Rebels Are We: The Early Genius of Woody Allen

Starting his career as a joke writer at an early age, and then perfecting his craft as a stand-up comedian through the early half of the 1960s, Woody Allen developed a personal comic style that combined social satire with religious paranoia and cultural references ranging from Freud to Pygmalion, a cross between Lenny Bruce and Dennis Miller, without the controversy or the F-bombs. Dabbling a bit in Hollywood, penning the fluffy but successful What's New, Pussycat? and appearing in the strange pseudo-James Bond experiment Casino Royale, Woody had gained enough clout and experience to go behind the camera, almost in a defensive response to the way his screenplays were being mishandled by directors and editors. An avid observer of both people and film, Allen saved all of his best material for just that moment.

What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966)
One of the first truly independent films ever made, the concept of the picture might be more clever than its actual content. The producers bought a low-budget Japanese 007 knockoff and Woody and some other actors and comedians dubbed a newer, funnier soundtrack. Later made popular by cult favorite Mystery Science Theater 3000, the completely license-less realm of possibilities stimulated Woody into giving the voiceover work his own brand of joke-kernel humor. The film achieved a bit of a cult status and put Woody on the funny map, even though it had its hits and misses, humor-wise. The film might be remembered more now for the film's closing scene of Woody with a Japanese stripper (shades of Soon-Yi) than it is for the conjured egg salad plot.

Most notable about Tiger Lily is that it begins Allen's obsession with the fine line between fantasy and reality. At some points, the dubbed storyline and dialogue seem more believable than what the actual source text may have sounded like. It also marks the beginning of Woody's desire to break in and out of the fourth wall, to have real people invade filmed events, and filmed people invade reality.

Take The Money And Run (1969)
Woody's first writer/director/star turn takes on the comedy goldmine of capers gone wrong. However, Allen presents the film in a mockumentary style, which was galvanized by the film's low budget, but also the need for outsiders to get introduced to Allen's oddball humor by letting "straight people" work as go-betweens. Seeing Virgil's parents in Groucho glasses does more to determine the tone of the film than anything.

The film might seem commonplace nowadays because many of its gags and situations have been stolen over the last 35 years, and a few of the jokes only Woody truly gets ("He made a meager living selling meagers") and you can only guess their meaning, but the hits outweigh the duds. Episodic in nature, with the plot as an excuse for various types of crime, bank robberies and prison escapes are set up and built around the core of sight gags, but not a definitive punchline. Situations are created that grow more absurd, such as the bank robbery with the illegible note and the human charm bracelet.

The film's pitfalls are also in the love story, which with the beautiful Nancy Margolin, seems like Love Story. Whenever their relationship comes up in between heists, it feels like a different film altogether, with the elevator music and the slow motion, trying to straddle the line between non-stop hilarity and studio-obligatory Hollywoodism. It showed his promise.

Bananas (1971)
A big-time step up creatively and cinematically from Take The Money And Run, Allen's first gag movie was more focused and more enjoyable to watch. The film has a higher jokes-per-minute ratio and episodic, but at the same time, driven story-wise. The Hollywood sentimentality was stripped away, and the whole thing was played like a live action cartoon. Even Marvin Hamlisch, who provided Money's forgettable score, livens up and fits Allen's cornball antics with a fun score.

But Bananas is also a fable of sorts, and Woody's first political movie. Inspired by the last decade's events in Cuba, and dictatorship in general, it puts everyman Fielding Mellish in the middle and eventually as the spearhead of a Central American coup d'etat. The moral of the story: absolute power corrupts absolutely. Once the rebel leader assumes presidency of San Marcos, he immediately goes insane.

Although Allen portrays Mellish as a man who refuses to take a serious political stand on anything, the comedy of errors uses the silly revolution to make a few assertions about the struggles of second world dictatorships, American involvement in foreign affairs, and the mass media's reporting of these affairs.

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex* (1972)
Despite the long title, this truly episodic film contains a half-dozen vignettes, all about sex, each filmed in a different style. Ranging from a bit about a '50s game show where the film is tweaked to look authentic to the feel of an old science fiction monster movie to a segment borrowing the style of French New Wave, it really shows Woody's ability to escape the pigeonhole of his latter two films and branch out without losing his personal touch.

Some of the bits are a bit long and outdated, but there are enough gags to satisfy even the harshest critic, as well as some lively performances by Gene Wilder as a doctor with a fetish and Tony Randall and Burt Reynolds as supervisors of a brain center. The bits with Woody Allen seem to be the overlong ones, as he pervades some of the bits with his egotism and overconfidence in his comic screen presence, but half (the majority of which make up the better half) of the vignettes just have him behind the camera.

The style of the film becomes interesting because the vignette experiments are precursors to some of the more memorable Woody Allen films: "Aphrodisiacs" takes on the period piece seen in Love And Death, "Sodomy" takes on the insanity out of banality in Annie Hall, "Orgasm" shows Woody's affection for European film that is shown in the Bergmanesque Interiors, "Transvestites" foreshadows the escape lunacy of Sleeper, "Perverts" takes on the faux recreation of Zelig, and "Findings" and "Ejaculation" delve into the science fiction of Sleeper.

Sleeper (1973)
Borrowing the old Rip Van Winkle tale, Woody molds a clever film that mocks the events and trends of 1973 by having his character frozen for 200 years and juxtaposing the future with the 1970s. Originally, Woody Allen had planned on a comedy of epic proportions, as he had planned to have the first half of the film his Miles Monroe character in 1973, and the latter half in 2173. However, the film works better the way it is, the first ten minutes is fairly silent and you cannot establish the tone of the film until the doctors peel the aluminum foil off of Woody's face. It's THX-1138 with a pulse.

This film is Woody's first true masterpiece because it combines a science story, the political allegory that was touched in Bananas, a great soundtrack, and a dynamic performance by Diane Keaton, who runs circles around Louise Lasser. The slapstick is not at all forced, and Allen uses the film space as well as Buster Keaton. Much of the scenes are bolstered only by the film's ragtime score, which does enough to please those who are not old or wise enough to decipher some of Woody's dated cultural references.

While borrowing thematic elements of 1984, Woody still manages to take the opportunity to take potshots at Richard Nixon, Howard Cosell, Norman Mailer, health food, McDonald's, Volkswagen, the NRA, California, and Albert Shanker, all the while making some pretty bold and creative predictions about the future, some of which unfortunately came true.

Love And Death (1975)
Woody's first experiment with the Bergmanesque, the most striking feature about the film is its locations and cinematography. It's an unusual film in that there are no fits of Jewish paranoia or displays of desperation that turn into pathos. The main two subjects of the film are love and death, and 19th century Russia serves as a neutral ground to explore both. Where he used the future in Sleeper as a way to investigate the present, in Love And Death, he uses the past as a way to investigate the two most timeless issues of mankind.

This film already begins the transition to the more personal side of Woody, as the beginning exposition is laid out in terms of Boris' upbringing. With the exception of parts of Take The Money And Run (which had to do so to mirror documentary film's stylistics), Allen's films never delved into his persona's character. In Love And Death, Allen strips away some of the fear of exposing his true self by hiding behind laughs, his "defense mechanism" as he admits in Annie Hall.

Sure, Love And Death is still as gag-ridden as any of his other films, but with a Bergman-inspired Grim Reaper character hanging around and a foreboding title, it goes a bit deeper than previous efforts. The love and the death are imperfect, and it even reaches somewhat of a philosophical examination, it doesn't wrap up so nicely as the previous films and marks the open-endedness of its followers.

Annie Hall (1977)
Woody Allen finally hit his critical and artistic crescendo up to that point with Annie Hall, that year's Best Picture winner. Regarded among the best comedies and love stories of all time, Allen kept the rapid-fire barrage of humor from topics ranging from Jewish paranoia to waiting in line to cocaine, but he presented his first fully realized love story, one that had a beginning and an end, where the film doesn't simply end with his protagonist in bed with the love interest.

The film was startlingly personal, as Woody finally dealt with issues he skirted around in previous films. He actually confronts his fear and hatred of California by physically leaving New York, instead of just joking about its flakiness. When Annie leaves him for his emotional immaturity, Alvy does not get her back by telling a few jokes as in Woody's previous works; Alvy goes through a state of pathos. It's the first instance in a Woody Allen film that could be considered "dramatic," where a sequence ends without a punchline.

The film's cinematic nuances are similar to the promise shown in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex: in telling the story, Allen uses animation, thought subtitles, directly addressing the camera in confessional, pulling real people seemingly out of thin air, hallucinations, out of body experiences, existential flashbacks, and an interesting temporal structure. Annie Hall also begins Woody's keen eye for burgeoning acting talents (Christopher Walken, Jeff Goldblum, Sigourney Weaver, and even Paul Simon) that would make him the most sought after director of the 1980s. Still regarded as his best film, Annie Hall finally put Woody in the eyes of mainstream America, but it meant he could never go back to his whimsical early years.