Word: allene
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...exactly a match made in heaven. Still, when the pair broke up shortly before the wedding day, Elton was benefit. "I tried to commit suicide. It was a very Woody Allen type suicide. I turned on the gas and left all the windows open." He has remained "wary of up-front women getting to know me." There have been very few women in the Elton entourage since...
...evidently, the price one pays for an Allen comedy. It is worth the fee. For unlike his closest cinematic competitor, Mel Brooks, Allen aims his custard pies up, not down. If his humor is merciless, it is not unkind; Boris' angry monologues with God are closer to Fiddler on the Roof than to comic on the make. The same affection courses through his parodies of Fellini and Bergman and of Pierre at Borodino. In mocking classics, in touching on the topics of religion and mortality, Allen has drawn laughter where there was silence and mustaches where there were faces...
Father Ronald Knox once observed, "The humorist runs with the hare; the satirist hunts with the hounds." Baying through this Russian blizzard of hilarity, Woody Allen, former rabbit, is at least trying to create a beagle. The fact that most of the time it comes out bagel should not discourage him. In any Allen film there can be only one winner: the viewer. · Stefan Kanfer...
...Allen has a book out too. Without Feathers (Random House; $7.95) is a series of sketches that show the author as a gentle practitioner of the short-haired shaggy-dog story. Most of them should be read as experiments rather than as polished pieces of comic ingenuity. One essay, for example, "If the Impressionists Had Been Dentists," imagines that Vincent Van Gogh is a dentist obsessed with bridgework and X rays as art for art's sake...
...miscellaneous jottings and parodies are as hilarious as Love and Death. Allen offers a menagerie of mythical beasts: the Great Roe has "the head of a lion and the body of a lion, though not the same lion." "The Whore of Mensa" wittily plays with the idea of a brothel for intellectual entertainment. The madam has a master's degree in comparative literature; for a price, a curvaceous Vassar student can be had for an hour's chat about Herman Melville; "symbolism is extra...