”). Allen’s family are genuine Jews. They fast on Yom Kippur. His childhood act of larceny is effected by stealing money from Jewish National Fund boxes. Even the casting seems revolutionary. An actress I have never seen before or since, one Mindy Morgenstern, has a twenty-second role as a teacher overseeing show-and-tell. A magnificent schnozz she has, dark eyes, her hair a barely tamed wire brush. Despite Mel Gibson’s protestations about our ubiquity and media stranglehold, a face like that is an unapologetically beautiful thing to see and a rarity on film. A face straight from steerage. A relic of the decades before rhinoplasty became the default sweet sixteen present. When being Jewish still meant quotas. Back when we were Other. Dare I invoke the title of this here blog, back when we were interesting.

The film ends on New Year’s Eve. The pantheon of radio stars have gone to the rooftop of the impossibly chic King Cole Room—whose gold and white Deco interior is already looking like a bit of a 30s relic—to usher in 1944. The years go so quickly, one of them observes, feeling the first twinges of panic as his livelihood sails into obsolescence. “Then we get old and we never knew what it was about.”

It’s cold on that rooftop as they all file back downstairs. Wallace Shawn, the counterintuitively milquetoast-y Masked Avenger, calls out his trademark line to the unhearing mobs celebrating down in the street: “Beware evildoers, wherever you are!” Evildoers. Once just an overblown locution from an implausible radio drama full of unnuanced portrayals of Pure Good and Pure Evil.

And the President couldn’t even wake up.

With this knowledge I see the whole experience with new eyes. Things seem fresher. Why, there are even some new selections on the pre-show tape: Take The A Train and The White Cliffs of Dover. I watch Maxi-Length Down Jacket’s back intently while the latter song plays. Its history seems so distant for me as to be medieval (even though I was born less than 20 after the end of World War II, the last year of the Baby Boom according to some demographers), but for her it must take her back. She was, at the very youngest, in her late teens when this wishful picture of peace and bluebirds was in rotation on the radio. People needed such rosy visions back then, I suppose, what with everyone aware of the war that was consuming the attention and resources of the public at large, with everyone worried sick about sons and brothers and husbands and friends fighting overseas. Good thing those days are past and we have NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO WORRY ABOUT!

I’ve been trying to parse the recondite logic behind pairing these two films today. It’s quite bizarre because they contradict. One is a direct refutation of the other. Good news out of the way first: Bullets Over Broadway is fabulous! Exponentially better and funnier and more beautiful to look at and terrifically well-acted than I remember. Dianne Wiest’s grande dame Helen Sinclair and Jennifer Tilly’s lollapalooza gun moll Olive are sublime. And the script (co-written with Doug McGrath) is tight and funny and has none of the runny, maddening, improvisatory quality of other films. If this is what having a collaborator does for Woody Allen (Manhattan and Annie Hall were written with Marshall Brickman), then he should never be without one.

Chazz Palminteri, playing mob henchman Cheech, assigned to guard Olive while she mangles her way through a Broadway part, is soon helping playwright John Cusack rework his script, turning it from serviceable into a work of art. But Olive is ruining everything with her proactive lack of talent. So he whacks her with the final words, “You’re a horrible actress.”

This central contention of the movie—that he has killed her with neither qualm nor remorse because art and the making of same is not subject to the morals of man (a deadly serious belief albeit played for comedy here)—seems noteworthy in light of Everyone Says I Love You, which is a lousy, shitty movie in precisely the way that would involve a thug’s slug. Everyone Says I Love You is a sloppy insult whose cracks and flaws are spackled over with fistfuls of money and sundry diversions in the form of real estate porn (it’s a love letter to the Upper East Side, right down to the immigrant nannies and Jamaican nurses of Mt. Sinai), some calling-in-favors flashy cameos (Itzhak Perlman on violin!), and Drew Barrymore’s astonishing (even to this fag) breasts. As my friend, Nextbook regular Jesse Green, when we saw the film together when it was first released, said about an ice-pink, boat-neck satin number Drew wears, “Who was the nipple wrangler for that dress?” They are truly amazing. Why are all the straight boys not still talking about them? I cannnot get them out of my mind!

But I digress. The movie is a musical wherein otherwise non-musical characters break into song. It’s like a pageant of the Post-Skill era. This is one time Woody Allen’s characteristic elitism fails him, and in completely the wrong way. One can almost see him responding to the unctuous wheedling of casting directors, persuading him to employ this hot young thing or that one. So there are dewy and delightful Natalie Portman and Edward Norton! Almost to a person—with the exception of kittenish Goldie Hawn—these actors can’t sing. Warhol was at least being ironic when he dubbed his rag-tag troupe of semi-talents Superstars.

Put aside, if you can (you won’t be able to, trust me) the aneurysm-inducing faux-roistering You Can’t Take It With You cacophony of the spoken scenes with their halting and muddled improvised dialogue. Forget the afterthought that is the camera work. The film’s cardinal sin isn’t even Allen’s brazen plagiarism of creator Dennis Potter’s unique twist on musical theater of having characters break into song, (although that’s pretty chutzpahdik). No, what so rankles is that Allen misses the point of the entire art form. What Potter was trying to achieve—and what every musical director and producer from Vincente Minelli to the Freed unit, even up to the massively annoying Lars von Trier, knew and executed by employing stars anointed with actual talent—is that the impulse to sing, that almost unendurable groundswell of emotion that would lead one to break the Fourth Wall of space-time and open one’s throat also by definition, according to the physics of the musical theater universe, possesses a transformative power. One becomes a perfect instrument of the emotion moving through one’s body. You are made beautiful, at least in voice. So that in those moments that you realize that if you were a bell you’d go ding-dong-ding or you can’t help lovin’ dat man of yours, what pours out of you are the perfect phrasing and honeyed tones of Howard Keel and Dinah Shore (or if you’re Natalie Wood, Deborah Kerr, of Audrey Hepburn, of Marni Nixon) Not, emphatically NOT the croaky documentary stylings of Edward Norton (who further appalls during a number set to My baby Just Cares for Me set in Harry Winston, where he dances self-consciously and like a goofball, as if to say “This is stupid and aren’t dancers just a stupid bunch of homos?”). Otherwise, you’re just in the shower.

Play It Again, Sam was actually directed by Herbert Ross, who went on to make the approximately perfect Pennies From Heaven. What? Were they not speaking by this point? Why didn’t Allen consult him. The generally very talented Kenneth Branagh made a similar travesty of the movie musical with the mediocre numbers with which he peppered his lousy Love’s Labour’s Lost. It’s a mystifying infraction for both these men, since no one’s sensibilities would be more mortally offended if you said to either Allen or Branagh, who clearly revere the respective realms to which they have devoted their lives, “I’m just gonna turn on the camera and shoot some shit,” or “I dunno, it’s just Shakespeare…how hard it be?”

The answer of course is Very Hard! It takes effort and rigor. That’s why we don’t generally spend more than five seconds watching children who have put thumbtacks on their shoes to “tap dance,” unless it is our own eight-year-old. Otherwise, it’s Cheech’s bullet for you, my friend, and there’s not a jury in the land that would convict you. (In truth, I’ve always had a bit of trouble with that pronouncement about art and artists being immune to the petty concerns of morality, or the need to be kind or fair or anything other than obliteratingly self-involved. It has always struck me as the rationalization that goatish, flesh-pressing painters, writers, and musicians trot out in order to cheat on or sock their long-suffering wives and girlfriends.) But the rigors of creativity—the self-doubt, the revising, the solitude—do require a kind of self-consumption. It comes at a cost; a cost that isn’t for everyone. At the end of Bullets, John Cusack’s character realizes it’s not a price he’s willing to pay. “I’m not an artist. There, I’ve said it and I feel free.”

We’re becoming quite the little tribe. I’m starting to see regulars (not terribly surprising in the art house demimonde of Manhattan. A years-long stint of being entirely shut down during renovation wasn’t enough to eradicate the atomized cadre of hissing, angry Hebrews who populated the Titus theater in the basement of MoMa. Go see a movie there today and there they are, newly sprung up like mushrooms, as if the place hadn’t even been closed for a day). Downtown at Woody, there is me, the white-haired Hummer (meaning man who hums, not hypertrophic military vehicle repurposed for a greedy consumer market), the surly cinéaste, the old woman in the maxi-length down jacket, the fellow who could be doing some sort of Marcel Duchamp Dada experiment on his own body, so conspicuously ill-fitting is his…no, I will go no further with this unkindness. At one point, he dips his raisin bagel into his coffee, spilling some on the floor, and in the space of a half-second at the longest, my interior snarl of impatience transforms into a wave of such empathy for the passing parade of malformed humanity, myself included, that it’s like being hit in the face with a frying pan.

Along with Young Frankenstein, Love and Death was an absolute touchstone of hilarity when I was ten/eleven. I must say, the filmmaking is beautiful and the humor mostly holds up in all its silliness. And there are things that my younger self (an inordinately sophisticated if not high-strung and unpleasant little pansy) didn’t even get. I understood that the shot of the soldier on the battlefield with the broken glasses was an Eisenstein reference, but I had had no idea, for example, what the “hygiene play” that Woody’s regiment was shown just before being sent to fight in the Napoleonic Wars was. Similarly, the tsunami-like force of the love-making between Woody and a Countess almost destroys her boudoir; furniture is upended, dishes are broken, linens scattered, and all of it in the course of five minutes. Again, lost on me.

Not picking up on all the sexual references might have been what interfered with my optimal enjoyment of Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask) when I saw it as a child, but seeing it again as an aging grown-up, I’m not so sure. It’s Love American Style, albeit with dirtier talk (“snatch,” “beaver,” “tit”) and less satisfying resolutions to its sketch format.

Sequences just peter out in a half-cooked whimper. Although there is a fantastic, pitch-perfect riff on La Dolce Vita, delivered entirely in un-subtitled Italian wherein Woody/Mastroianni wonders what to do about his frigid wife (a completely counterintuitive Louise Lasser as an icily elegant, almond-eyed, neurasthenic blonde). And What’s My Perversion?, a What’s My Line? spoof, done with actual panelists (including a young Regis Philbin), shot on black-and-white kinescope is marvelous if only for its coda wherein Rabbi Chaim Bauml is that week’s lucky viewer to have his fantasy fulfilled on national television. It involves silk stockings, being tied up, whipped by a miniskirt-clad model (“You’ve been a baaaad rabbi!”) and the coup de grace, his wife, the Rebbetzin Bauml, who will sit at his feet and eat pork. Now that’s dirty!

There are a lot of messy-haired slinky ectomorph boys who work at Film Forum. One of them is looking for a place to live and might have found a two bedroom up in Inwood at the corner of Seaman and Cumming. I remember laughing at almost exactly this address in college. A friend knocked up his girlfriend in freshman year and, in the years that they managed to struggle along together before they were each finally free, they took an apartment—along with their new-born issue; a woman of, I think, twenty-four at this point—on Seaman Avenue: the street that started their problems in the first place.

This is becoming chore-like already and I still have twenty-three films to go. I leave my house at noon and don’t get out of the movies until 5:00. A cranky cineaste “psst’s” my tiny writing light. I can hardly blame him, but it seems a minor offense compared to the rustling of the loose-leaf tracts in the Strand bag from the near-indigent mutterer behind us. And the sound today is off, to boot. To say nothing of the primordially funky odor emanating from the folds of someone’s garments as if they’d just come from truffling.

Much of Mighty Aphrodite feels improvised, which makes for viewing that can be soul-deadening when it’s not outright annoying, like when characters who ostensibly ought to know the details of each others’ lives (because, oh I don’t know, they’re married), speak in dialogue whose exposition—to say nothing of its class assumptions—makes one want to jump into the scene and introduce and then throttle them. And the discomforting tone-deafness of older Woody is starting to show. It’s odd to see him kissing Helena Bonham Carter or fathering a five-year-old, who it looks like he’s just met by the craft services table. When Woody asks Linda, Mira Sorvino’s prostitute character if she ever worries about being murdered by one her johns, she laughs it off with a helium-voiced, “I always get paid in advance,” which is played for laughs. (On a similar note, Play It Again, Sam has an extended riff between Woody and Diane where he comfortingly assures her she’ll never get raped and she responds with a wistful, “not with my luck…” granted that was close to 40 years ago.) But Sorvino is quite charming and almost heart-breakingly sweet at moments, like when she hands back the snapshot of his son. A Harvard grad in real life, Sorvino is playing dumb, just like Judy Holliday who was, by all accounts, fiercely intelligent. By contrast, her romantic foil, Michael Rappaport, who is not uncharming, exudes natural dunderheadedness of an eye-watering intensity. He’s like one of those freshly unwrapped taxicab pine tree air fresheners in Stupid fragrance.

The crowd swells for Manhattan Murder Mystery, which mystifies me, since I don’t recall loving it all that much. What I most remember is that I was working at HarperCollins at the time the film was made and Woody’s character plays a book editor at this self-same publisher. They filmed on the very hallway where I worked. The fluorescent bulbs under which we generally toiled cast a light that was deemed too warm and inviting for film, so the production crew replaced them with tubes whose beams were even greyer and less flattering. A number of us actually became quite nauseous. Our day was a stream of interruptions, being intermittently told to be quiet or to make sure to duck down in our cubicles when the cameras rolled for fear that we —actual employees of HarperCollins Publishers—might be seen in a shot set at HarperCollins Publishers. It was an abjection heaped atop a job a great many of us loathed with an uncommon despair. But I have to say, my memory is one hundred percent wrong. The movie is terrific. Funny, natural, deft, and with a finale that uses funhouses mirrors and a sample of The Lady From Shanghai of such casual virtuosity that it takes my breath away. During Aphrodite, I had been cursing Allen’s prolificacy, but here, I just take my hat off. And there’s something to be said for not being too precious about it all. “Inspiration is for amateurs,” says the painter Chuck Close. I’ve decided this is to be my New Year’s mantra. Just get down to work and get it done. Sometimes it will be dross, and sometimes it will be jewels. My friend Patty very cleverly pointed out that an output of a film a year is not unlike blogging. So herewith, your daily dose of dross, jewels forthcoming at unspecified date, it is fervently hoped.

A Django Rinehart number plays followed by the through-the-front-teeth whistle of “Big Noise From Winnetka.” (“Quick! Who played the original?” one of the film geeks in front of me fires at his seatmate. A brief word about film geekdom, or for the purposes of this pointlet, fanaticism, and I only bring it up because this particular double-feature is predicated on the almost Lourdes-like curative powers of movies. Play It Again Sam’s opening shot is the same as Purple Rose’s final one: a close-up of a face, rapt in a movie house. I’ve certainly felt that in my life. I’ve been known to cry watching Gene Kelly. A too-persistent romanticism tempered by its disappointed evil twin, cynicism, caused me no small amount of trouble in my younger days. But let’s face it: professing a deep interest in movies, the absolutely dominant global art form of the last century, is at this point like professing an interest in air. Passion is nice. Erudition is admirable. But it’s like that moment when good manners cross over into meaningless etiquette. The former are designed to make people feel comfortable, respected, welcome. To prevent the embarrassment of others, one of the few Talmudic principles I actually know about and one I can heartily get behind. Whereas the coded gestures of the latter are used to exclude. When someone tells you how “deeply they care about movies” more often than not, what they are really saying is “…in ways you cannot possibly begin to appreciate.”)

Play It Again Sam has Humphrey Bogart advising Woody’s character, Alan Felix, in the proper comportment befitting a rough and tumble manliness. Ironic, given the real-life Bogey’s own relatively cosseted, borderline blue-blood Manhattan upbringing compared to Mr. Konigsberg’s own much more hardscrabble Brooklyn boyhood. The further irony is that, just as Jacqueline Onassis never needed a Jewish girl to show her how to get what she wanted from a man (my mother’s brilliant explanation as to why we were forbidden from using the racist term “J.A.P.” in my house), Woody Allen doesn’t need anyone to teach him how to get the girl. He is the walking proof of that old stand-by from the Playmate questionnaires: a sense of humor may well be the most attractive thing for women (let this in no way serve as an endorsement of Christopher Hitchens’ recent idiotic theory that women aren’t funny. Clearly he’s never met Amy Sedaris, Jackie Hoffman, or Kristin Schall, among countless others…). Being funny might just be the great aphrodisiac (take that, jowly, shambling war criminal, Henry Kissinger!). Being a pale, translucent, unphotosynthesized schmendrick didn’t matter as long as you were smart and funny. Beautiful, leggy shiksas were just waiting to laugh and subsequently throw themselves at you. This was the myth of Woody Allen when I was growing up, indeed the abiding myth for all of us Jewish men (except for those of us who were more interested in the broad-shouldered, corn-fed shaygetzes). There was even a commercial for Hai Karate after-shave predicated on this amusing if not improbable disconnect, except in Woody Allen’s case, it just happened to be true.

Susan Anspach plays the first wife who leaves Woody’s character, claiming she wants more out of life. She wants to ski and laugh and ride a motorcycle. She cannot have known it, but it’s not far from the litany of missed regrets in the song about Lucy Jordan, sung by Marianne Faithfull that plays over the opening credits of the film in which Anspach later starred, Dusan Makavejev’s very good Montenegro. “At the age of 37, she realized she would never ride through Paris in a sportscar with the warm wind in her hair…” (I care really deeply about movies…) Similarly, when Woody’s character is trying to impress a date by playing the Oscar Peterson record, but also leaving the Bartok LP out for show, I was put in mind of the list of things that make life worth living in Manhattan, about which more later, when that film shows, I suppose.

29-year-old Woody looks like every Williamsburg hipster. Viva playing a self-professed nymphomaniac who then screams “What do you take me for?” when he pounces remains a delight (and I will always, always love Viva for her on-screen commentary in the documentary Nico/Icon. A deeply annoying film, it was an adoring portrait of the former model/sometime Velvet Underground singer. It went on and on about how “interesting” Nico was, how everyone for some inexplicable reason wanted to be with her and hear her views. Gee, it must have been because of her searing intellect and have nothing to do with the fact that she was a startling Teutonic beauty. Finally, Viva, the voice of reason, has had it. “She. Had. No. Interests!” she says to the camera. And like that, the fever is broken. Viva, Viva!).

When Woody eventually confesses his love for Diane Keaton and they kiss, extendedly and comically, it is played for laughs and intercut with images of Bogey and Bergman’s more legitimate on-screen lip-lock. What makes it touching is that these two clowns went on to be a cinematic coupling easily as romantic and immortal: the very ideal of modern movie love for many. “You’ve really developed yourself a certain style,” says Bogie, at the end. “What the hell. I’m short enough and ugly enough to succeed on my own,” says Woody.
Near the end of the film, Woody manages to echo the immortal “Maybe not now, maybe not next week. But soon, and for the rest of your life,” speech. “That’s beautiful,” says Diane Keaton. It’s from Casablanca, he admits. “I’ve waited my whole life to say it.” I feel like I know a little something about that. At least three times a week, I am overwhelmed with a wave of gratitude to New York City for providing me with a life. Not that my life is so great, although I think it’s pretty nifty: I don’t mine coal, I get paid to write. But just sitting in my seat reading Frank Rich and waiting for the next movie to start approaches a kind of ideal I only dreamed about when I was a young homo in the provinces. The wish fulfillment of it all can be almost uncoupling. But like I’ve said, I can’t be trusted when it comes to notions of the city. I’m a hopeless romantic.

An appropriate emotion when watching The Purple Rose of Cairo. “You kiss perfectly,” says Mia Farrow to the fictional character Tom, and it’s all you can do not to cry. I wonder why this movie’s not thought of as being as seminal as it actually is. There wouldn’t be any of that Charlie Kaufman/Michel Gondry stuff without this movie. Clearly it’s not the first to play with the notion of the screen and the unseen audience, to say nothing of the unseen hand of the creator. Max Fleischer was constantly doing it in Betty Boop cartoons. And the Daffy Duck Loony Tune where he draws the undermining ire of Chuck Jones’ vengeful pen is a classic. But Purple Rose is just magnificent.

There’s that old apocryphal chestnut about masters of Noh Drama who have such control over their instruments that they can turn their heads from left to right a full 180 degrees in such a slow, subtle, and sustained manner that you will not be able to clock them moving. Mia Farrow’s face in the final shot—watching Fred and Ginger dance to “Cheek to Cheek” on a set of such blinding white Deco cleanliness—goes from hopeless despond to luminous rapture and you don’t see it happening. It is a wonder.

Christmas tomorrow. God bless us everyone.

How many times have I seen this, I wonder? Unquantifiable. The film is canonical and familiar and memorized, almost to the point of ritual. Perhaps this is the spiritual solace the faithful find in the formulaic rhythms of liturgy. It’s as comforting as stepping into a warm bath. Diane Keaton is enchanting, there is no other word for it. She comes on the screen and you can hear the slightest creaking in the audience as corners of mouths turn up. There is Christopher Walken, a peach-fuzzed stripling. And there, doe-eyed, with drum-tight skin: Carol Kane playing Alvy’s first wife, Alison Porchnick.

Alison Porchnick. Oy. I am generally known as an unfailingly appropriate fellow. I have very good manners. But when I fuck up, I fuck up big time. Suddenly, I am reminded of how, three years ago, I was on a story for an adventure magazine, an environmental consciousness-raising whitewater rafting expedition in Chilean Patagonia (about which the less said the better. It’s really scary. Others may call it exhilarating, and I suppose it is, the way having a bone marrow test finally over and done with is exhilarating. And Patagonia, Chilean Patagonia at least, while pretty, isn’t one tenth as breathtaking as British Columbia). On the trip with me were Bobby Kennedy, Jr., hotelier Andre Balazs, and Glenn Close, among others. Everyone was very nice, I hasten to add.

After lunch one day, my friend Chris, the photographer on the story, came up to me and said, “I’d lay off the Kennedy assassination jokes if I were you.”

I laughed, but Chris reiterated, not joking this time. “No, I’d really lay off the Kennedy assassination jokes. The lunch line…” he reminded me.

And then I remembered. I had been dreading this trip (see above about how totally justified I was in my trepidation) for weeks beforehand, terrified by the off-the-grid distance of this Chilean river, a full three days of travel away; terrified of the rapids and their aqueous meat-grinder properties; terrified of just being out of New York. All of this terror I took and disguised as an affronted sense of moral outrage, that such trips were frivolous, given the terrible global situation. I explained it to Glenn Close thusly:

“I was using the war in Iraq to try and avoid coming down here,” suddenly, unthinkingly invoking the part of Annie Hall when Alvy breaks off from kissing Alison because he’s distracted by niggling doubts: if the motorcade was driving past the Texas Book Depository, how could Oswald, a poor marksman, have made his shot? Surely there was a conspiracy afoot. Then, with Bobby Kennedy, Jr. helping himself to three-bean salad on the lunch line not five feet away, I switched into my Carol Kane as Alison Porchnick voice and said, “You’re using the Kennedy Assassination as an excuse to avoid having sex with me.” Then I followed that up with my Woody Allen imitation and finished out the scene. Nice. No one pointed out my gaffe or was anything other than gracious and delightful.

* * *

Despite how well I know the material, the film feels so fresh. All the observations and jokes feel like they’re being made for the first time, or are at least in their infancy. By later films they will feel hackneyed (in the movie Funny Girl, the process of calcification is even more accelerated. You get back from intermission and Barbra Streisand already feels like too big a star, a drag version of herself), but here it’s all just terrifically entertaining. And current! Alvy tells his friend Max that he feels that the rest of the country turning its back on the city—It’s the mid-70s. Gerald Ford to New York: Drop Dead, and all that jazz—is anti-Semitic in nature. That we are seen as left-wing, Communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers. And so we remain, at least in the eyes of Washington and elsewhere, a pervy bastion of surrender monkeys. There was an Onion headline that ran after a sufficient interval of time had passed post-9/11, that essentially read, “Rest of country’s temporary love affair with New York officially over.”

Rest of the country’s perhaps, but mine was just beginning when I saw the film at age eleven. By the time the voice-over gets to the coda about how we throw ourselves over and over again into love affairs despite their almost inevitable disappointments and heartbreak because, like the joke says, “we need the eggs,” (if you need the set-up to the punchline, what on earth are you doing reading this?) I am weepy with love for the city. Although, truth be told, it doesn’t take much to get my New York waterworks going.

Walking out, my friend Rick, thirty-plus years resident said, “I had forgotten how Jewish a film it is.” I really hadn’t noticed. But I’m the wrong guy to ask. It’s like saying to a fish, “Do things around here seem really wet to you?” I wrote a book that got translated into German a few years back. There was a fascination among the Germans with what they perceived as my Jewish sensibility; a living example of the extirpated culture. I’ve said this before, but I felt like the walking illustration of that old joke about the suburbs being the place where they chop down all the trees and then name the streets after them. At least a dozen of the reviews referred to me as a “stadtneurotiker,” an urban neurotic, a designation that pleased me, I won’t lie. Especially when I found out the German title for Annie Hall: Der Stadtneurotiker.

David Rakoff

In another, a fox, bleeding and exhausted, “beside himself with rage and fear,” stumbles into a clearing, pursued by a hunter’s hound. The fox first pleads with the hound, one canine to another. Then, understanding the inevitability of his approaching end, he suddenly sits erect and speaks in a voice bitter as gall: “Aren’t you ashamed, you traitor…You turncoat…You spy.”

The denunciation is taken up by others in the forest. “Traitor!” screams the magpie, “Spy!” shrieks the jay.

The dog responds in kind, denouncing their benighted naiveté. Besides, he isn’t the only traitor. What about the cow, the sheep, the chicken?

“They’re rabble!” snarls the fox—his last defiant words as the hound sets upon him, a fine spray of blood dyeing the snow.

Salten’s writing has not a trace of anthropomorphized cuteness. Bambi‘s forest is peopled (creatured?) with characters by turns arrogant, venal, gossipy, and engaging—as flawed and varied as the cosmopolitan fauna Salten must have encountered daily in his life in Vienna.

Felix Salten

The novel was immediately popular with both children and adults. An English-language edition followed in 1929 (translated, curiously enough, by Whittaker Chambers, who took the job to supplement the paltry salary he earned as editor of the Communist newspaper The Daily Worker), with a foreword by novelist and playwright John Galsworthy, who deemed it “a little masterpiece,” and signed off with, “I particularly recommend it to sportsmen.”

Sportsmen, however, were less enthusiastic, at least insofar as the Disney version was concerned. When the feature-length cartoon was released in 1942, the American Riflemen’s Association tried to get the studio to tack a pro-hunting prologue onto the movie, something Uncle Walt declined to do. The gun lobby was justified in its worry, since entire generations of American children would go on to identify the death of Bambi’s mother as among their earliest and most wrenching psychological terrors. (Disney used to have a stringent policy of withdrawing films for years at a time, so my pre-DVD childhood was Bambi-less. Whatever dead-cartoon-mom angst I was imprinted with was located in Dumbo, specifically the scene in which, chained inside a boxcar, Dumbo’s mother dandles him in the cradle of her trunk, the only extremity she can get through the barred window. It is unutterably sad. I still cannot watch it.)

But as harrowing as the celluloid rendition of Bambi’s maternal loss may be, it is nothing compared to Salten’s original chapter, where things are bad to begin with and only become more horrible. It is winter and the once cordial animals have begun to turn on one another in the madness of hunger. The near-famine conditions have “spread bitterness and brutality.” The crows kill the hare’s sick young son for sport. The ferret wounds the squirrel mortally, the fox has torn the admired and stately pheasant to pieces. “It’s hard to believe that it will ever be better,” says Bambi’s dispirited mother. Bambi himself is skittish and exhausted with hunger and cold.

Suddenly, one of the young bucks prickles with a vague presentiment of trouble. From the farthest edge of the wood, a murder of crows comes flying by, agitated. The magpies begin to screech to one another from the trees, and finally the deer can smell “that fearful scent [that] kept streaming on in a wider wave, sending terror into their hearts and uniting them all in one mad fear, in a single feverish impulse to flee, to save themselves.”

The forest roars with the sound of hunters advancing from all sides, snapping twigs, beating on tree trunks to drive out the animals. A pheasant flies into the air and is killed in front of everyone. “Don’t lose your head…. Just run, run, run!” one of his surviving compatriots panics to the others. But it is all too much for the bird and, crazed with fear, he too takes off into the air, only to be shot down.

“Then everyone lost his senses.” Creatures swarm over one another to get away. All is tumult and thunder and death. The old hare is murdered before their eyes, the sky is darkened by a rain of blood and feathers. Bambi follows behind his mother to the edge of the thicket. They are to run across the clearing and he is to keep running, regardless of what he might see happen to her. Well, you know what happens to her. Salten and Disney share a restraint by not showing us. The chapter ends simply, “Bambi never saw his mother again.”

* * *

Like many an artist, Salten first tasted prominence in death, though not his own. Born Siegmund Salzmann in 1869 in Budapest, he moved with his parents to Vienna when he was three weeks old. The city had begun granting Jews the rare privilege of full citizenship just two years prior, prompting a large Jewish migration from elsewhere in the Hapsburg Empire. Salten grew up poor in the Vienna slums, with little formal education. He labored in a series of menial, clerical jobs in the insurance business while sending out his work to little or no effect until 1902, when his obituary of Emile Zola, by all accounts a moving and noteworthy piece of writing, received widespread notice and provided Salten entrée into the Jung Wien, the Young Vienna Movement, a loose conglomeration of progressive bohemians. Artists and writers, most of them Jews, Jung Wien counted among its members composer Franz Lehar, playwright and novelist Arthur Schnitzler, librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Stefan Zweig. Once enfolded into this rarefied klatch, Salten became a prolific novelist and a noted theater critic for various publications, shuttling back and forth between Berlin and Vienna.

Salten received only nominal Jewish instruction, it seems. He even served as an altar boy, which might account for the novel’s vaguely Christian sensibility. Humans are referred to using the God-like “He” and “Him” throughout. It seems a fitting moniker for a largely unseen force that is quick to ire and possessed of awesome, arbitrary, and obliterating power. Ultimately, a grown Bambi realizes that “there is Another who is over us all, over us and over Him,” A force of unquantifiable strength, but one also imbued with the attributes of mercy and lovingkindness. And yet, even if Salten hadn’t known the experience directly, even the casual reader cannot fail to see in the young fawn’s life of precarious freedom and probationary ease what can only be described as a deep Jewish uncertainty. The entrapment and slaughter of the scene rings with the authenticity of nothing less than a sylvan pogrom. There is other evidence to suggest that Salten’s Jewish consciousness was not entirely dormant. In 1910, when Vienna’s beloved mayor Karl Lueger died, Salten took some heat for an obituary he wrote in the Presse newspaper criticizing the encoded anti-Semitism in Lueger’s falsely populist anti-intellectualism, that “disintegrates the physicians, insults the professors, jeers at learning.” Salten’s lingering vestigial Jewishness did not go unnoticed in Bambi either, at least not by one of the members of Jung Wien. The writer Karl Kraus, a Czech-born Jew who renounced his Judaism and was baptized as a Catholic at age 37, criticized Salten for muddying the purity of the German tongue by putting Yiddishisms in the mouths of his animal characters.

* * *

Bambi’s religion may have been a matter of some dispute, but his gender never was. He is most assuredly a male fawn, despite his name’s adoption by subsequent generations of female porn stars. It’s an oddly appropriate fate, given Salten’s own foray into filth. The Memoirs of Josephine, authored by one Josephine Mutzenbacher, was a pseudonymous “autobiography” told from the point of view of an older woman looking back over her life as a courtesan. As Josephine, or “Pepi,” says near the beginning, whoring “saved me from suffocating in the slums and permitted me to live like any woman of good society.”

The book, a prequel to Pepi’s later genteel life, documents her childhood in the destitute Ottakring district of Vienna, in a crowded tenement with her parents and two older brothers. A series of boarders who sleep in the tiny apartment’s kitchen educate the juvenile Pepi in the ways of sex, although her main and most energetic instructor is her next-older brother, along with a pair of precocious siblings who live upstairs.

Salten wrote the book in 1906, seventeen years before Bambi, and just four years after his redemptive Zola obituary. The indignities of Pepi’s youthful privation are clearly and minutely recalled by a writer whose own relief at having “gotten out” must have still been quite fresh.

There is no indication that The Memoirs of Josephine was a standout in its field, either critically or commercially. Salten didn’t vocally claim authorship of the material and, deeply felt psychological roots notwithstanding, the book reads like pretty standard porn. There is squalor, but menace and any real hardship are largely absent from the narrative. To be sure, no one is sitting down to lavish meals or clothing themselves in finery, but one can’t help wondering, why aren’t these children being beaten in dingy school rooms by ignorant, malodorous teachers with filthy beards and long fingers? Or else having their own digits caught in the gnashing maws of early industrial factory machines? Instead of the usual Jacob Riis-style hijinks one might expect from Pepi and her ragamuffin pals—stealing from pushcarts, rolling hoops, lobbing bricks through storefront windows—they seem to spend their free time (and they have an awful lot of it) screwing around. Her days stretch out before her, with hours during which to experiment with her urchin pals, with bored housewives, with a seriously unqualified governess, a great, massy coal wagoneer in the cellar, the corrupting priest Father Mayer, an “art” photographer named Capucci, and, after the death of her mother, her own father.

It’s a regular Melroseplatz. For a little girl sprung from the mind of a compatriot and contemporary of Freud, she is remarkably lacking in sexual trauma, although Salten’s explanation for this has to do with class and privilege. “In my childhood, boys and girls like my brother and I were all sexually aware and eager to practice that premature knowledge,” Pepi reports. “Boys did it with their sisters and girlfriends as a matter of course. They had never heard the word incest, or taboo, like the rich kids who had the opportunity to listen to the conversations of educated adults. Brothers and sisters of the poor proletarian class saw each other as males and females and would have been quite surprised if they had been told that relationships should make them see one another differently. When I could do any reading in my later years I discovered that the children in primitive societies felt and acted exactly as we did.”

There is the sense from these repeated, falsely erudite primitivist fantasies from an adult Pepi that the The Memoirs of Josephine aspires to something more than mere stroke book. We learn that, although it might have been Pepi’s beauty and lack of sexual squeamishness that eventually afforded her her financial independence, it was her curious intellect that led her to a life of music and art and culture (a life not dissimilar from the one that Salten himself was delivered to once he was accepted at the tables of the Café Griensteidl). It gave her existence beauty and meaning and it gave us, the lucky readers, these pages. Yet we never get even a glimpse of this earthly reward. The Memoirs of Josephine ends years before the salons, the conversations, the evening musicales. It’s like being invited over to someone’s house for supper and being regaled with the tantalizing rigors of her Cordon Bleu training and the resultant meal she’s going to cook for tomorrow night’s guest. In the meantime, all we get is repetitive, consequence-free pistoning and probing. It is surpassingly dull.

And while I cannot speak to the book’s authenticity—having never been Viennese, female, or sexually unbridled myself under anything but the most metaphorical circumstances, and even then only when drunk—it has the ring of falsehood about it. Salten’s forest seems less idealized and idyllic than his Vienna, a city he fled at the start of World War II. He settled in Zurich and died there in 1945.

Salten and his Viennese cohort were among the first Jews raised in a largely secular milieu, allowing them to live lives and make art independent of a strictly Jewish experience. They filled the exciting new void left behind by abandoned religious traditions with an exuberant secularism, which would go on to inform painting, writing, theater, psychoanalysis, and just about every other aspect of a dynamic age hurtling into the future. A few decades later all of this would fall under the entartete, or “degenerate,” rubric. Ironic, seeing as how there would be almost no more iconic a Nazi image than a proud stag in the forest.