Between 1965 and 1976, Woody Allen transformed himself from a stand-up comedian into an accomplished screenwriter, actor, and director. While his early films are very entertaining, there can be no doubt that they were intended primarily to be comedies. Allen’s own evaluation of his early work is revealed by his comment to Mel Gussow that he strove in these films “to have a thin story to hang the comedy sequences on” (Yacowar, 1991, p. 129). When philosophical issues are raised—and they are raised often—it is with the clear intention of provoking a laugh rather than an insight. Philosophical themes touched on in these films are inevitably dealt with more seriously in his later work. Thus this chapter briefly reviews Allen’s work in a few of the most interesting of these films, with an eye towards exposing those elements which provide important clues to his later philosophical concerns.
Woody Allen’s work on the 1965 film What’s New, Pussycat? is usually considered to be of importance only as his entrée into the world of filmmaking. At the time, his career had focused primarily on nightclub work and secondarily on comic writing. In 1964, Allen was appearing as a stand-up comic at a New York club called the Blue Angel when the producer Charles K. Feldman caught his act and hired him to write the screenplay and appear in the film (Hirsch, 1981, p. 29). Nancy Pogel states that “neither the critics nor Woody Allen considered What’s New, Pussycat? an artistically important movie, but it was such a commercial success that Allen’s managers, Joffe and Rollins, were able to launch Allen as a director, actor, and writer of his own films” (1987, p. 34).
In this first effort, despite Feldman’s interference, Allen reveals a great deal concerning his reactions to the cultural changes taking place in the mid-sixties. This was a time when American culture was becoming much more open about sexuality, a time when such magazines as Playboy, with their celebration of male sexual fantasy were becoming popular. Traditional mores were challenged by the so-called sexual revolution and the emergence of the youth “counterculture,” with its acceptance of hedonism as an overriding value.
While What’s New, Pussycat? is unquestionably inferior to all of Allen’s later serious films, it introduces many of the themes which pervade those films. In Pussycat, the roles of men and women in the search for romantic and sexual fulfillment are hopelessly confused. The film’s characters present us with two mutually exclusive models for behavior: the search for sexual satisfaction (represented by Fritz, Renée, Phillipe, Rita, and Victor) and the search for romantic fulfillment through marriage (represented by Carole, Liz, Renée’s husband, and Fritz’s wife). No one gets what they want. The men believe that all they want from women is sex; yet when one of them, Michael, is magically able to attract women sexually, he finds (like Jack in Husbands and Wives) that he really wants the one woman able to resist that sexual attraction. Indeed, Pussycat is a vaudevillian version of the view of sex and love presented in many of Allen’s films, culminating in the pessimistic vision of Husbands and Wives.
Michael’s use of the deprecating term “pussycat” to refer to all women—a habit of the actor Warren Beatty, who was originally intended to play the part (Yacowar, 1991, p. 26)—dehumanizes women by trivializing each one’s uniqueness as well as her nonerotic substance and value. Michael is interested in Liz’s poetry only as part of his transparent attempt to get her into bed. He praises her “Ode to a Pacifist Junkie” as being “very sexy,” when in fact, as Liz tells him, it is “a plea for better housing.” Yacowar interprets the whole film as a plea for “better housing, either physical or psychological” (1991, p. 26). In his words, “Liz Bien’s point is that the soul needs ‘better housing’ than the body, which is subject to vagrant needs and unsteady devotions. Nothing is really new, Pussycat. We have always been tormented by the opposing appeals of protective shelter and uninhibited freedom” (1991, pp. 34–35).
My primary disagreement with Yacowar’s analysis of this film (and of Allen’s contributions to the unwatchable 1967 follow-up film, Casino Royale) stems from my contention that Allen’s themes here represent not simply a timeless dichotomy but a new and, to Allen, frightening conflict, which burst upon the social scene of the sixties with the full blooming of the sexual revolution and the women’s movement. Many of Allen’s later films are equally obsessed with the problems of sexual identity and romantic fulfillment, which have their origins in these cultural changes.
Allen’s live-action directing debut tells the story of Virgil Starkwell, an incompetent criminal played by Allen himself with most of the characteristics of his “little man” persona. In this film Allen experiments for the first time with techniques that parody the documentary format. The story is narrated by Jackson Beck in a manner which lends a mock tone of seriousness and realism to the piece. Indeed, much of the film’s humor derives from the paradoxes created by the use of formal conventions to convey absurd messages. Again and again, the tone of the soundtrack seems to be in direct contradiction with the visuals which accompany it.
Allen juxtaposes formal structures of behavior with inappropriate content in order to create many of the film’s funniest scenes. For example, Virgil’s first attempt at bank robbery is foiled when the bank tellers are unable to decipher his handwriting. Once they understand that he is robbing the bank, he is required to have his note initialed by a bank supervisor. This comedic juxtaposition is repeated throughout the film, including its final setup, when Virgil discovers that the victim of his armed holdup is a childhood friend. They reminisce over old times as Virgil periodically interrupts to demand his friend’s watch and wallet. Just as he is about to depart, the friend remembers that he is a cop and arrests Virgil.
The film also parodies the documentary format in its frequent interviews with witnesses or experts who try to shed light on the events in Virgil’s criminal career. These interviews are humorous in that their supposed insights inevitably fail to shed any light on Virgil’s behavior. Periodically, Virgil’s parents appear, wearing Groucho Marx glasses to hide their shame. As their appearances continue, their input deteriorates from a debate over Virgil’s true nature into discussions of irrelevant issues (e.g., the father offers to show us his stamp collection), and finally into a marital quarrel which the father vows to continue once the interview is over.
Allen ridicules the supposed authority of psychiatry, this time in an interview in which a psychiatrist who once treated Virgil seems to attribute his problems to his decision to study cello in his youth. Like Fritz in Pussycat, this psychiatrist is shown willfully violating his professional responsibilities. He allows himself to be interviewed while one of his patients is clearly visible on his couch, and he even makes derogatory comments concerning that patient’s sexual problems.
By the film’s end, the fictional documentary maker has become so disgusted with the quality of the information he is receiving from his subjects that he, too, acts unprofessionally, putting the label “cretin” in parentheses beneath the name of one particularly long-winded witness. He also frequently interrupts this witness to demand that he “get to the point.”
By using these techniques, Allen suggests that reality is too complex and multi-layered to be portrayed accurately in any one documentary or scientific study. He will make this same point more seriously, and effectively, in later films such as Zelig and Husbands and Wives. The device of showing his audiences early scenes from the boyhood of his characters will reappear again and again in his films, perhaps most famously in Annie Hall.
Despite the fact that Allen’s character is given a non–Jewish name, Virgil Starkwell, the film presents us with a number of clues suggesting that the character is really Jewish. Yacowar points out that Virgil’s last name is probably meant to remind us of Charles Starkweather, a famous murderer of the 1950s (1991, p. 120). Yet, the only side effect of the experimental drug Virgil takes in prison is to turn him into an Orthodox rabbi, complete with appropriate beard and clothing, who sits in his cell explaining the meaning of the Passover seder before the shocked eyes of prison officials. Virgil’s choice to see a psychiatrist named Julius Epstein, his obvious discomfort in a scene where he pretends to worship in a prison chapel in order to plan an escape, and the mysterious reference to his grandfather as being “of German extraction” likewise suggest that the film is hiding Virgil’s true Jewish identity, and, perhaps, the real reason for the persecution he suffered growing up.
Working again with Mickey Rose, his co-writer on the previous film, Allen presents us with another slapstick comedy in which he plays an incompetent product tester named Fielding Mellish who becomes the Castro-like leader of a revolutionary movement in a fictional Latin American country called San Marcos. Early scenes in the film reinforce Allen’s distrust of technology as Fielding is overwhelmed by the product he is supposed to be testing, just as Virgil was unable to control the shirt-folding machine he encountered in prison.
Fielding, like Virgil, is a person with no self-confidence or personal convictions. He sees himself as an outsider, someone with nothing genuine to offer, and so he must always pretend to be something he is not (Yacowar, 1991, p. 129). Complaining about his job to fellow workers, he is asked what he might have become if he had not dropped out of college. He replies that he was in the Black Studies Department so by now he might have been black.
When he meets Nancy (Louise Lasser), a parody of a feminist political activist of the early seventies, he pretends to know all about yoga, Kierkegaard, and philosophy, but it is clear that he knows nothing of any of these subjects. Nancy is initially fooled, however, because even though she is a philosophy major at City College, she knows nothing about these subjects either. Throughout the film, characters who preach the importance of abstract concepts such as freedom, love, or patriotism are inevitably shown to be fools or hypocrites. Esposito (Jacobo Morales), the rebel leader who claims to be fighting for the independence of his people, embodies this hypocrisy when he reacts to the success of his movement by immediately denying all the principles for which he was fighting. Now that they are no longer in his interest, he jettisons his earlier views in exchange for the egotistical demands of a despot. In a sense, he, like Fielding, is an outsider who wishes to be accepted. Yet, once he becomes leader, his only goal is to turn others into outsiders.
None of the film’s characters seem to have any clear sense of identity. Strangely, the inhabitants of the supposedly Spanish-speaking nation of San Marcos all speak English (albeit with a Spanish accent). When Fielding, as the new president of San Marcos, arrives in the United States for a visit, he is greeted by an official and an interpreter. When the interpreter simply repeats the conversation in English, we are led to think for a moment that perhaps Fielding’s encounters in San Marcos were supposed to be taking place in Spanish, but Allen destroys this temporary illusion by having the interpreter chased away by white-coated men with a butterfly net.
Allen’s exaggerated portrait of American society does convey the sense of hopelessness and confusion many felt as a result of the political and cultural changes which tore apart the country during the sixties. This confusion is further emphasized by a number of other clashes of style and content, such as a conservative-looking jury that passes around a joint, and a commercial on television in which a Catholic priest hawks “New Testament” cigarettes as he dispenses communion. At one point during the trial, a man bursts in, loudly confessing his guilt for some crime, only to realize that he’s in the wrong courtroom (“Isn’t this Epstein v. Epstein?”). Allen’s most ingenious symbol of the identity crisis racking America during this period is a black woman with an afro (Dorthi Fox) who takes the stand only to reveal that she is really J. Edgar Hoover. Asked to explain her appearance, she responds, “I have many enemies, and I rarely go out unless I’m in disguise.”
Bananas implies that in a world where every philosophical, political, and religious system has been found to be inadequate, all sense of identity will be lost, and the most important decisions will be made in a whimsical fashion on the basis of personal preference without recourse to either reason or memory. For example, despite the fact that Fielding is found guilty on all counts, the judge suspends his sentence on condition that Fielding not move into his neighborhood.
Now freed, Fielding asks Nancy to marry him, and, irrationally, she agrees to do so, despite her repeated acknowledgments throughout the film that she doesn’t love him. Interestingly, throughout this scene, Nancy’s face is obscured from our view. We never get the sense that any genuine discourse is taking place between the two supposed lovers. When Nancy asks Fielding what he means when he says that he loves her, Fielding responds, as he did when he was initially trying to impress her, with a stream of meaningless but profound-sounding gibberish similar to the nonsense Allen will present at even greater length in Love and Death. Nancy acknowledges the worthlessness of his response by changing the subject to ask a question he can actually answer: “Do you have any gum?”
The lack of true feeling in their relationship is reinforced in the film’s last scene, in which the consummation of their wedding vows is shown on television as part of ABC’s Wide World of Sports. The film began with Howard Cosell covering an assassination as though it were a sporting event. By having their lovemaking appear on TV, Allen implies that even the most intimate of activities is now fodder for the media as part of the ongoing public spectacle that has come to pass for history. Cosell covers this event as he would a boxing match, and after the bout (which Fielding wins by successfully “making it” despite a cut above his eye), the participants reveal the antagonism between the genders which, Allen will contend in his more serious films, has eliminated the possibility for authentic, long-term romantic relationships.
In this 1972 filming of his stage play, Allen worked under the direction of Herbert Ross, although Allen adapted his play for the screen and appeared as the main character, Allan Felix. As his character’s surname indicates (felix is a Latin word for “happy”), this is one of Allen’s more upbeat projects. In fact, the character even has Woody Allen’s original first name, spelled as it was when he was born Allan Stewart Konigsberg.
Allan Felix is a film critic going through a recent divorce from Nancy (Susan Anspach), paralleling his own life in the late 1960s when Allen was an aspiring filmmaker going through a divorce from his second wife, Louise Lasser (who played Nancy in Bananas). The play’s connection to Allen’s personal life is not our concern here, but the film’s philosophical themes are of greater interest than any of Allen’s work during his pre–Annie Hall period.
As Yacowar points out, the play was theater about film, while the movie is film about film. He asserts that “the film of the play assumes an additional element of self-reflection because a film about film is an experience different from that of a play about film, even if the text were the same” (1991, p. 57).
The film begins, without credits, in the midst of the final scene from Casablanca. Allen knows his audience will be familiar enough with the film to immediately recognize it and be able to enter into it yet again. We watch and listen as Rick (Humphrey Bogart) explains to Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) why she must join him in heroic self-sacrifice for the good of all:
I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you’ll understand that. Now, now, here’s looking at you, kid!
As we watch, the borders of the screen contract, letting us know that we are not in the film, but watching it on a screen. Then the camera draws back to show the shadow of a person watching Casablanca with us. Finally, as the scene moves into the crucial dialogue, we cut to Allan Felix, watching the film with his mouth open, mesmerized by the action. The film’s title, Play It Again, Sam, appears on the screen almost as though it were a cartoon balloon indicating speech coming from Allan’s mouth. We watch Allan doing what many a man has done, identifying with Bogart even to the point of mimicking his trademark mouth movements.
When the lights go up, we are jerked back, with Allan, into the world of the movie theater. We see Allan sitting by himself in the middle of the theater as the other people in the audience yawn, stretch, rustle about, and begin to get up. Allan blows air out of his mouth in a gesture which indicates his reluctance to leave the world of fantasy.
The themes of appearance versus reality, self-deception versus authenticity, and watching versus doing are thus established for the rest of the film. Allan tells himself, and us, as he leaves the theater, “Who am I kidding? I’m not like that. I never was, I never will be. That’s strictly the movies.” We next see Allan lying in his bed beneath a huge poster from Bogart’s Across the Pacific as he complains to himself about how depressed he is. A memory of Nancy tells him, “You like movies because you’re one of life’s great watchers. I’m not like that. I’m a doer. I want to live. I want to participate.”
Allan holds himself up to impossible standards. He judges the success of his life by comparing himself to the lives of fantasy characters from the movies he loves. Like Binx Bolling, the protagonist in Walker Percy’s memorable first novel, The Moviegoer (a novel which begins with a quote from Kierkegaard about despair), Allan wallows in a pool of existential anxiety and self-pity, making demands of life which can only be fulfilled in fantasy. In a reverie worthy of Allan Felix, Binx describes himself this way:
Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man [Percy, 1961, p. 14].
Allan gauges the meaning of his life by comparing himself to the unreachable Bogart persona epitomized in Bogart’s signature role as Rick in Casablanca.
The use of Casablanca at the beginning of the film is a change from the play, which began with Allan watching the climactic scenes from The Maltese Falcon on television in his apartment. This change, made by Allen but possibly suggested by Ross, has two effects on the film. First, placing Allan in a movie theater emphasizes the fact that we are watching a film about film’s effects on its audience. Second, though we may miss hearing Bogart himself remark that the falcon, like film, is “the stuff dreams are made of,” the use of Casablanca draws our attention more directly not just to the influences of film, or the Bogart mystique of male heroism, but, more specifically, to the impact of Casablanca itself. Casablanca, after all, is often cited by critics and the public alike as their favorite film of all time.
Yet the Casablanca of the first few minutes of Sam is not the “real” Casablanca. Film buffs in the audience will have noticed that the scene we watch with Allan is shortened and edited. Major bits of action and dialogue are left out. For example, we see no Major Strasser, nor do we hear the famous line, “Round up the usual suspects.” What we are being shown, then, is the myth of the film Casablanca, not its reality.
This is further emphasized by the fact that our film’s title, “Play It Again, Sam,” is the most famous line ever not spoken in film. Despite the fact that the line is instantly recognizable, admirers of the film know that the closest Bogart ever comes to saying it is when he tells the character named Sam (Dooley Wilson), “You played it for her, you can play it for me. Play!”
One primary theme of Allen’s film, therefore, has to do with whether such mythical paradigms are a help or a hindrance to us in the living of our lives. Ultimately, the film argues that success will always elude those who wear a mask, who assume a persona in order to impress others and satisfy imaginary needs. This is a theme which may also be found in the writings of such existential thinkers as Nietzsche, Heidegger, or Sartre.
Much of the film’s humor comes from watching Allan attempt to act as he imagines the mythical Bogart persona would act in the situations he encounters. We know from the beginning, of course, that the Allen persona (the “little man”) is incapable of truly acting like Bogart, so his perpetual romantic failures do not surprise us. Yet, by the film’s end, Allan has managed to put himself into the shoes of Bogart sufficiently to replay for “real” the final scene from Casablanca. Thus, Allan’s request to “play it again, Sam” in this film’s opening credits is fulfilled by its conclusion.
Two questions arise, however. First, how has Allan managed to overcome his ineptness sufficiently to recreate the Casablanca scenario, and second, is there anything about the Casablanca scenario that makes it particularly susceptible to being recreated in life?
Upon reflection, one sees that Casablanca itself is filled with a kind of existential ambiguity. After all, Rick Blaine is not really a heroic figure until the film’s end. He starts the film as the hard-boiled expatriate café owner who believes in nothing and only looks out for himself. In the film’s first scenes, he ignores Peter Lorre’s pleas for help, and then watches passively as Lorre’s character is dragged out of the café by police. His justification of his inaction is stated simply: “I stick my neck out for nobody!”
Rick pretends not to care what happens to the people he meets or even to care if the Nazis invade his own country. In one famous exchange, his only response to a Nazi’s suggestion that the Germans might soon occupy New York City is to warn the Nazi humorously of the dangers of entering certain sections of the city, a line Woody Allen himself might have used. He maintains an attitude of cultivated indifference and witty amusement towards the suffering he sees all around him. From the Heideggerean perspective, he is a classic example of an inauthentic person, one who appears to hide the “care” (sorge) that is within each of us. Yet we find out very soon that Rick is the proverbial tough guy with a soft heart, who cannot resist helping innocent people in trouble—whether a young married couple desperately in need of money, or Victor Laslo himself, the husband of his beloved Ilsa, for whom he eventually risks everything he has, including his life. Rick is one of the first American film antiheroes, the paradigm of the film character who will dominate the film noir movement and its descendants, including Godard’s famous homage in the 1959 film Breathless, with Jean-Paul Belmondo in the “Bogie” role.
The same is true for the French police chief, Louie (Claude Rains), who pretends to knuckle under to the Nazis while caring only for gambling and women. In fact, however, all of us know that when the chips are down, he will stand up and fight for what’s right, and, of course, for his friendship with Rick. Others in the film engage in pretense as well. The Nazis and Louie initially pretend that Casablanca is a neutral city, yet everyone knows it is under Nazi rule. Major Strasser pretends to be civil to the Laslos even though he is barely able to keep his animosity from breaking through.
Most importantly, we learn that even during that purer, more innocent time in Paris, before the Nazis marched in, when Rick was a young man with few emotional defenses, Ilsa was already pretending. When she first met Rick, she pretended to be unmarried and emotionally available, yet we eventually learn that she was in mourning for Victor. Later, when she knows she must leave Rick to go to Victor’s side, she lets Rick think she will meet him on the train. It is this last pretense which sets up all the drama in Casablanca, and whose ambiguity carries over into Play It Again, Sam. In a sense we never know what Ilsa’s genuine feelings are, or what Victor and Rick really believe about those feelings. Clearly, Ilsa is playing false with either Victor or Rick (or possibly both). Initially, she tells neither about the other. She pretends to love each exclusively and fully. Rick only learns of Victor’s existence in Casablanca and, amazingly, Victor only learns of Rick’s existence there as well. Ilsa tells Rick in Casablanca that she never really knew what love was until she met him in Paris, that all she felt for Victor was affection and gratitude. Yet she allows Victor to believe, even in Casablanca, that she loves him exclusively, and that Rick was never important to her.
One cynical acquaintance once suggested to me, after seeing the film for the first time, that Ilsa was only playing an entertaining game. The film’s true message, she maintained, is that love and heroic struggles are no more than pleasant little lies which we tell ourselves to fill our empty lives with some form of meaning, no matter how artificial. As if to confirm this interpretation, a cloudy haze of romantic fog envelops Rick and Louie as they walk off the airport tarmac into “the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” This obscuring haze, which has been palpably present throughout the whole film, fully reveals itself as the characters walk into the mists of fantasy. Interestingly, Allan walks off into a similar fog at the end of Sam.
Thus, from Sam’s very beginning (Casablanca’s finale), the clouds of pretense are exceptionally heavy as the film exploits a cinematic environment which was already self-consciously mythological. The film’s very title suggests that it will be a retelling of the story which has just ended in the film’s opening credits. The differences between the two stories are more stylistic than substantive, with the comedic style of the contemporary Allen persona playfully emulating the equally exaggerated style of the now nostalgic Bogart persona.
Yet we are made subtly aware of the fact that if the Bogart persona, as represented by the spiritual Bogart (Jerry Lacy) who advises Allan, were actually present in the film’s contemporary setting, he would be almost as comic as Allan himself. The film understands, even if Allan Felix initially does not, that the problem with adopting the Bogart persona is not just Allan’s unsuitability for the role, but the inappropriateness of the persona itself in a social and political environment that differs dramatically from the beginning of World War II.
The success of the Bogart persona has always been a matter of style, not substance. At a number of points, most notably in the last scene, Allan himself remarks on Bogart’s own shortness and ugliness. In Casablanca, the “Richard” with whom Ilsa falls in love in Paris is much more like the Allan who is so attractive to Linda than Rick’s “tough guy” persona in Casablanca. The film acknowledges that the Bogart persona is a defensive covering that Rick wears like a scab to protect the more vulnerable “Richard” from the pain of emotional involvement. Rick’s success at the end derives from the fact that by playing the hero and the martyr, he regains his self-respect, as well as the admiration of those around him. Thus, at the film’s conclusion, he walks into the mist a more complete “Richard” who might be able to commit himself authentically the next time around. The ending of Casablanca leaves us with a pleasant sense of anticipation of the more genuine actions in which the new, more mature Richard will now be able to engage. Casablanca, therefore, is the tale of an immature man who chooses to grow up. Sam tells the same story in contemporary terms.
The trick for Allan Felix is to avoid Richard’s mistake of responding to rejection (Ilsa’s rejection of Richard in Paris, Nancy’s rejection of Allan in San Francisco) by becoming inauthentic, someone other than himself, in order to “attract babes” and thereby avoid true emotional involvement. It is to Allan’s credit that he is so feeble in his attempts to artificially appeal to women for whom he feels nothing. It is his authentic vulnerability which attracts Linda (and us) to him.
As all of this eventually dawns on Allan in the course of the film, his attitude towards the Bogart persona changes. At first, Allan respects Bogart and tries to emulate him in all things, even drinking bourbon (which he can’t stand) and calling women “dames” (a term recognized as derogatory and very much out of step in the hip surroundings of San Francisco in the early seventies). Later, as Allan rebuilds his self-confidence by winning Linda’s affection and respect, he is more critical of Bogart’s advice, more willing to show the impracticality of the Bogart style.
Thus, at the film’s end, when Allan worries about how to break off from Linda as he rushes to the airport in a cab, Bogart’s solution is a melodramatic scene in which he disarms Linda and turns her over to waiting police. Allan also has fantasies about a similarly attired and armed Linda facing the real Allan in the airport. Allan has sufficiently grown in his own eyes, and Bogart has sufficiently shrunk, that Allan can play himself in his own fantasies.
After the recreation of the final scene of Casablanca, in which Allan himself is able to say Bogart’s lines and really mean them, the Bogart persona is reduced to playing Louie’s role of the faithful friend. Bogart acknowledges that Allan doesn’t need him anymore as he has developed his own style, and the film ends with Bogart telling Allan, “Here’s looking at you, kid!” It is only at this point that we realize that Bogart has been calling Allan “kid,” the same affectionate nickname he had for Ilsa, throughout the entire film.
By his last scene with Linda, Allan has become so authentic, so honest, that he admits that the lines he’s reciting come from Casablanca, and that he has waited his whole life to say them. By this time, it doesn’t matter that Linda was planning to go with Dick anyway, just as it doesn’t matter whether Ilsa really wanted to go with Rick or Victor, because the real point of both stories has to do with being true to oneself.
The play ends with Allan meeting his beautiful new upstairs neighbor who appears to be his perfect mate. She loves film and admires his writing. The suggestion that she is the fulfillment of his every fantasy of romantic love is enhanced by the fact that she is played by the same actress who earlier played his fantasy ideal of Sharon, the first date Linda arranged for him. By removing this artificially happy ending from the film, and allowing Allan to walk alone into the airport fog, Allen implies that even though Allan is now sufficiently mature to build a real relationship, that process is the stuff of a new and different story.
In analyzing this film so extensively, despite the fact that it was not directed by Allen, I am varying slightly my use of the auteur theory. In this case, Allen’s contributions to the film (authorship of both the play and the screenplay, the use of his hand-picked cast, his own roles as main actor and, unquestionably, as chief advisor to the director), make him here the most important contributor to the aesthetic value of the film. Yet Herbert Ross’s more experienced directorial guidance, and his obvious willingness to offer constructive collaborative criticism to Allen, make this film, in my view, Allen’s finest and most important effort prior to Annie Hall, clearly outshining his entertaining but less serious work in his other early comedies.
Writing for the first time with Marshall Brickman, Allen in Sleeper takes us two hundred years into the future, plunging us into a totalitarian society based entirely on a celebration of hedonism and the avoidance of genuine commitment. In his previous films, Allen suggested that the hedonism and moral cowardice of his “little man” persona is rapidly becoming the accepted norm in contemporary society. Sleeper reinforces that contention by placing a typical Allen persona, the Jewish owner of a Greenwich Village health food store named Miles Monroe, into a society which distracts itself from its political oppression at the hands of a Great Leader by endlessly pursuing impersonal sensual gratification through drugs, sex, food, and popular culture.
The cryogenically preserved Miles is resuscitated by scientists allied with a political Underground seeking to overthrow the government and restore power to the people. The scientists hope to persuade Miles, who has no official identity, to travel to the Western Reserve, where he can help the movement to uncover the Aries Project supposedly aimed at destroying the rebels. However, when the scientists are captured by the government’s inept security forces, Miles is able to escape by disguising himself as a robot, assigned to the shallow and politically uncommitted Luna (Diane Keaton).
When his deception is uncovered, Miles kidnaps Luna and forces her to lead him to the Western Reserve. Eventually, he is captured by the government and brainwashed into submission, while she is transformed into a revolutionary. The film ends with a restored Miles leading Luna in a successful operation to steal the nose of the dead Great Leader, which is being used in an attempt to clone a new tyrant.
The film’s title suggests that all of the characters, and perhaps the audience members as well, are being lulled to sleep by the mindless pursuit of pleasure while avoiding the necessary commitments which give life its meaning (Yacowar, 1991, p. 152). Although the future society is presented as unconnected to our own (because it arose from the ashes of a war which destroyed many historical records), as the film progresses it becomes clear that Allen views this society as very much like the one we currently inhabit. Indeed, the attitudes and activities of normal inhabitants of the future, like Luna, prevision the parodies of the Los Angeles “lifestyle” as it will be so memorably presented in Annie Hall and other Allen films. Indeed, the party given by Luna at the film’s beginning is remarkably similar in look and style to the one which will take place at Tony Lacy’s house in Annie Hall, even down to the use of white clothing to represent the characters’ acceptance of hedonism.
Allen’s own character, however, is by no means exempt from criticism. For the first time in a film which he himself directs, Allen criticizes his “little man” character for his unwillingness to take life seriously. After all, it is Miles who is the “sleeper” of the title; he is the one who has consistently refused to commit himself to any principle which might require sacrifices contrary to his self-interest. This point is made abundantly clear when the scientists attempt to persuade Miles to risk his life for the restoration of moral values and political liberty. When Dr. Melik (Mary Gregory) asks Miles if he has “ever taken a serious political stand on anything,” he responds, “Yeah, sure, for twenty-four hours once I refused to eat grapes.” When pressed to join them he says, “You’ve got the wrong guy. I’m not the heroic type. Really, I was beaten up by Quakers.”
Yet, in his attempts to persuade Luna to believe in his innocence and to understand the shallowness of her lifestyle based on its use of “the orb, the telescreen, and the orgasmitron,” Miles discovers his own need to become more authentic. Thus, surprisingly, we hear Miles, the Allen persona, telling Luna that sex should not be merely mechanical but should be based on genuine emotion. In Luna’s society one can satisfy physical needs by creating enormous fruits, instant orgasms, and immediate intoxication, but one does so at the expense of individual identity and true creativity. In the future society, everyone is reduced to a stereotype, and even the robots are programmed to act archetypically. In a gay household, the robot mimics the mannerisms of its owners, while the mechanical tailors to which Miles is sent for new clothes speak with Jewish accents. When Miles is brainwashed by the government, part of the process involves his acting out the fantasy of winning a beauty pageant, for what could be better training for instilling the ability to conform to the expectations of others? Once he has been reprogrammed, he is given an apartment complete with a robotic dog that talks. His life has been entirely reduced to the artificial.
Yet one of the more hopeful aspects of the film is the suggestion that no government will ever be sufficiently efficient to succeed in draining the quirkiness from human life. Unlike the terrifyingly impersonal structures portrayed in such dystopias as Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World, Allen’s future government is run by incompetent clods whose success in using their own technology is no greater than Miles’s own. At the film’s end, the individual initiative of Luna and Miles overthrows the system entirely. Optimistically, the film tells us that as long as apparent losers like Miles and Luna can bring down totalitarian regimes, there is hope that the rest of us can rediscover our humanity.
Moving from the future into the past, Allen here creates a hilarious parody of serious philosophical and literary works set in the world of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Allen plays Boris, a Russian, and this time definitely a Christian, who struggles with issues of mortality, love, duty, and violence against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars. Fueled by his love for his distant cousin Sonia (Diane Keaton), Boris becomes a hero, fights duels, has mystical visions, and eventually is executed for his part in a failed plot to assassinate the emperor.
While the tone throughout is comic, sometimes descending into slapstick, the average viewer may also be awed by the many references to serious philosophic issues and concerns. Throughout the film, the characters periodically enter into theoretical disputes littered with obscure jargon which often sounds genuine and serious. In fact, however, while Allen certainly demonstrates his familiarity with the fundamental issues explored by such thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and others, the dialogues themselves are clearly intended to be no more than clever gibberish, vaguely reminiscent of important insights, but on their own completely unconvincing.
Thus Allen suggests here, as he will again in so many of his later films (e.g., Manhattan), that no amount of abstract intellectualizing will ever resolve the fundamental questions of human life, including (1) Is it possible to create a deeply satisfying romantic relationship with just one person? (2) Is there one set of absolutely true moral principles, or is ethics simply a matter of opinion? (3) Is there a God? and (4) What will happen to me when I die?
Using parodies of situations from classic literary and cinematic sources, Allen touches on all these issues without taking a stand on any of them. Indeed, despite his condemnation of the cowardice of his persona in Sleeper, Allen again plays a “little man” initially unwilling to take a stand on any issue or risk himself for any cause. Yet, by the film’s end, Boris does take a risk. He chooses, without any of the empty debate which has characterized his earlier actions, to voluntarily return to the chamber in which he left an unconscious Napoleon. There, he finds in himself the resolve to pull the trigger and premeditatedly kill another human being in order to prevent the continuation of an oppressive war in which so many innocent people have already suffered.
No explanation is given for Boris’s apparent change of heart. There are no high-sounding arguments or soul-searching insights. This decision is perhaps the first example in Allen’s work of a character seriously choosing to make a moral commitment with real consequences. As the price of his selfless action, Boris is condemned to death.
In his cell awaiting execution, he is visited by his loony father, with whom he engages in banter highlighted by a dialogue in which each manages to include the name of a character, novel, or story created by Dostoyevsky. Later, as he sits alone in his cell, the shadow of an angel falls on the wall. He hears a voice telling him that his life will be spared by the emperor at the last second. This mystical revelation, the last of many he has experienced throughout the film, allows him to face the firing squad without fear the next morning.
However, it turns out that the angel lied, and we next see Boris accompanied by the white-clad figure of Death, who has appeared to him periodically throughout the film in a parody of Ingmar Bergman’s black-clad figure in The Seventh Seal (1956). He appears outside the window of Sonia’s room just in time to interrupt another Bergman parody, this time of the women in Persona (1966). Sonia asks him to describe what it is like to be dead, but all he can tell her is that it’s worse than the chicken at a lousy restaurant.
In his concluding monologue, spoken directly to the audience, Boris shares his final reflections from beyond the grave on the philosophic issues raised in the film. Unfortunately, death seems to have done little to deepen his understanding. His insights at the end of his life are just as ludicrous and no more compelling than his earlier remarks. At the end, we see Boris comically dancing with Death as they move away from us. It is the last time Allen will ever leave his audience with so little of substance to reflect upon. Indicative of the fact that Allen had, during the making of this film, already decided to explore these same themes more seriously in his future work is the way in which he departs, speaking directly to the audience and actually telling us that we will never see this exclusively comic persona again: “Well, that’s about it for me folks. Goodbye.”
The next time we see him in a project of his own, he will again be speaking directly to us—not, however, in the role of the “little man,” but as a character much closer to himself, Alvy Singer.
In his last film work before Annie Hall, Allen agreed to play the role of Howard Prince in The Front, a condemnation of McCarthyism produced and directed by Martin Ritt with a script by Walter Bernstein. Howard, a sleazy version of Allen’s “little man,” makes his living as a cashier and bookie until he is approached by a group of blacklisted TV writers who ask him to act as their front. Allen does a good job in his first appearance as an actor in a primarily serious film. Although he maintains the usual stream of comedic observations which we associate with his persona, Ritt is successful in using him as a symbol of an everyman who eventually comes to realize that he must make a commitment to some set of moral standards or his life will be empty of meaning.
By this juncture in his career, Allen’s persona was associated in audience’s minds with the “outsider” who wants to become an “insider,” a desire which Prince explicitly concedes (Yacowar, 1991, p. 40). Initially, Prince is happy to accept the praise and rewards that come from his supposed success as a TV scriptwriter. Like David Shayne in Allen’s later Bullets Over Broadway, Prince could continue to reap the benefits which derive from his unearned status as a successful writer; instead, he eventually chooses authenticity over dishonesty, even though it means making sacrifices.
While Allen’s participation in this project was limited to acting, it is clear that this experience strengthened his resolve to move in more serious directions. One indication of the film’s impact on his work can be found in Manhattan, where Allen reverses the roles played by himself and actor Michael Murphy. In The Front, Murphy’s character, Miller, tells Prince, “You always think there’s a middle you can dance around in, Howard. I’m telling you, this time there’s no middle.” Manhattan casts Murphy as Yale, a man who betrays everyone important in his life. In that film’s most dramatic scene, Allen’s character, Isaac, will tell Yale, “You cheat a little bit on Emily and you play around the truth a little with me, and the next thing you know you’re in front of a Senate committee and you’re naming names, you’re informing on your friends.”