Woody Allen turned 70 on Thursday, and consequently, lots of gushing material is being written about him in the urban newspapers and the wire services. Here's a sample:
Allen himself has a more modest appraisal of his career, at least ostensibly. In Vanity Fair recently, he gave himself a "B" and said that his work paled next to that of Kurosawa and Bergman. The comparison is telling, in that it indicates not the scale of Allen's modesty so much as the extent of his aspiration. He didn't compare himself, after all, to great comedians or other comic filmmakers, such as Chaplin and Keaton, but to towering, tremendously prolific writer-directors of profound stature, who worked without interruption for most of a lifetime. Yes, he gave himself a B. But what would he have given Harold Lloyd? Or Truffaut? Or Hitchcock?Even if Allen is not Ingmar Bergman — the greatest of the great in Allen's opinion (mine, too) — it's also true that Allen at his best has a master filmmaker's capacity for rearranging an audience's molecules. It's hard to remember this when Allen muddies the waters with garbage like "Anything Else" and "Everyone Says I Love You," but films such as "Hannah and Her Sisters" and "Crimes and Misdemeanors" leave audiences transformed. Allen's best films capture the longings and moral preoccupations of his time, while standing at a slight remove. This distance allows for comedy, but also for the perspective that has kept him from getting mired in contemporary myths. His humor, while very funny, is not just funny, but gets at underlying truths. That's why his films are aging well and will continue to blossom over time.
Well, his films up until Crimes And Misdemeanors and the Soon-Yi debacle, and primarily, those prior to 1980's Stardust Memories, in which he worked especially hard to dynamite much of the goodwill he had built up with American audiences during the 1970s.
The loss of that goodwill has cost him enormously in the American box office--but then, few mainstream entertainers have been as self-destructive to their career as Allen. As a result, he's increasingly capable of unintentional self-irony, as this recent quote illustrates:
The director, who turns 70 on Thursday, moved away from his native New York locations in 2003 after voicing dissatisfaction with his lack of creative freedom.He tells Vanity Fair: "I don't feel that (the studios) are qualified to give the input. They wouldn't know a good script from a problem script or how to cast a picture."
This from a man who hasn't had a movie in at least a decade and a half with profitable US box office.
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