Moral and Aesthetic Blindness (Crimes and Misdemeanors and Hollywood Ending)

Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) may seem an odd place to start, since it only engages filmmaking in its lighter subplot. But, as Peter Bailey argues, in Crimes and Misdemeanors, “Allen allowed himself to directly articulate the philosophical questions that arise elsewhere in his work in more fragmentary, tentative or self-parodic terms” (2001: 140). Thus it is a remarkably good touchstone for understanding crucial recurrent themes in Allen’s work.²

The title of the film deliberately evokes Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and the major plotline clearly echoes Dostoevsky’s exploration of the idea that, in the absence of God, anything is permitted. The substitution of “misdemeanors” for “punishment” has two suggestive implications. First, it underscores that the central character, Judah, does not get punished for his crime; he prospers and even triumphs over his guilt. Second, it acknowledges that Allen has paired a less serious subplot with the main story’s examination of murder and its consequences.

In the primary story, successful ophthalmologist Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau) is worried that the mistress from whom he is trying to extricate himself will confront his wife and ruin his family and professional life. In desperation, he turns to his brother, Jack (Jerry Orbach), who helps arrange her murder. After the murder, Judah is stricken with remorse but represses his urge to confess and finds himself settling into a comfortable life as his guilt recedes. Meanwhile, a rabbi, Ben (Sam Waterston), who is a patient of his, grows blind with an untreatable eye disease. Judah had confided in Ben about the affair (not the murder) and Ben had counseled him to confess his affair to his wife and beg her forgiveness. Ben speaks to Judah about the importance of a God-driven universe in which evil actions are punished, and admits that he couldn’t survive in a meaningless world absent such a faith.

In the subplot, Clifford Stern (Allen) is struggling to make a career as a documentary filmmaker while his marriage to Wendy (Joanna Gleason) deteriorates. Wendy’s brother, successful sitcom producer, Lester (Alan Alda), as a favor to his sister, hires Cliff to direct a documentary about him for the public television series, “Creative Minds.” Though Cliff loathes his commercial and successful brother-in-law, he accepts out of financial necessity and to save his marriage. While making the film, he falls for a producer working on the project, Halley Reed (Mia Farrow). When a rough cut of Cliff’s documentary reveals that it is a mocking parody of Lester’s self-importance, Cliff is fired from the project. A few months later, Cliff’s wife leaves him and he learns that Halley is engaged to Lester.

In relating these two plots, Allen is making a familiar Hollywood genre move: pairing a crime drama with a romantic comedy, a resilient genre running from films like North by Northwest and To Catch a Thief to Foul Play and Bird on a Wire. But the conclusion of the film, where the two plots converge at Ben’s daughter’s wedding (attended by both Judah and Cliff), subverts the endings appropriate to each genre. In the crime drama, the murderer prospers with his crime undiscovered, his fortunes growing, and his family beside him. In the romantic comedy, Halley ends up with the wrong man, the shallow Lester, and protagonist Cliff is left unemployed, unsuccessful, and involuntarily single.

The subplot is full of references to the movies. Cliff is a documentary filmmaker, Halley a television film producer, and Lester a successful Hollywood comedy producer. Cliff dotes on a teenage niece, whom he takes to old classic films, allowing Allen to quote from several Hollywood films and juxtapose them ironically with the Judah plot. It is tempting, of course, to identify the character Allen plays as a stand-in for Woody Allen himself, the vaguely autobiographical presence in so many of his films. But it may be more useful to see Cliff and Lester as comically exaggerated versions of two sides of Allen’s aesthetic nature: Cliff represents the serious filmmaker committed to topics of importance (he’s done documentaries on leukemia, toxic waste, and starvation), while Lester represents the side of Allen that is a highly successful comic entertainer. How these characters become caricatures, how they interact, and how they form two sides of the romantic triangle with Halley reveal the complexity and unresolved nature of Allen’s attitude toward the film artist and his own work.

Each character is an exaggeration of a type. Clifford’s choice of decidedly grim topics for his small documentaries is at odds with the light Hollywood fare he delights in with his niece and with his owning a 16 mm copy of Singin’ in the Rain, which he screens privately for Halley. Why would someone who so clearly loves light Hollywood comedy eschew humor completely in his own work and ridicule his successful brother-in-law who creates shows that make people laugh? Against the multiple glimpses of Hollywood films we see with Cliff and his niece, we are treated to several extended glimpses of Cliff’s big project, a documentary on a Holocaust survivor and philosopher Louis Levy. Though Levy offers a life-affirming philosophy, the footage Cliff has shot is extensive “talking head” material. If it were not uncommercial enough in its raw form, it is rendered unmarketable by news of Levy’s suicide, which belies his philosophy.

We never see any of Lester’s work, though we do see him advising writers as Clifford films his documentary. The scenes that Lester shoots reveal Lester as egotistical and self-aggrandizing, as he intones pseudo-wisdom about comedy and flirts shamelessly with an actress recently hired for one of his shows. The most important of the several framed films we glimpse in Crimes and Misdemeanors is the rough cut of Clifford’s profile of Lester. In it, he crosscuts between Lester’s pronouncements and clips of Mussolini, and puts some of Lester’s observations into the mouth of Francis, the Talking Mule. The result is, well, funny, and it is a startling contrast with what has been shown and implied to be the normal nature of Cliff’s good cause documentaries. Ironically, Lester has unleashed Cliff’s humor and wit. Of course, Lester fires him and takes control of the production, so the audience for this unfinished piece of Cliff’s oeuvre is even smaller than it is for his documentaries.

Halley is attracted to Cliff, but he’s married. And she is not immune to Lester’s charm and attention. Ultimately, we shouldn’t be surprised that the woman whom Cliff wooed with Singin’ in the Rain chooses the successful creator of Hollywood comedies over the dour, resentful, and self-destructive documentarian. But Cliff is stunned; Halley’s marriage to Lester represents the ultimate injustice in the world, even if it is only a misdemeanor, and not a crime. To us in the audience, the resolution of the love triangle may suggest how Allen feels about the success of his comic entertainments over his more serious ventures, though in actuality Allen’s most critically successful work has been material that combines comedy with serious themes, as in this film and films such as Hannah and Her Sisters or Annie Hall, as opposed to the strictly screwball material (Bananas or Manhattan Murder Mystery) or the strictly serious (Interiors or Alice).

The two plots are brought together in the key final wedding scene in which Judah and Cliff meet by chance in a quiet room. Judah pitches the story of his actual murder of his mistress as a movie idea (though he later insists it is “real life”). Clifford criticizes the outcome of Judah’s story in which the killer gradually loses his guilt and prospers: “Then his worst beliefs are realized” (there is no justice in the universe). And he argues that it would be a better story if the murderer turned himself in. Judah responds, “If you want a happy ending, go see a Hollywood movie”: a tricky response, since Cliff assumed they were indeed discussing a movie scenario. The moment is fraught with multiple Hollywood ironies. The success of the main plot protagonist – that is, the apparent happy ending for Judah – is not conventional Hollywood because evil and crime must be punished (as the Production Code required in the classic Hollywood era). Meanwhile, Cliff, the realistic documentarian, is advocating for the Hollywood ending, perhaps because he experienced just the opposite in his real-life romantic disappointment. As Sam Girgus puts it, “What Cliff sees as tragedy, Judah describes as a happy ending” (2002: 145). As in a good Hollywood comedy, the ending brings all the characters together at a wedding celebration, but the festivity and Cliff and Judah’s drunken conversation reveal a world resolved counter to the genre expectations: murderer Judah thrives; virtuous Ben is now wholly blind; Louis Levy, philosopher of reconciliation and hope, is an unexplained suicide; pompous Lester gets money, fame, and girl; and the filmmaker with integrity is left broke, unrecognized, and alone.

The film seems clearly designed to show us the inauthenticity of Hollywood endings. The blindness motif, which some critics felt was overplayed, highlights the emphasis on movies. Judah makes his fortune correcting people’s sight, but he is unable to see clearly in a moral sense in his own life and is unable to restore the sight of rabbi Ben. The implication is that it is God who is blind (or absent). But to the extent that the film is about movies, it is about visual art and how people see the world presented to them on film by Hollywood. Seeing movies may create a blindness to the realities of the world, and yet Crimes and Misdemeanors remorselessly returns us to cinematic visual images through the use of the framed screen: various of the films that Cliff and his niece see are used to comment ironically on the Judah plot; Cliff’s films of Louis Levy and Lester are excerpted and shown, and, in the final moments of the film, scenes from Crimes and Misdemeanors itself run as a montage against the audio of Louis Levy. As one critic puts it, “What is important for us as the audience . . . is the possibility of seeing ourselves mirrored [in the film] and our becoming transfigured by it (Gilmore 2005: 89). Richard Gilmore imagines the audience transfigured by Allen’s film, but Crimes and Misdemeanors, in its frequent inclusion of bits of films and film references, reminds us that this film exists within a universe of movies that affect our sensibilities and condition our expectations. Crimes and Misdemeanors depends on our familiarity with genre in order to shock us by refusing the resolutions traditionally appropriate to the genres. But that very familiarity suggests that Crimes and Misdemeanors is limited to being a feeble protest against the Hollywood norms that collectively have much greater cultural weight. Ultimately, Crimes and Misdemeanors, with its emphasis on blindness, asks us to question what we are seeing. That Allen’s own characteristics and sentiments are divided between the portrayals of Cliff and Lester ensures that the ambiguity of the film’s stance on the role of moviemaking can never wholly be resolved.

Hollywood Ending (2002), made 13 years later, has a surprising number of resonances with Crimes and Misdemeanors. In fact, we can view Hollywood Ending as a romantic comedy made from the subplot of Crimes and Misdemeanors, played (appropriately) with broader comedy and a happy ending. The romantic triangle here is quite familiar: Val (Woody Allen), a film director known for artistic integrity, cost overruns, diminishing popularity, and hypochondria; Ellie (Tea Leoni), his ex-wife, working as a Hollywood producer; and Hal (Treat Williams) the ultra-successful Hollywood studio head for whom Ellie left Val. Ellie (like Wendy in Crimes and Misdemeanors) successfully lobbies her lover Hal to hire Val to direct a new film, The City that Never Sleeps, a remake of a noir crime drama set in New York, because it is just Val’s kind of movie and he has “the streets of New York . . . in his marrow.” The studio balks because, though once a successful director, Val is known now as a “raving incompetent psychotic.” Ellie responds in his defense: “he’s not incompetent” (Figure 10.1).

Figure 10.1 A split screen contrasts the New York filming location (left) with the Hollywood of the studio bosses (right), Hollywood Ending.

(Executive Producers: Charles H. Joffe, Jack Rollins, Helen Robin, and Stephen Tenenbaum. Producer: Letty Aronson)

Once again, it is tempting to read Woody Allen wholly into the character he portrays, but more revealing, I think, to read him into both halves of the Val/Hal coin: the pessimistic director with artistic integrity and the successful filmmaker with multiple awards and profits. As the story develops, Val takes on the role of director, recognizing it as a last chance to regain stature in Hollywood. But as filming begins, he is struck with psychosomatic blindness. Fearing to blow his chance, he directs the film anyway, concealing his blindness through the cooperation of his agent and the interpreter for the Chinese cinematographer. Broad comedy ensues as expected, with the blind director tripping over things, looking the wrong way, and making odd decisions about camera angles, set designs and takes. Near the end of the film, Val is forced to take Ellie into his confidence, and they work together to complete the film while concealing the truth from Hal. Hal learns of their deceit and is horrified by the movie and aggrieved at his fiancée’s deception. When he confronts her, she discovers that she has never stopped loving Val. She returns to him as the movie is released to terrible reviews. His blindness lifts, and they are reunited. Meanwhile, the film becomes an unexpected hit in France, and Val is invited to Paris to make a new movie. Val and Ellie head to Paris as they had always dreamed of doing.

The film can thus be read in terms of what Stanley Cavell (1981) calls “the Hollywood comedy of remarriage,” the Philadelphia Story subgenre in which the happy ending is the reuniting of a husband and wife who have been separated or divorced. The comic disruptions of the romantic comedy work like Shakespeare’s “green world” to shake up the amorous arrangements that had seemed to make sense at the outset of the drama. As a result, the apparently good match for the woman is revealed to be not evil but boring and conventional, while the original husband is revealed to be genuinely valuable in spite of (or perhaps because of) the flaws that undermined the marriage in the first place.

In this case, those flaws are broadly exaggerated forms of self-destructive hypochondria. Val is prone to suspect terminal diseases around every corner, having stopped production once to be tested for black plague and another time for hoof-and-mouth disease. Allen consistently undermines his serious filmmakers, like Clifford and Val, by ascribing to them comic neuroses that suggest their failures are not wholly the result of their artistic integrity. Certainly, Val’s psychosomatic blindness that results in the creation of a baffling and incoherent film suggests a critique of artistic pretension. We never see any of the film that Val has shot, but we do see others reacting very negatively to the screening of dailies. Given Val’s blindness, it is no surprise that the film would be visually incoherent, and the reactions of audience members at test screenings and American critics confirm this. The comic twist of having the film be a critical smash in France plays on another classic theme in Hollywood novels and films. The prototypical work of the accidental success is Merton of the Movies (original novel 1919, adapted for the stage in 1922, filmed in 1924, 1932, and 1947), in which a would-be serious actor is so bad that he inadvertently becomes a comic hit. The theme appears regularly throughout Hollywood literature and film, most recently in Peter Lefcourt’s The Deal (novel in 1991 and film in 2008). It reaffirms the belief that Hollywood success is arbitrary and capricious, or, as screenwriter William Goldman famously put it, that “Nobody knows anything” (1989). That Hollywood credo affirms an aesthetic nihilism. If Crimes and Misdemeanors is a world of moral blindness, a world in which God is blind, then Hollywood Ending depicts an aesthetic blindness, a world in which directors, producers, and audiences (at least French ones) are equally blind. One of the ironies of Hollywood Ending is that Allen never lets us judge the framed film for ourselves: he manipulates the reactions of others to suggest that the film is as incoherent as we would expect from a blind director. The French joke is a joke at Allen’s own expense, of course, since his own films enjoy a very strong reputation in France.

What are we to make of these two similar plots with antithetical endings in Crimes and Misdemeanors and Hollywood Ending? The simplest response would be to align Allen’s values with Crimes and Misdemeanors, a work that explicitly criticizes Hollywood endings, as Allen himself does elsewhere. In that reading, Hollywood Ending is a deliberately silly movie that critiques the ending it offers through its very silliness. That is, Allen cannot bring himself to write the romantic ending that affirms human relationships and the role of the artist unless he subverts it by framing it consciously as light (and lesser) entertainment. The Hollywood ending of Hollywood Ending in which Val and Ellie are surrounded by blooming dogwoods as they depart for Paris leaves the audience uncomfortably uncertain whether the film is mocking its own romantic ending or mocking the audience’s desire that films end there, which is the idea (as we shall see) dramatized so effectively in The Purple Rose of Cairo. Yet, these implicit critiques of the Hollywood ending are difficult to reconcile with the filmmaker who celebrates Singin’ in the Rain and Duck Soup or the filmmaker who makes the effort to create so many light entertainments in his work.

This interrogation of the Hollywood ending emerges more complexly in The Purple Rose of Cairo and Stardust Memories. These films also challenge the redemptive happy ending characteristic of Hollywood film, finding their authenticity in refusing that ending (as in Purple Rose) or complicating it (as in Stardust Memories).

The Framed Screen (The Purple Rose of Cairo and Stardust Memories)

The ultimate signifier of the self-referential movie about Hollywood is the scene in which a film is shown within the film. I use the term “framed screen” or “framed film” to discuss the cinematic uses of this kind of self-referentiality (Ames 1997). Over time, a fairly consistent cinematic syntax has developed that shapes how framed films are depicted. The director has available a set repertoire of shots that shows the movie-within-the-movie: a full-screen shot in which the framed film occupies the entire screen; a framed shot in which the framed film occupies most of the screen but a frame (such as a theatre curtain or the edge of a television or monitor) is visible; a shot which includes the viewers (often from the rear or the side) in the frame along with the framed film; and, finally, a reverse-angle frontal shot of the audience watching the film (often illuminated by the light of the projector). To describe this menu of shots another way, the director can show us the content of the framed film, the content plus a frame image, the content plus a view of the audience, or only the audience.

Directors arrange these shots into a meaningful pattern that often allows the use of an eyeline match that connects viewer to scene viewed. Obviously, full-screen shots focus the external audience on the subject of the framed film, while reverse-angle shots focus us on the reaction of the internal audience. Directors can also create what I call a “reality cut,” in which we don’t know for certain that a full shot of a movie-within-a-movie is indeed a framed film until we pull back or cut into a “reality” which shows the frame or the audience. Films that begin inside of a framed film use this reality cut very dramatically.³ Allen uses the reality cut in Crimes and Misdemeanors in most of the shots of films that Clifford and his niece view. That is, we cut from a scene in the Judah plot to a full-screen shot of the movie Cliff and his niece are watching and only then pull back with a reality cut to reveal (or confirm) that the new scene is a movie being viewed in the theatre.

The Purple Rose of Cairo is practically a primer on the use of the framed screen, and Stardust Memories is one of the most complex and significant uses of the “reality cut” in film history. In both cases, Allen’s use of framing devices and movies-within-movies advances and complicates the view of Hollywood expressed by his films.

The Purple Rose of Cairo explores the familiar thesis that Depression-era film audiences were drawn to films representing elegant and sophisticated life as an imaginative way of escaping the limitations of their everyday lives of poverty, abuse, and frustration. The film shows both the effectiveness and the dangers of this kind of escapist or compensatory behavior. That the film is intended as a cautionary tale is indicated by the first line of dialogue – “Be careful, Cecilia!” – as a letter falls off the theatre marquee.

Allen builds a careful contrast between the life led by Cecilia (Mia Farrow) with her unemployed and abusive husband Monk (Danny Aiello) and the world depicted in the movies she watches. In the scenes of Monk and Cecilia quarrelling in their tiny apartment, Allen comes as close as he ever has to writing pungent working class drama in the mode of Arthur Miller. These finely crafted scenes emphasizing the characters’ financial and emotional poverty and overall helplessness are contrasted with the world depicted in the framed film, The Purple Rose of Cairo, a romantic comedy about an elite social set drinking champagne at jazz clubs and enjoying cocktails in evening dress in elegant apartments furnished with white telephones.

Allen manipulates the many and detailed presentations of the framed black-and-white film so as to make us always conscious of Cecilia’s reaction. We thus get a mediated view of the black-and-white Purple Rose, always aware that these images are feeding Cecilia’s dreams and illusions and compensating for the disappointments of her life away from the theatre. Cecilia becomes an obsessed viewer, an exaggerated figure of the ideal audience, an embodiment of “the gaze,” in the sense of the look of the viewer imprinted on and implied in the film (Doane 1987).

After establishing the Depression setting, Allen presents the first full scene of Cecilia watching the black-and-white framed film, The Purple Rose of Cairo. It is a masterful example of the dynamics of the framed screen, and it establishes the plot and ambience of the black-and-white Purple Rose and Cecilia as enraptured viewer. Allen communicates the experience of attending a full-length film in a crisply edited four-and-a-half minute sequence. A shot of the neon marquee advertising the film cuts to an unusual shot of ticket buyers viewed from inside the ticket booth, a parade of audience faces similar to the many such shots used in Stardust Memories. The presentation of the film-within-a-film begins with a shot of the audience (from the perspective of the screen) as they settle into their seats, the lights darken and the beam of light from the projector shoots out over their heads. This begins a sequence of 20 shots (not counting a handful of cuts that occur within the framed film). As the RKO logo of the framed movie appears, we see a shot that shows the theatre in color with the seated audience decked in muted reds and browns revealing the screen at the center of the frame in black and white. As the title card, Purple Rose of Cairo, follows the RKO logo, the camera cuts in to a full-screen shot of the framed film. This is followed by a reverse-angle shot of Cecilia watching the film illuminated by the glow of the screen and the projector beam. We will see this iconic shot of Cecilia watching throughout the film. In this sequence, Allen uses it five times. He mixes that with four shots that show the partial audience and the framed screen, seven shots of the framed film shown full screen, and four shots of other audience members. Twice he uses a fade out to communicate time passing to a later scene in the movie. Finally, we cut to Cecilia daydreaming at her waitress job, a shot that communicates the movie has ended, the night has passed, but Cecilia is still in the grips of her film viewing.

This economical presentation of the black-and-white Purple Rose and Cecilia as viewer establishes the key themes of the movie. We see the debonair and privileged lives of the characters in the framed film, a work that begins with a man in evening dress complaining, “I’m bored with cocktail parties and opening nights.” The clips take us to an Egyptian tomb and a New York nightclub where Kitty Haynes sings “Let’s Take It One Day at a Time” in Marlene Dietrich style (original song by Dick Hyman). Cecilia’s love for the film is underscored by the audio continuity that pairs lines like “What’s life without a little risk taking?” with Cecilia staring at the screen. Allen uses the pattern of cuts to communicate Cecilia’s heightened interest when Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels) comes on screen, and the Kitty Haynes lyric, “Ours will be a different sort of love affair,” presages the complications that will follow Baxter walking off the screen and into Cecilia’s life.

Allen’s manipulation of the syntax of the framed film, aided by the contrast of color and black and white, prepares for the tour de force of the scene of Baxter walking off the film, a “screen passage” that owes a good deal to Buster Keaton’s brilliant use of the technique in Sherlock, Jr., an influence noted in many reviews and discussions of Purple Rose.⁴ In the first presentation of the framed film, the movement from full-screen shot of framed film to reverse-angle shot of Cecilia or others viewing creates a rhythm of expectation and fulfillment very like that created by the reverse-angle pattern of dialogue scenes (suturing). In the crucial scene that violates the boundary between screen and audience, that metaphorical dialogue becomes literal dialogue, as Tom Baxter and Cecilia talk across the two different realms. Cecilia is on her third consecutive tearful viewing after a terrible confrontation with Monk when Baxter’s gaze wanders away from his costars to catch Cecilia’s eye in the audience. “My God, you must really love this picture,” he says to her to begin their dialogue. After they exchange a few lines, Allen uses the partial audience-framed screen shot to show Baxter approaching the camera within the black-and-white film until he is in extreme close-up. Baxter then passes through the screen and becomes a color face in a shot showing the framed film full screen. Allen handles the size disparity (i.e., the images of the actors are bigger than real people) by cutting to the reactions of shocked audience members and then cutting back to the partial audience shot of the screen which shows Baxter, now human-sized in the center of the frame in color in the aisle of the theater while the black-and-white costars gaze out at him from the film with concern and Henry (Edward Herrmann) comments: “Listen, old sport, you’re on the wrong side.” The screen image entered into the real world becomes the comic device of this film, much as the blind director serves as the gag for Hollywood Ending. But this is a much richer trope, and Allen mines it for insightful humor about the relation of actor to character, theatre to film, and, above all, of the world of Hollywood to the real world of Depression America. Gags such as Baxter realizing that his money isn’t good in the real world and that things don’t fade out when he kisses Cecilia enrich the basic argument of the film that the conventions of elegant film adventure and romantic comedy are wholly at odds with the struggles of imperfect humans in an impoverished society.

Both Tom Baxter and the actor who portrays him, Gil Shepherd (also Jeff Daniels), become contenders for Cecilia’s affections and alternatives to her desperate life with Monk. The three men represent three different levels of artifice. Technically, of course, Baxter is a fictional character (within the world of the fictional framing film, the color Purple Rose of Cairo) and Shepherd and Monk are both real people. But Shepherd as a Hollywood actor is depicted as somehow less real or less genuine than Monk. He woos Cecilia in part to cajole Baxter back into the framed film and end the negative publicity. As a Hollywood star, he is accustomed (the film implies) to fleeting and shallow love affairs with women. The implication is that Hollywood actors partake of the unreality of the illusions they depict. So when the film actress of the black-and-white “Purple Rose” counsels Cecilia to go with Gil because, as film images, “we’re limited,” the counsel may also imply what the movie shows: that the lug Monk is realer than the Hollywood actor Gil. From Monk’s point of view (and the movie’s), Cecilia running away to Hollywood with a star actor is just as impossible as Cecilia having a love affair with a screen image. We see this implication in Cecilia’s articulate explanation to Tom about why she is choosing Gil: “In your world [the world of the movies], things have a way of working out right. I’m a real person and no matter how tempted I am, I have to choose the real world.” The argument for Gil becomes, devastatingly, an argument for remaining with Monk, which is her ultimate disappointing fate.

This grim conclusion is tempered by the fact that all the characters are, after all, part of a fiction film. But it is crucial to Allen’s vision that the framing color film has an ending antithetical to the implied ending of the framed black-and-white film. While the framed film presumably ends with the marriage of Tom Baxter and Kitty Haynes, the appropriate conclusion of a romantic comedy, the framing color film ends with Cecilia abandoned by both her romantic dream suitors and left to the abusive Monk to whom she must ultimately return. Allen fought for the “unhappy” ending of this film and reported that “The whole reason for Purple Rose was for the ending” (Lax 2007: 19).

But the ending is not so simple, because Allen returns Cecilia to the movie theatre and shows her engaging with the next film that has come to town. Understanding the ambiguities of this ending is crucial to understanding Allen’s tortured relation to his own comedy. Cecilia learns that Gil Shepherd has jilted her from the theatre manager, who tells her also that the new Astaire and Rogers film begins that day. We cut to Gil Shepherd aboard his plane headed back to Hollywood but looking guilty for abandoning Cecilia. An audio overlap of the opening lines of “Cheek to Cheek” connects Gil and Cecilia: “Heaven, I’m in heaven.”

Allen cuts to a full screen shot of Astaire and Rogers dancing and then reverses to show Cecilia, utterly dejected, entering the theatre with her suitcase and ukulele. As the dialogue of shot/reverse shot continues, the lyrics of the song take on poignant significance: “I seem to find the happiness I seek.” We watch Cecilia go from her complete dejection with eyes on the floor, to lifting her eyes to view the screen, to the return of her enraptured gaze as the white light of the screen is reflected in her eyes, to the final opening of a smile as she becomes fully engaged with the transcendent fantasy of the dance number on film. This transformation is underscored by the audio overlap of the scene and the intercutting of the superb dancing of Astaire and Rogers as “Cheek to Cheek” comes to a climax.

Cecilia is left in her miserable life and she remains grossly overinvested in the consolations of film. Yet the celebration of momentary happiness enveloped in the very jazz that backs this and almost all of Allen’s movies tempers that cautionary tale. Excessive compensatory emotional investment in the movies occurs precisely because of their power to capture and preserve the moments of fleeting beauty and happiness we experience. As Cecilia explained to Tom before sending him back to the silver screen, “I loved every minute with you, and I’ll never forget our night on the town [when he brings her into the framed film].” That is, the emotional power of art and entertainment is real, even if the images and narratives that generate it are imaginary. In Purple Rose that paradox generates the pity of Cecilia’s plight and the emotional force of her imaginative engagement with movies.

The ending of Purple Rose of Cairo has strong parallels to Pennies from Heaven (1981) in which the characters played by Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters flee their horrible Depression existence by actually entering an Astaire and Rogers scene (from Follow the Fleet) on the movie screen. Both directors – Herbert Ross and Woody Allen – pick an Astaire–Rogers dance number as the epitome of the imaginative escape offered by Depression-era musicals. Music and dance depicted on film embody the idea of artistic transformation. In Allen’s canon, the parallel moment for Purple Rose’s “Cheek to Cheek” is Louis Armstrong singing “Stardust,” the moment that provides the touchstone and title for Stardust Memories. Stardust Memories – a film about a contemporary director much like Woody Allen – is tied to the film nostalgia of Purple Rose through its transformative title song. Stardust Memories shows us another side to Allen’s investigation of the significance of making movies.

It will take us a while to get to the “stardust” moment in Stardust Memories. Stardust Memories is Allen’s fullest examination of the role of the filmmaker in contemporary culture, and much of its clever magic comes from its repeated displacement of concluding and affirming moments. Like all the films discussed here, Stardust Memories is an exploration of how to end a film, but the movie itself gives us multiple endings, another strategy for presenting the ambiguity inherent in Cecilia’s sad smile.

An obvious homage to Fellini’s 8½, Stardust Memories casts Woody Allen as filmmaker Sandy Bates, struggling to find the right ending to the film he is making. While this struggle, which is both internal and a struggle with his producers, is going on, Bates attends a Sandy Bates film festival where several of his earlier films are screened and he deals with ardent fans, producers, and publicists. He recalls his love affair with a depressive girlfriend, Dorrie; he’s visited by a married romantic partner, Isobel, who reveals that she has taken her kids and left her husband to be with him; and he pursues a third woman, Daisy, whom he meets at the festival. The film is filled with “reality cuts,” in which a cut reveals that a segment we have been seeing is actually a film-within-the-film. The reality cuts are so numerous that the distinction between framed film and framing film (so clear in Purple Rose and reinforced by the color/black-and-white contrast) becomes obscured. Allen has asserted that the entire film after an early scene in which his housekeeper prepares rabbit for dinner is Sandy Bates’s dream – though this would hardly be apparent to viewers (Bjorkman 1993: 123).

There is a key moment very late in the film which I think clarifies, as much as possible, what is framing what. When the lights come up after a projected scene on board a train (a happier version of the “ending” the film opens with), two of the three women in Sandy Bates’s life discuss what it was like kissing him in the film (they didn’t like it). This scene reveals that Isobel and Daisy (and presumably Dorrie) were all actresses playing characters in the film within a film, and this seems to suggest that the entire movie, except for the brief final scene, is Bates’s framed film being screened in the Connecticut auditorium where the festival, depicted within the film, is held. Thus, if I am reading it correctly, all the framed films, including the debate over the ending of Bates’s film and the comic films screened at the festival and Bates’s Q&A after the films, and his memories of Dorrie and interactions with Isobel and Daisy, all are within the film he has just shown.

This unsolvable puzzle is the natural extension of filmic self-referentiality, the desire to make the film being made within the film identical to the framed film the final audience sees. As Robert Altman said of the highly self-referential film The Player, “The movie you saw is the movie you are about to see; the movie you saw is the movie we’re going to make” (Altman and Sterritt 2000: 163). As such, Stardust Memories participates in the rarified literary subgenre of the work about the difficulty or impossibility of making a work of art, a genre which cancels itself with its own achievement (and which ranges from Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode” to John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse”).⁵

Appropriately, Stardust Memories begins with a fully framed film in which we see Sandy Bates on a silent train car filled with grim and scowling people. Across the tracks is another train car filled with lively and gay partyers. Bates wants to change trains, of course, but he can’t. Finally, the train car leaves its grim passengers off at a garbage dump, and they sadly progress by it as seagulls whirl noisily in the air. The image is a brilliant one: life as a sad and inexorable progression toward the garbage dump of death. It is as striking and powerful as the death personification in The Seventh Seal that Allen so admires. A reality cut takes us to a small audience silhouetted against the blank screen, and we realize that the ending of Bates’s new film has just been screened for his studio backers. They are not happy with it.

The scene that follows echoes the opening of Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels, in which a successful comic film director screens the final scene of a movie about Depression poverty and homelessness to his stunned studio bosses. Bates’s backers complain that artists “document their private suffering and fob it off as art.” “His insights are shallow and morbid.” Another asks, “Doesn’t the man realize he has the greatest gift of all – the gift of laughter?” Sandy Bates stands firm: “I don’t want to make funny movies anymore. They can’t force me to. . . . I look around the world and all I see is human suffering” (Allen 1982: 283, 286). Sullivan (Joel McCrea) in Sullivan’s Travels makes the same argument: “How can you talk about musicals at a time like this? With the world committing suicide . . . with corpses piling up in the street, grim death gargling at you around every corner?” His bosses suggest, “Maybe they’d like to forget that.” And they add that the movie Sullivan admires and wants to model his next film on, “Died in Pittsburgh. Like a dog.” Bates’s handlers mirror Sullivan’s: “Human suffering doesn’t sell tickets in Kansas City.”

This deliberate echo reminds us that Allen is continuing a conversation about the role of art and entertainment in people’s lives. Preston Sturges manipulates the story of Sullivan’s Travels toward a ringing affirmation of the power of comedy to lift the human spirit. Allen will give voice to that sentiment but undermine it and pose a more ambiguous and nuanced response to this debate between comedy and tragedy recast as the twentieth-century tension between popular entertainment and high art.

Stardust Memories is Allen’s most deliberately dialogic treatment of this recurrent theme. By “dialogic,” I mean Allen’s placing of different voices in competition, with one undercutting and undermining the other. In the films discussed here, the much compromised character of the artistic figure serves a complicating or dialogic function. We see this in the egotistical self-destructiveness of Cliff and Val. It also emerges vividly in Allen’s later film, Celebrity (1998), in which the familiar complaint of the Hollywood writer against his philistine bosses is undermined by the shallowness and selfishness of Lee Simon (Kenneth Branagh). In addition to depicting a self-indulgent film director, Stardust Memories remorselessly and masterfully pits one voice against the other in the cultural dialogue about the role of movies. Thus the opening of the film immerses us in one film experience and cuts away to people criticizing it. Allen then responds to the criticisms, but those critical voices continue – and, as the movie shows, the critical voices continue inside Bates’s consciousness, too. More than a statement about the roles of art and entertainment, Stardust Memories is an unresolved dialogue about those issues.

The film offers us five distinct endings or ending moments. The first is the opening scene on the train to the dump. The next we see is one reshot or recut by the studio in which the characters end up not at a dump but in “jazz heaven” with a white-robed jazz orchestra serenading them in the clouds. Bates protests, as we would expect, and the scene comically mocks the traditional Hollywood ending (looking ahead to the pressure on Allen to give Purple Rose a happy ending and increase its marketability, a pressure so specific that the studio estimated the net difference in ticket sales should Allen retain the unhappy ending). The jazz heaven ending is ludicrous, but the studio defends it by saying to Bates, “You love jazz,” which is of course true of Woody Allen, too. Bates asserts: “I don’t want anyone going to jazz heaven; that’s a nitwit idea. You know the whole point of the movie is that no one is saved.”

As he leaves the scene, Bates protests further, “Jazz heaven – that is the stupidest thing I ever heard. You can’t control life; it doesn’t wind up perfectly. Only art can you control – art and masturbation, two areas in which I am an absolute expert.” Bates raises the familiar question about how the perfection of art relates to the imperfection of life: should art reflect the messiness of life or provide an artificially ordered alternative to that imperfection precisely because perfection and order are only wholly achievable within the artwork? Or does such a role for art render it inauthentic? Allen’s recurrent connection of art to masturbation suggests how both are tied to illusions and the rosy alternative to real life that imagination provides. The comic link to masturbation proposes the artist as narcissist (especially if he is “Mister Bates”) and oddly jibes with the producers who criticize Bates’s work as self-indulgent. That same love of and suspicion of illusion animates Allen’s recurrent treatment of the young artist as magician, which recurs here when he levitates Daisy to an admiring audience at the UFO convention. But magic “couldn’t save Nat Bernstein,” its illusions powerless against mortality. Inauthentic art, Bates implies, works like magic to distract people from what is really going on (through misdirection), whereas genuine art confronts the viewer with the limitations of his existence.

But just how ludicrous is jazz heaven, especially if we look ahead to Purple Rose and its “Cheek to Cheek” conclusion: “I’m in heaven . . .”? And if there is another “jazz heaven” moment in Woody Allen’s work, it is the most luminous affirmative scene in Stardust Memories, the scene that gives the movie its title. This scene is complexly framed, as Bates has been shot by an adoring fan, or rather he imagines he has been shot by an adoring fan in a sequence within the framed film. He then imagines receiving a posthumous award and discussing this vision in his acceptance speech from beyond the grave. Bates relates how, on the operating table, he searched for “something to hang on to . . . something to give my life meaning,” As he narrates this, the music of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust” (lyrics by Mitchell Parish) begins and provides audio continuity to the dramatization of the remembered scene. The scene Bates recalls involves listening to Louis Armstrong’s version of “Stardust,” “music that I grew up with,” while the warm breeze of a spring morning comes through his apartment where Dorrie is reading the paper and he’s having breakfast. He thinks “how terrific she was and how much I loved her,” and for a brief moment experiences transcendence in which he feels “indestructible.” As Armstrong sings the song, the camera follows Bates’s gaze to Dorrie and she looks up a few times from the paper with ever-broadening smiles.

The scene is powerful partly because the music works on us as well as the characters. As Allen has said about his scoring, “The audience always has the pleasure of the extra evocation of the song” (Lax 2007: 308). It is a beautiful song, and tying it to his sense of well-being and love aestheticizes the character’s emotional experience and also renders it potentially communicable. The song’s melancholy lyrics echo the themes of this scene; that is, the lyrics thematize the aestheticization of experience. The singer spends his nights alone because his great love is in the past. But he takes consolation in the song that reminds him of his love and that revives his feeling of being with his beloved, however evanescent, like stardust: “My consolation is the stardust of a song.” That is, “Stardust” is precisely about turning experience into art through memory. Since beauty and happiness are fleeting, it is art – here a song – that allows us to imaginatively recapture the feelings that have flown, “the memory of love’s refrain.” This phrase is doubly distanced from the real experience; that is, the song evokes not simply the “memory of love” but the “memory of love’s refrain,” love turned into a song that echoes itself.

The final verse (which Armstrong sings in the excerpt) invokes a nightingale very like Keats’s symbol for transient beauty: “The nightingale tells his fairy tale/ A paradise where roses bloom/ Though I dream in vain/ In my heart it will remain/ My stardust melody/ The memory of love’s refrain.” That the song celebrates an illusion as well as a memory is indicated by “fairy tale,” “paradise,” and “dream.” But the “melody” inspires the “memory,” and what is remembered is that mixture of emotion and music: “love’s refrain.” Read affirmatively, this moment and song in Bates’s movie become vehicles that capture what Allen wants to celebrate about life: transcendent moments of happiness and beauty accessible through the actions of memory and art.

There is an explicit parallel in Allen’s earlier work, when in Manhattan he lists the things that make “life worth living” and the list not only includes Louis Armstrong, it is heavily tilted toward aesthetic experience and spectatorship, placing his lover’s smile (like Dorrie’s in this moment) in the context of artistic experiences:

Why is life worth living? That’s a very good question. Um . . . Well, there are certain things I – I guess that make it worthwhile. Uh, like what? . . . Okay. Um, for me, oh I would say . . . what, Groucho Marx, to name one thing . . . uh . . . ummmm . . . and Willie Mays . . . and, uh, um . . . the 2nd movement of the Jupiter Symphony . . . and ummmm . . . Louis Armstrong’s recording of “Potatohead Blues” . . . and, um . . . Swedish movies, naturally . . . Sentimental Education by Flaubert . . . uh . . . Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra . . . umm . . . those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne . . . uh, the crabs at Sam Wo’s . . . tsch, uh . . . Tracy’s face . . . (Allen 1982: 267–268).

Jazz heaven does not sound so far off. Or, to put it another way, when Allen mocks the studio’s happy ending, he is mocking his own tendency to represent happiness and the value of life in an aesthetic or hedonistic way. Yet he is also affirming that very vision in the power of his presentation, creating what is for many the most memorable scene of Stardust Memories. He then immediately undercuts it with a reality cut as the scene fades to black and a reverse shot shows the audience complaining about Bates’s sentimentality: “Cop-out artist!” “Why do all comedians turn out to be sentimental bores?” The intellectual strength of Stardust Memories lies in this remorseless self-interrogation or dialogism. Allen seems to think that both sides of his artistic persona represent easy ways out or remain, by themselves, inadequate to the artistic vision he is seeking.

The “Stardust” scene leads, in a complicated fashion, to yet another ending in this interrogation of Hollywood endings. In the framed and imagined scene of Bates’s near death experience, he whispers Dorrie’s name and offends Isobel, who is by his side. She takes her children and departs, and Bates follows her to the train. As he boards the train with her, they find themselves in a set very like the original ending which began the film. In that context, Bates tries to woo Isobel back to him by describing the new ending he envisions, which includes her. The scene is a more sophisticated version of the joke in Annie Hall about rewriting scenes from life into art in order to have the endings come out right.

We’re on a train and there are many sad people. I have no idea where it’s headed; it could be the same junkyard. But it’s not as terrible as I originally thought it was because, you know, we like each other, and, you know, we have some laughs, and there’s a lot of closeness and the whole thing is a lot easier.

Once again, in dialogic fashion, Isobel resists and complains, “It’s too sentimental,” to which Bates replies, “It’s a good sentimental.” He then writes her into the scene, describing her life-affirming virtues. Like Cecilia and Dorrie, she begins to smile. Bates then writes in a kiss to close the movie, and she does kiss him, as the jazz score heightens and the framed movie fades out – for good this time.

The audience departs without the dialogic undercutting that greeted the “Stardust” scene in the (apparently) framed film, though it is here that Isobel and Daisy discuss how Bates takes advantage of the screen kisses in a creepy way. Stardust Memories has come full circle to a revision of the initial bleak ending, a revision that, while not jazz heaven, celebrates the passing pleasures of life as worthy of artistic affirmation. But the interrogation of Hollywood endings is not quite complete. Allen shows us a shot of the now empty theatre that has been the scene of much of this movie and its framed films. Bates walks slowly into the empty theatre and retrieves his sunglasses (Figure 10.2). He walks out and the scene fades to black. As Peter Bailey has suggested, it is tempting to read this last figure as Woody Allen, not Sandy Bates, coming on Hitchcock-like to preside over the final ending. In any case, the long shot of the blank screen outlines the battleground of Allen’s movies about Hollywood: what will fill that white space and how it will interact with artist and audience and to what end? Picking up his sunglasses, Bates/Allen shows himself to be the celebrity he will ridicule in Celebrity, and the dark glasses hint at the themes of moral and aesthetic blindness developed elsewhere in his films. No matter how many endings Stardust Memories may proffer, one of them will come literally at the end of the film before the final credits roll. Bates/Allen dons his dark shades, the white screen goes dark, the lights above it disappear – and only the insistent jazz music remains. This final gesture is as ambiguous and subject to multiple readings as the pattern of dialogic undercutting of the entire film: the sunglasses suggest the limitations of the artist’s vision while the score flirts with the “jazz heaven” Sandy Bates has already scorned.

Figure 10.2 Artist and canvas: director Sandy Bates facing the blank screen, Stardust Memories.

(Executive Producers: Charles H. Joffe and Jack Rollins. Producer: Robert Greenhut)

1 John Ford quoted from a 1964 BBC television interview in Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 1985.

2 When the journal Film and Philosophy devoted a special issue to the works of Woody Allen, 5 of 11 articles were devoted to Crimes and Misdemeanors (Lee 2000).

3 There are many examples of films that begin with a framed film and only reveal, a few minutes in, that we are watching a film-within-the-film. Among those mentioned here are “two of the film versions of Merton of the Movies” (1924, 1947), Play It Again, Sam (1972), and Sullivan’s Travels (1941).

4 I provide a fuller discussion of the trope of characters crossing over into a framed film in my discussion of “screen passages” in Movies about the Movies: Hollywood Reflected (Ames 1997). Buster Keaton’s ability to enter the screen is eventually explained by revealing the film as his dream. Dreams and movies are often compared, and dreams and films framed within a movie can both be revealed by reality cuts.

5 Stardust Memories is compared to Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” in Dunne (2006: 233).