Word: allene
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...David Richmond, men with more experience in acting and directing than in writing. It opened in New York last September and is still running at the off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theater. The New York director, Peter Bennett, has repeated his assignment with the newly assembled cast here, as have Allen Cornell (set and lighting) and Jane Tschetter (costumes...
...terms of the higher banality: psychobabble, discussions of creativity, even home decoration when money is no problem. Despite advance word that this was to be this deservedly respected writer-director's first entirely serious film, a faint hope stirs. Perhaps he is merely setting up the biggest Woody Allen joke of them all, since this kind of talk, and film making, is one of his best satirical subjects. Alas, the snapper never comes...
...adults, the three young women still seek compensation for the parental debts left over from childhood. But good performances by these actresses can not really compensate for the desperate sobriety of the film, which robs it of energy and passion, so that it seems to congeal. One sign that Allen may have recognized this difficulty is his attempt at a big finish: a walk-into-the-sea suicide that is a belated attempt to engage us emotionally in a story so sterile that we have long since withdrawn from...
...sympathetic to Allen's problem. As great comedian to his age, he must have felt that the faintest suggestion of humor would have stirred audiences to a risibility from which he could not recover their attention. But, of course, the absence of wit does not necessarily betoken seriousness; it merely betokens the absence of wit. All Allen really had to avoid was farce. We could have accepted, as a logical outgrowth of his work to date, the rue and irony of a full-scale comedy of middle-class manners, a sympathetically satirical study of the lies by which many...
...style is Bergmanesque, but his material is Mankiewiczian, and the discontinuity is fatal. Doubtless this was a necessary movie for Allen, but it is both unnecessary and a minor embarrassment for his well-wishers...