It’s No Joke!

Woody Allen has made his first serious film, Interiors, and its condition is worse than serious, it’s grave to the point of disaster. Whether it makes you bite your lips in rage or roll over with helpless laughter, you will concede that there is not one real original character in it; that almost every line of dialogue is, at best, hackneyed, at worst, ludicrously stilted; and that virtually every shot is derived from some other filmmaker, usually Bergman or Antonioni. In fact, most of the film is taken over from Bergman in a misunderstood and mismanaged way, particularly from Cries and Whispers—one of Bergman’s poorest films, but we can hardly expect anyone tasteless and foolish enough to make Interiors to know what to copy.

When Allen made his last drearily inept film, Annie Hall, not only was he hailed with unprecedented critical hosannas, but Vincent Canby of the New York Times even went so far as to declare him our Ingmar Bergman. And Allen, who, as we know from Love and Death, has a Bergman complex, was fool enough to believe Canby. Right from the titles of Interiors—simple white on black, and, as in the rest of the film, no music—we know we are in Bergman country.

JS

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John Simon

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Woody Allen has made his first serious film, Interiors, and its condition is worse than serious, it’s grave to the point of disaster. Whether it makes you bite your lips in rage or roll over with helpless laughter, you will concede that there is not one real original character in it; that almost every line of dialogue is, at best, hackneyed, at worst, ludicrously stilted; and that virtually every shot is derived from some other filmmaker, usually Bergman or Antonioni. In fact, most of the film is taken over from Bergman in a misunderstood and mismanaged way, particularly from Cries and Whispers—one of Bergman’s poorest films, but we can hardly expect anyone tasteless and foolish enough to make Interiors to know what to copy.

When Allen made his last drearily inept film, Annie Hall, not only was he hailed with unprecedented critical hosannas, but Vincent Canby of the New York Times even went so far as to declare him our Ingmar Bergman. And Allen, who, as we know from Love and Death, has a Bergman complex, was fool enough to believe Canby. Right from the titles of Interiors—simple white on black, and, as in the rest of the film, no music—we know we are in Bergman country.