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WOODY’S UNIVERSAL ROBOTS: Can an android experience human feelings? This age-old question receives a unique comic twist in writer-director Woody Allen’s only foray into science fiction. Courtesy: Rollins-Joffe/United Artists.
CREDITS
United Artists; Woody Allen, dir.; Allen, Marshall Brickman, scr.; Jack Grossberg, Charles H. Joffe, Jack Rollins, pro.; Allen, mus.; David M. Walsh, cin.; O. Nicholas Brown, Ron Kalish, Ralph Rosenblum, ed.; Dale Hennesy, prod. design; Joel Schumacher, costumes; Dianne Wager, set design; A. D. Flowers, Gerald Endler, F/X; Bill Hansard, Harvey Plastrik, optical/visual effects; 89 min.; Color; 1.85:1.
Woody Allen (Miles Monroe); Diane Keaton (Luna Schlosser); John Beck (Erno Windt); Mary Gregory, John McLiam, Chris Forbes, Peter Hobbs (Doctors); Susan Miller (Ellen); Lou Picetti (M.C.); Jessica Rains (Woman in Mirror); Howard Cosell (Himself); Jackie Mason (Robot Tailor, voice); Douglas Rain (Evil Computer, voice).
MOST MEMORABLE LINE
Science is an intellectual dead end . . . a lot of little guys in tweed suits cutting up frogs on foundation grants.
MILES TO LUNA
BACKGROUND
The idea of a “sleeper” can be traced back to ancient times, and in the United States, the Rip Van Winkle story dates from the early nineteenth century. The first modern (i.e., scientific) variation on this theme appeared as a short piece, “A Story of the Days to Come” (1897), by H. G. Wells. His second version appeared in 1898, under the title “When the Sleeper Wakes,” which was then expanded into a novel in 1910, The Sleeper Awakes. This served as a forerunner to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984, and other dystopian future sci-fi. Woody Allen (1935–) and Marshall Brickman admitted they were influenced by all those classics, the Wells tale exerting a particularly strong influence.
THE PLOT
When health food store owner Miles enters a hospital for a minor operation, he’s killed by incompetence, frozen in the emergent cryogenic technique, and awakened two hundred years later when doctors revive him. They are members of an underground movement who want Miles to infiltrate the mysterious Aires Project, controlled by their fascistic government. During his mission, Miles falls in love with Luna, a wide-eyed innocent. Posing as her robot butler, he convinces her to join him. She becomes a rebel, joining radical leader Erno. Miles discovers that the head of state is dead and that Aires was an elaborate plot to use his only remaining body part, the nose, to clone a new Big Brother.
THE FILM
In 1969, Time magazine hailed Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider as “the little film that killed the big films.” The old studios closed their backlots as a new breed of young moviemakers headed out into the real world to make a more “honest” kind of film. Formula films disappeared; genres were no longer viable. Soon, though, a sense of loss set in, resulting in “the genre spoof,” which allowed us to laugh at what we had once taken seriously. Mel Brooks satirized clichés of the West in Blazing Saddles (1974), and at first glance, Sleeper does the same thing for science fiction, though with a different approach. Brooks’s movie is not a Western but a burlesque of that form; Sleeper, however, can be taken seriously as a sci-fi film. Woody Allen’s piece is not merely a comedy about sci-fi but a sci-fi movie played in a comedic, rather than a dramatic, tone. Proof of Allen’s ambitiousness appears in records of his meeting with sci-fi greats Isaac Asimov and Ben Bova, both of whom he consulted to make certain everything in the piece conformed to genre rules.
THEME
Like other near-future projects, Sleeper predicts a sexless society in which synthetic processes replace the animal act for humans. This, however, does not give way to an increase in human intelligence, since the people are superficial thinkers and shallow in emotion.
The late 1960s were identified with political activism for social causes, including antiwar and pro-environmental concerns. Social critic Christopher Lasch noted that the 1970s offered reaction, people cocooning in personal relationships, leading to what he labeled the “Culture of Narcissism.” This film embodies that concept. Miles gives up on revolution to concentrate on romance with Luna, insisting that even if the fascistic government is toppled and Erno takes over, he will be just as bad as the previous leader. Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. “Political solutions don’t work,” Miles says.
TRIVIA
Though Allen would shortly settle on his beloved Manhattan for almost all his films, this movie was made in a rural area near Boulder, Colorado. The most impressive “set,” the rebel’s hideout, was not built for the project. The 1963 work of genius was a monstrosity called the “Sculptured House,” which had been built by architect Charles Deaton.
Kubrick’s 2001 exerted a strong influence. Whereas that film contrasted the emptiness of space with classical/romantic music, Allen sets the emptiness of life on a future Earth against the warm, vital sounds of jazz, including his own clarinet playing. Douglas Rain, the voice of HAL the Computer, was persuaded to do the honors here for the Evil Computer. The scene in which Miles is brainwashed recalls, if in a less harrowing manner, Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971).