Word: allen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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MACHEATH HAS TO be a man of the world who knows how to survive, who's grown a little shabby, a little scruffy, perhaps, but who keeps his sense of style along with his white gloves. Allen C. Kennedy's Mack the Knife sounds like a two-bit punk who got lost in Flatbush and somehow ended up in London, 1830. It's not necessarily a wrong-headed interpretation, but it needs strength, consistency, and a sense of Macheath's age--and Kennedy gives it none of these...
Scenes from several of Woody's movies highlight the half-hour. They always illustrate points made by the surrounding narrative but they break up the audience nonetheless. There on the screen is the Woody Allen we have come to know (maybe) and love--Woody flying over the battlefield in Love and Death, Woody as a robot of sorts in Sleeper, Woody talking to Diane Keaton in Annie Hall--and these scenes alone carry the film...
Whatever its failings as explanation, the film is interesting as description. Interspersed among the shots of Allen talking to the camera, or scribbling over and over on a first draft of some comedy routine, we see scenes of Midwood High School, which he attended for three uneventful years, and the playground at Avenue L and East 17th Street where he spent much time as a growing boy. Trying to give us a feel for his background, the camera sweeps past the Orthodox Jews buying fruit at the numerous stands on Avenue J, past the movie house and the pizzerias...
...documentary, despite Mantell's efforts to the contrary, is not wholly bereft of insights into Woody or chances to view sides of the man not often seen. When Allen says he would rather risk failure by experimenting with comic possibilities less familiar to him instead of "going with my strength, always making hits," but not growing as a performer, one begins to understand what led him to produce a straight movie like The Front and then move on to the Bergmanesque Interiors. And the shots of Allen at home talking casually to the unseen documentarian and playing his clarinet...
MANTELL'S FLIMSY effort to capture the essence of what makes Woody Allen an American comedy only lightly brushes over the subject, concentrating not on the sources of Allen's humor but on his technique of turning that humor into finished comedy. Nor does the film ask why audiences identify so strongly with Allen--do they laugh out of recognition or from the sheer absurdity? If only Mantell had titled his work something less pompous it would be fine; as Woody Allen: Some Random Facts, no viewer would be misled into thinking he would get an explanation of Allen instead...