In Love and Death, Woody Allen gets the girl again. It is becoming a bad habit of his. Woody Allen should never get the girl. It is bad enough to go to the movies and have to watch Robert Redford get the girl. Or Paul Newman. Even Jack Palance. A man can take that. One accepts the American reality, realizes that the getting of the girl is inevitable if blessed with Redford’s masculine beauty, Newman’s insouciance, Palance’s magnificent cheekbones. The getting of the girl is their cinematic due.
Before them, Gable, Cooper, Grant and a pack of irresistible leading men extending back to Valentino taught us resignation to our inferiority. Yes, such charming devils would always get the girl. It would be useless to compete.
One felt gray, puny, lifeless, slow-witted, heavy-footed, dense and timid sitting there in the dark watching them always get the girl. Feminists now say that women who grew up on these films were scarred, that they came to view themselves as despicable sex objects because movie women existed only to be gotten by leading men. But what of the men who grew up on them? Were they not also scarred? Were they not cursed with a lifelong sense of masculine inferiority?
If the movies created a sense of inferiority in men, they did occasionally compensate with a character so timid, so incompetent, so awkward, absurd and inconsequential, that the dreariest mouse of a man could sit in the dark and feel like a prince of lovers. Men tired of seeing Valentino get the girl could recover their self-esteem by watching Chaplin’s tramp, a man so inferior he could get nothing but a nightstick over the skull. The tramp did occasionally wind up with the girl, but he was so inept at the techniques of amour that one knew he would immediately lose her to the first passing Valentino.
Woody Allen has some of Chaplin’s power to make us feel superior by playing the loser. He makes us laugh by being more miserable in almost every respect than the most miserable specimen of humanity in his audience. We sit laughing in contentment with our own superiority while he fails tests of manhood which the meekest of us could pass without exertion.
Then he betrays us. He gets the girl. And not just any girl. She is the ultra sex-symbol girl, the fantasy girl displayed full-length in men’s daydream magazines. In Love and Death, she is the most desirable courtesan in Russia, a girl brave men have died for, a girl whom Gable, Cooper, Grant or even Valentino might not have been able to get without adding a bit of brilliantine to their locks.
No problem for Woody Allen. All it takes him to reduce her to jelly is a bit of eye-rolling at the opera house.
It is appalling. Allen has been traveling under false colors. We have been gulled, made to feel like one of the schlemiels Woody Allen has been impersonating. He is not a schlemiel at all, but a Valentino in schlemiel’s eyeglasses, and he has made fools of us by luring us into feeling superior and then sneaking away to get the most desirable girl in the house.
All right, we suspend judgment. After all, Groucho Marx often almost got the girl, but we were always saved by Harpo and Chico parading through the love nest, thereby establishing that Groucho was no more apt at amour than the rest of us. W. C. Fields once came very close to getting the girl, if the term can be applied to Mae West, but when he cuddled up under the blanket, Mae had substituted a goat, and our sense of superiority was saved.
Surely Woody Allen, setting off for the courtesan’s boudoir, is setting himself up for similar humiliation.
Alas, he is not. The betrayal only becomes worse. Woody Allen goes ahead and shamelessly gets the girl. Bad enough, but the twist of the knife is still to come. In the following scene the girl, this empress of passion, notifies the audience that Allen is the greatest lover she has ever embraced, and she is not kidding.
I couldn’t have been more crushed if Hopalong Cassidy had announced he was joining Gay Liberation.
Woody Allen has done this in earlier movies, and I wish he would stop it. It is one thing when the full-time girl getters—Newman, Redford and company—send you out into the street feeling like a schlemiel. When America’s leading schlemiel sends you out feeling like a schlemiel, that, friend, is having schlemiel-hood ground into your soul.
Come on, Woody—be a lousy lover.