Another Woman (1988)

USA, 81 minutes

Director/writer: Woody Allen

Photography: Sven Nykvist

Music: Erik Satie, Woody Allen’s record collection

Editor: Susan E. Morse

Cast: Gena Rowlands, Ian Holm, Gene Hackman, Sandy Dennis, Mia Farrow, Blythe Danner, Betty Buckley, Martha Plimpton, John Houseman, Harris Yulin, Frances Conroy

Director and writer Woody Allen’s movie about the bourgeois in New York City entering their 50s is surprisingly very good. I suspect a good deal of that, especially nowadays with his reputation in shreds, is because this is one of his rare movies in which he does not appear. It doesn’t hurt that the cast is stellar: Gena Rowlands and Gene Hackman are excellent, as usual. Others—Betty Buckley, Sandy Dennis, John Houseman—have small roles but make the most of them. I also got a kick out of seeing a youthful Frances Conroy, who went on to the TV series Six Feet Under more than 10 years later.

It's still a Woody Allen movie, specifically in his “serious” key, aping the greats of European cinema, usually Ingmar Bergman. For Another Woman he hired cinematographer Sven Nykvist, hailing from the Bergman stable (Scenes From a Marriage, Fanny and Alexander, Cries & Whispers). He throws a coat of brown / golden / sepia over the proceedings, which gives the picture an aura of something from the past. This was their first collaboration, but Woody and Nykvist ended up working on a few more films together. Another Woman draws on the reminiscing structure and wistful, nostalgic notes of Bergman’s Wild Strawberries with an interestingly complicated scenario. Gena Rowlands is Marion Post, a tenured professor of German philosophy who reads Rilke for pleasure. Her life has reached a point where it suddenly falls apart.

Mermaid Avenue (1998)

This interesting collaboration between Billy Bragg and Wilco—and two more that followed in 2000 and 2012, plus similar projects by other artists, none of which I know—started with Woody Guthrie’s daughter Nora, the first director of the Woody Guthrie Foundation. It seems Woody left behind over 1,000 completed lyrics which he never set to music. In 1995, Nora contacted Bragg after seeing him perform at a Woody tribute concert. She wanted to know if he would be interested in setting some of them to music. He was indeed, and he invited Wilco to join, and the first results are on this album. For the most part the songs are divided about equally between them—Bragg writes his and Wilco writes theirs. Everybody performs on all—the credits are complicated, plus extras like Natalie Merchant sit in on some tracks. Some of the Wilco stuff is composed by Jeff Tweedy, some by Tweedy with Jay Bennett. Two—“Hoodoo Voodoo” and “She Came Along to Me”—are collaborations between Bragg and Wilco. The whole Wilco band gets credit on the first. “She Came Along to Me,” one of the best on the album, is credited to Bragg, Tweedy, and Bennett. In general, and somewhat surprisingly for me, as a fan of Wilco who has spent most of my life generally indifferent to Bragg, the best songs here are by Bragg. For one thing, he channels the spirit of Woody Guthrie better. The wry, resigned aside in “She Came Along to Me” and the pause that expresses everything—“Maybe we’ll have all of the fascists out of the way by then.... Maybe so”—might by the most Woody Guthrie moment on the album (and that might be Bennett or Tweedy on the rejoinder). But I think the most Woody Guthrie moment on the album actually goes to another Bragg workup, “I Guess I Planted,” which stoutly shouts for the union battle and is perfectly rousing about it. “Walt Whitman’s Niece” is a nice call-and-response wake-up number to start the album (by way of the sequencing given) and “The Unwelcome Guest” finishes it well. Both by Bragg. That reminds me. I get a kick out of Woody’s various celebrity fixations found in these lyrics: Walt Whitman, Ingrid Bergman (in her Stromboli phase, which to me is still a dish ordered in Italian restaurants), and Hanns Eisler, a composer associated with Bertolt Brecht. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the Wilco gang didn’t contribute anything worth our time here. “California Stars” and the shorty “Christ for President” are two of the best songs here. But I do think, and maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised, that Bragg is the most obviously plugged in to Woody Guthrie.

Zelig (1983)

USA, 79 minutes

Director/writer: Woody Allen

Photography: Gordon Willis

Music: Dick Hyman

Editor: Susan E. Morse

Cast: Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Patrick Horgan, John Buckwater, Marvin Chatinover, Stanley Swerdlow, Paul Nevens, Howard Erskine, Susan Sontag, Saul Bellow

Zelig is not the world's first mockumentary—given Take the Money and Run, it's not even director and writer Woody Allen's first mockumentary. But with its use of a photo and film manipulation technology that was virtually state-of-the-art for the early '80s, Zelig is a significant inflection point, looking forward to Robert Zemeckis's Forrest Gump tour de force (trite as it may be) as well as to a surge of mockumentaries that accompanied the commercial swelling of legitimate documentaries. This Is Spinal Tap contributed to the momentum the very next year. I've always had mixed feelings about Zelig—I admired the technical ingenuity and general novelty, while at the same time feeling like Allen too often phones in the jokes from about 1958.

In fact, on that "general novelty" point, I hadn't really given the embedded documentary premise itself enough credit. It's fairly insightful and even profound. I finally saw that better when I was reading Chekhov's short story "The Darling," which has much the same premise. Let's call the character trait "impressionable." Or let's call it what today's psychologists call it, "environmental dependency syndrome," "Zelig syndrome," or "Zelig-like syndrome" (per Wikipedia), "a syndrome where the affected individual relies on environmental cues in order to accomplish goals or tasks." Anyone who has ever had to survive office politics (thus, everyone) knows instinctively how this works, adjusting behavior based on what one's superiors and/or peers prefer or demand. We are all a little affected by Zelig syndrome. We are never 100% ourselves in our public lives, only fractions of it, depending on what we know is expected of us. Some of us just have a harder time letting go—let's call that "dissociative." But this simple insight, at its heart, is what makes Zelig almost profound.

Love and Death (1975)

USA, 85 minutes
Director/writer: Woody Allen
Photography: Ghislain Cloquet
Music: Sergei Prokofiev
Editor: Marilyn McLaren
Cast: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, James Tolkan, Harold Gould, Georges Adet, Despo Diamantidou, Frank Adu, Olga Georges-Picot, Jessica Harper, Lloyd Battista

Woody Allen's lampoon of Russian literature remains one of his funniest movies, arguably the best of the early comedies, and the last of them. But it was also an early sign that we might have a pretension problem on our hands. In Love and Death, people often erupt in philosophy jargon babble—"but judgment of any system or a priori relation of phenomena exists in any rational or metaphysical or at least epistemological contradiction to an abstract and empirical concept such as being or to be or to occur in the thing itself or of the thing itself"—which, even as it makes fun of such affectation, also serves to let us know Woody Allen has read philosophy. He's no nebbish. He's a real intellectual. (He also gets to have it both ways, as this particular speech is punctured by Allen's laugh line response: "Yeah, I've said that many times.")

The Russian setting of Love and Death is plainly Tolstoyan, taking place during the Napoleonic era. The scheme by Boris Grushenko (Allen) and his cousin Sonja (Diane Keaton) to assassinate Napoleon (James Tolkan) wallows in obvious Dostoevskian angst. And Sonja's life is Chekhovian. (I'm sure there are nods to Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, and others as well.) But the structure of the movie is more like a 19th-century American novel, Moby-Dick. That's the way of classic Woody Allen comedies, indeed of a certain style of movie comedy still used all the time today, from the Zucker brothers' Airplane! to Judd Apatow and beyond, and dating back to the Marx Brothers: set a quick pace and use everything you can think of that might work, visually, verbally, and every which way, and never stop doing that. But Love and Death has even one more secret weapon.

Radio Days (1987)

USA, 88 minutes
Director/writer: Woody Allen
Photography: Carlo Di Palma
Music: Woody Allen mixtape
Editor: Susan E. Morse
Cast: Woody Allen, Julie Kavner, Michael Tucker, Seth Green, Dianne Wiest, Mia Farrow, Danny Aiello, Josh Mostel, Wallace Shawn, Don Pardo, Kenneth Mars, Tito Puente, Larry David, Jeff Daniels, Kitty Carlisle, Tony Roberts, Diane Keaton

This charming Woody Allen picture may be somewhat overlooked because it's a tricky one to categorize. Or maybe because it doesn't seem that original. Director and writer Allen has basically taken the flashback sequences from Annie Hall 10 years earlier and blown them up into a neat little feature, just under 90 minutes like most of his movies. It's closer to an essay-film than anything, a sentimental memoir of childhood years built around anecdotes and songs connected with that early instrument of mass media, the radio. Allen touches on radio theater dramas such as The Shadow (or his version, "The Masked Avenger"), daytime gossip shows, news featurettes, quiz shows, and more, including, at one point, a hit parade of the songs that played.

The structure is freewheeling, friendly, open—deceptively easygoing, with a very sharp screenplay that moves like a stream from anecdote to tall tale and back again. His family is full of characters, a mother (Julie Kavner) and father (Michael Tucker) who present an interesting contrast to what we would see in another 10 years in the documentary Wild Man Blues. I guess "idealized" covers it. They sure look like nice parents through the prism of this movie. There is also extended family: an Aunt Bea (Dianne Wiest), perennially single, and more aunts and uncles, grandparents, neighbors, teachers, and hangers-on, kooky characters all. Woody Allen's voice is all over it as the narrator, but the screenplay is as tight as anything he's done, he's never in the frame, and it often feels like sitting around talking to him, or listening, as he holds court.

Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)

USA, 104 minutes
Director: Woody Allen
Writers: Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman
Photography: Carlo Di Palma
Editor: Susan E. Morse
Cast: Diane Keaton, Woody Allen, Jerry Adler, Lynn Cohen, Alan Alda, Anjelica Huston, Joy Behar, Ron Rifkin, Melanie Norris, Aida Turturro, Wendell Pierce

After making a handful of movies with heavy philosophical themes and the word "and" in the late '80s and early '90s—Crimes and Misdemeanors, Shadows and Fog, Husbands and Wives, and Another Woman among them—Woody Allen turned toward lighter fare for a spell. It's possible it was related to his foundering relationship with Mia Farrow and the cloud of scandal descending on him. I see that some of those heavy movies, notably Crimes and Misdemeanors, are considered among his best now, but they looked to me like flailing then and for the most part they still seem to fit his long-term pattern of decline all too well.

But Manhattan Murder Mystery stands as an exception for me—a brief, fleeting, and patchy return to the heights of his comedies, which owes as much to Diane Keaton as anything. I'm not sure Keaton always gets her due in the comedies. She was a huge part of making them work—go take a look at Love and Death again. She's brilliant. She wasn't just Woody Allen's girlfriend, though it might be fair to say she's a protege. However it came about, she became an accomplished comic actress in her own right. And even though, if you think about it too much, there's something kind of funny-peculiar about the way she stepped in to take a role for which Mia Farrow had been cast before the troubles, it's still fair to say she is exactly what makes the movie work—not just her performance, not just her screen presence, but she obviously had an effect on Allen that's only for the better.

Annie Hall (1977)

USA, 93 minutes
Director: Woody Allen
Writers: Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman
Photography: Gordon Willis
Music: Woody Allen's record collection
Editors: Wendy Greene Bricmont, Ralph Rosenblum
Cast: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts, Carol Kane, Paul Simon, Shelley Duvall, Colleen Dewhurst, Christopher Walken, Russell Horton, Marshall McLuhan, Dick Cavett, Jeff Goldblum, Shelley Hack, Sigourney Weaver, Truman Capote

A lot of things that Woody Allen is good at—tormented narratives shattered by revision, pieces playing just so where they land, tender ruminations buoyed by comfort music and nostalgia and surprising jokes, and streaming patter of gags, to name three—arguably found their best homes in Annie Hall. The fine points of this very fine picture, the easiest and most obvious movie of the year I've had to pick yet and maybe ever, is a very long list as it also includes that indelible chemistry with Diane Keaton, that wonderful self-flattering feeling of grown-up sophistication in the cultural markers (from Groucho to Kierkegaard), that certain casting touch that goes down to the smallest roles, and being so funny generally. But you get the point. It is arguably both the best movie Woody Allen ever made and the best Woody Allen movie ever made, which are not necessarily the same thing.

So what to say? It's going on 40 years now and the template that Annie Hall established for romantic comedy has positively dominated since then, replacing the slightly shopworn screwball model, which had gotten to be a little stuffy or inane or both since its own heyday. Woody Allen brought more genuine emotional engagement to the enterprise and obviated the whole idea of matrimonial happy endings, replacing them with the much more expedient joys and frustrations of connection (or lack thereof), which in turn grounded and made it more appealing. Remember (spoiler alert), Annie Hall does not have a "happy ending." As Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) mentions in the first minutes of the picture, the breakup is already in the past. Yet it rarely leaves me anything less than happy, tickled, pleased as punch, or downright joyful. It has a very good energy, as the saying goes, from beginning to end.

Manhattan (1979)

USA, 96 minutes
Director: Woody Allen
Writers: Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman
Photography: Gordon Willis
Music: George Gershwin
Editor: Susan E. Morse
Cast: Woody Allen, Mariel Hemingway, Diane Keaton, Michael Murphy, Meryl Streep, Anne Byrne Hoffman, Bella Abzug, Wallace Shawn, Michael O'Donoghue

I was once pleased to call Manhattan my favorite movie, prized above all others, desert island selection (never mind how you play those), etc. By the early '90s and the time of the Woody Allen / Mia Farrow tabloid spectacle I was more interested in forgetting it. In the event of the movie question, I quietly started calling another movie my favorite—City Lights, which has distinctive affinities—and didn't even bother to look at Manhattan again for a very long time.

It's the Tracy character and narrative thread causing the problems, of course, with the awkward (and unmistakable) overtones of predatory sex. I don't actually believe Woody Allen is a pedophile, or anything other than a somewhat boorish and clueless person. I also don't think it's enough to say that his personal life doesn't matter, only the work does. That's a sensible approach and one that mostly works with, say, Roman Polanski. But looking at Manhattan again closely underscores how determinedly Woody Allen interjects himself, on a very personal basis, into the center of his pictures.

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

USA, 103 minutes
Director/writer: Woody Allen
Photography: Carlo Di Palma
Editor: Susan E. Morse
Cast: Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Dianne Wiest, Michael Caine, Carrie Fisher, Barbara Hershey, Maureen O'Sullivan, Lloyd Nolan, Max von Sydow, Daniel Stern, Sam Waterston, Tony Roberts, Julie Kavner, Lewis Black, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, John Turturro, Richard Jenkins, Joanna Gleason

One of the best formulations I know of the appeal of the Marx Brothers is found late in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters, his best movie of the '80s. In an implausible scene of suicide considered and averted (a Woody Allen staple even then), he makes the familiar case for Groucho and crew—inspired zaniness equated to life affirmation, that sort of thing. It is of a piece with the usual accolades for the Marx Brothers, and others such as Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, Martin and Lewis, all that comedy of bygone times lost on me beyond certain undeniable quaint charms (e.g., Laurel and Hardy music). What's interesting to me, perhaps because I can't appreciate the Marx Brothers the way Woody Allen and so many others do, is how well it stands in as approximation of the way I feel about Woody Allen movies, and nearly as much as ever.

Even the bad ones validate ideals I hold dear—may even have learned in part absorbing Woody Allen's '70s movies—an irresistible vision of an urban lifestyle constructed around cultural markers and cityscapes, and at deeper levels identity, and ultimately alienation. Life, this self-absorbed and conflicted Woody Allen view seems to tell us, is about emotional connections, the rejection of commerce, and privilege, in about equal proportions. Or, as he puts it in Annie Hall, the world can be divided into the horrible and the miserable, and the best any of us can hope for is to be among the miserable. Which, in turn, is itself eternally belied by the easygoing roll and tumble of Woody Allen's jokes and situations, second nature by the time of Hannah and Her Sisters, enabling him in fact to pull off the rather remarkable stunt that I think distinguishes it.

Annie Hall (1977)

#5: Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977)

I suffer with Woody Allen fatigue right along with so many others now, but must say I am probably more surprised than I should be to find out how many people don't like him or his work at all and never did. He was easily my favorite filmmaker for quite some time. Guilty pleasure or otherwise, I looked forward to every new release, unfailingly attended the week they opened, and absorbed them like a sponge. I used the scandal attending his breakup with Mia Farrow and hookup with Soon-Yi in the early '90s as my excuse to officially check out, even though one of my favorites among his more obscure titles came shortly after. I have probably seen only half of his output over the past 15 or 20 years, but on a list like this, if I'm going to be honest, he deserves a lot more from me than just one or two mentions. The least I can do is throw up a top 5...

5. Another Woman (1988)
I already picked this for my #47 for this list, and I know, I know, I know: "out there," "misguided," and not one of his comedies. I admit I am mystified by similar exercises of his from around the same time, notably Crimes and Misdemeanors (which has evidently been settled on by many as one of his best; I guess I need to see again) and Husbands and Wives. But I loved this from the first I saw it and spent a period utterly in thrall to it with a VHS tape from the library.

Another Woman (1988)

#47: Another Woman (Woody Allen, 1988)

I gave up on Woody Allen about 10 years ago, finally willing to admit, every time I sat down in the dark of a theater and the trailers ended and the clarinet music started and that same old white font on that same old black screen appeared, that I was dying just a little. I don't think I could possibly articulate the terms of his appeal any better than the second half of the Andrew O'Hehir piece from 1998 that I'm linking to below. However shabbily and however self-involved he is in going about it, Woody Allen even still represents a sensibility (arguably middlebrow, arguably overprivileged) that prizes wit, intelligence, and all their cultural standard-bearers above nearly everything else, a value that seems perfectly valid to me.

I can't speak well to the compulsion I had to see Another Woman again and again, but I'm willing to argue it's the best of his "serious" movies, though it rarely gets its due. Preoccupied and enamored and all decked out with 20th century signifiers of modernism—Brecht and Klimt and Rilke and Satie and above all Chekhov—the screenplay about a politely failing marriage moves with astonishing confidence from straightforward narrative into flashbacks and fantasies and back again, looping in and around and back across time, practically tying itself in knots, but always with preternatural clarity and textured by production design elements straight out of a theatrical staging. It's all in the service of a somewhat trite theme—getting in touch with one's feelings, probably the appeal for me if I'm going to be honest about it—but that doesn't stop the cast from hammering it to the ceiling. Gena Rowlands is tremendous, as she always is, and Ian Holm, Gene Hackman, and Mia Farrow are more than adequate too. Cinematographer Sven Nykvist paints the picture in an impossibly warm glow. Maybe best of all, at this point in things? No aging Woody Allen onscreen to clutter up the proceedings. 

"I realize that you've been hurt, and if I've done anything wrong I am sorry. Forgive me. I accept your condemnation."

Andrew O'Hehir, "Yucky Woody/How Woody Became My Dad"

Phil #47: Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963) (scroll down)
Steven #47: My Family/Mi Familia (Gregory Nava, 1995)