Film: Woody Redivivus

In his excellent study of movie comedy, The Comic Mind (1973), Gerald Mast caught the essence of Woody Allen’s genius: “conceptual parodies … of social attitudes and psychological stereotypes, of television and film genres, styles, and conventions, even of specific film sequences and television programs—with surrealistic gags, jokes, wild situations, unlikely characters, and anything else that seems to occur to Allen at the time.” I can’t put it any better than Professor Mast, who also zeroes in on Allen’s Langdonesque use of the look of his body for cinema magic.

But of late Woody Allen seemed to have played himself out. His Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask (reviewed here, October 27, 1972) was a monumental bore, funny only in widely spaced moments, a conception—the final putdown of Dr. Reuben’s idiotic book—too large for its realization even at the hands of the usually sublime Allen. The film skirted colossal tastelessness and offended as much as, or more than, it satirized; it looked to me then as if Allen might have taken off on the Milton Berle route to eternal grossness and repetition.

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David Brudnoy

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In his excellent study of movie comedy, The Comic Mind (1973), Gerald Mast caught the essence of Woody Allen’s genius: “conceptual parodies … of social attitudes and psychological stereotypes, of television and film genres, styles, and conventions, even of specific film sequences and television programs—with surrealistic gags, jokes, wild situations, unlikely characters, and anything else that seems to occur to Allen at the time.” I can’t put it any better than Professor Mast, who also zeroes in on Allen’s Langdonesque use of the look of his body for cinema magic.

But of late Woody Allen seemed to have played himself out. His Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask (reviewed here, October 27, 1972) was a monumental bore, funny only in widely spaced moments, a conception—the final putdown of Dr. Reuben’s idiotic book—too large for its realization even at the hands of the usually sublime Allen. The film skirted colossal tastelessness and offended as much as, or more than, it satirized; it looked to me then as if Allen might have taken off on the Milton Berle route to eternal grossness and repetition.