After weathering investigations, blacklists, slander, libel, and worst of all, financing issues, Woody Allen will begin shooting his 51st feature film this Monday in Madrid. It’s an English language comedy starring Jemima Kirke (Girls) and Alexi Wasser (Messy), and per Spain’s agreement with the production, the title will feature the word “Madrid.” Allen’s 90, and by all accounts the only thing that interrupted his movie-a-year routine was the public re-litigation of abuse allegations from the early-1990s. Allen was cleared of abusing his daughter Dylan in both investigations, but never mind that, please don’t get in the way of Ronan Farrow, eager to parlay the beginning of #MeToo into a media career and gaslight an amnesiac nation into believing that Allen was never cleared of any wrongdoing. Mia Farrow got a little less out of it: a few documentaries, some op-eds, and the belated cancellation of her ex-husband.
She successfully smeared him and made him into the pariah she never could in the 1990s when everything was still fresh and people weren’t pressured into believing “all women” no matter what. The fact is Dylan Farrow claims she was abused by Allen, Ronan backs her up, but their siblings Moses and Soon-Yi Previn not only dispute Dylan’s claims but allege that Farrow abused them. Taking sides in and determining innocence and guilt in the saga of Allen vs. Farrow is obscene in and of itself, because you’re pitting two sets of kids against each other and automatically calling one of them liars. Allen was investigated, cleared, and his career continued uninterrupted into the 1990s, 2000s, and most of the 2010s. In fact, he had one of the strongest runs of his career immediately after his divorce from Farrow.
Manhattan Murder Mystery came first, a “lightweight” movie that originated in one of the earlier drafts of Annie Hall (when it was still a murder mystery called Anhedonia); Allen put it off for years, comparing it to airport fiction, but the stress and strain of his very public divorce and Farrow’s allegations—and the disclosure of his relationship with Soon-Yi—drove him to make something fun, a film that he could enjoy making. By all accounts, Diane Keaton’s the one who made Manhattan Murder Mystery a particularly easy and near-buoyant set; co-star Anjelica Huston said the shoot was, “oddly free of anxiety, introspection and pain.” It’s a light movie, but thoroughly enjoyable and a significant step up from Allen’s first two films of the 1990s, Alice and Shadows and Fog (1992’s Husbands and Wives, released just weeks after Farrow made her allegations, is one of Allen’s masterpieces, and among the best of the Farrow/Allen collaborations).
Manhattan Murder Mystery’s relatively small cast—Allen, Keaton, Huston, Alan Alda (and a 17-year-old Zach Braff in a single scene role)—is an indication that people largely hadn’t made up their minds yet regarding Allen. Michael Caine (Hannah and Her Sisters) initially said he wouldn’t work with Allen again, but retracted his statement when Allen was cleared of any wrongdoing in 1994; Alda was similarly equivocal, but ultimately insisted that due process must be followed and respected. Who knows what would’ve happened if Allen were found guilty of abusing his daughter? Manhattan Murder Mystery might’ve been the end of a film career that was already unparalleled. Luckily, Allen was permitted, even encouraged, to flourish in the 1990s and 2000s when the Farrows’ claims were dismissed.
You have to remember that Allen was in a serious relationship with a woman most mistakenly referred to as his stepdaughter; in fact, because Allen never married Farrow nor adopted Soon-Yi, he never had a stepdaughter to marry! But even then, and especially now, it looks odd, I’ll admit that. This was a local story when I was growing up, and I learned about the case when I was very young because Allen was so prolific and the “fact” that he “married his stepdaughter” was brought up annually. That people continued to go to his movies and make them hits speaks to the decline in general intelligence today, because while no contemporary writer called the 1990s a particularly enlightened period when it came to pop culture, people were able to “separate the art from the artist” and make the distinction that it “looks weird,” but it’s not against the law, so what are we talking about here? Nothing. Let’s return to the movies.
1994’s Bullets Over Broadway was Allen’s proper comeback, with an ensemble cast of returning collaborators (Dianne Wiest, Jack Warden) and stars of the moment like Chazz Palminteri, Jennifer Tilly, Mary-Louise Parker, Jim Broadbent, Tracey Ullman, and John Cusack. A period piece set in 1928 New York, Cusack plays the Allen archetype, a neurotic playwright fresh in from Pittsburgh looking for his big break. His manager (Warden) finds a financier in the mafia, but there’s a catch: the gangster’s girl (Tilly) has to be in the play, and she gets to futz with the script and ad-lib as much as she wants. Cusack runs around with his hair on fire, getting absolutely nowhere, until Palminteri, Tilly’s handler, makes a deft plotting suggestion that turns the entire company against Cusack. The play gets better as Palminteri continues to tinker with it, changing plot points, adding dialogue, and cutting entire scenes to the delight of both the producers and the very loopy theater people. It gets to the point where Palminteri resents Tilly for ruining “his” play (“Sorry, ‘ours’—you know what I mean” he tells Cusack), so he takes the liberty of rubbing her out. Just as he’s about to shoot her, he tells her, “I think you should know that you’re a terrible actress.”
Bullets Over Broadway was widely lauded and won Wiest her second Oscar (the first was for Hannah and Her Sisters); it’s still widely regarded as one of Allen’s best films, and a musical version would’ve been staged in early-2018, if not for the return of the wrath of the Farrows. Although it’s a straightforward comedy, Bullets Over Broadway has two significant meta-textual elements: the casting of Palminteri as a mafioso-savant mirrors the actor’s own struggle and success in staging his hit A Bronx Tale, and the speech that Wiest gives in her first scene. After introducing herself to the cast and crew, she walks upstage and delivers an hilariously overblown monologue pointing out the ghosts of “Cordelia!… Ophelia!… Clytemnestra!!” and comparing every opening night to a birth, “and every curtain… a death…”
Although it’s played primarily for laughs, Allen crucially doesn’t mock Wiest’s character. The camera remains in the front row, with Wiest at the top of the frame, and her co-stars in the back, silent and skeptical but too struck to make fun or undercut the very real sentiment that Wiest is getting across. It’s one of the great serio-comic moments in all of Allen’s films, and is likely the scene that won Wiest her Oscar. Allen had some success in drama (Interiors) and some misfires (September), but it’s his serio-comic films—Crimes and Misdemeanors, Husbands and Wives, Blue Jasmine, Annie Hall—that distinguish him as a major film artist, not merely a prolific comedian. The 1990s were golden years in Allen’s career—and all it took was a public death.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM