Word: keaton
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Woody Allen is out finest screen comedian. He only goes seriously wrong when there's not enough of him, like his not directing Play It Again, Sam, or his absence from some of the skits in Everything... But in Sleeper he's everywhere, directing, staring (Diane Keaton is there, too, but she can't fit into what is designed to be a one-man show) and co-authoring (with Marshal Brickman), generally leaving his stamp all over this terrifically funny film. Woody Alley may be staging everything a little too perfectly here, but he isn't going to lose...
...ones assigned to homosexuals even lisp). To escape from the security police (whose ray gun, incidentally, is always blowing up on them, the spirit of the CIA being immortal), he disguises himself as one of the robots. This bit becomes especially hilarious when his owner (the admirable Diane Keaton) returns him to the factory in order to have a new and more pleasing head installed. Other hairbreadth escapes employ a recalcitrant flying-belt of the sort first used by James Bond, a wildly inflatable rubber suit and a 200-year-old Volkswagen that starts on the first...
Allen finally links up with the revolutionary underground, but he is no kinder to it than to the Establishment. He accuses its musclebound, Marxist leader of neglecting his duties in order to take handsome lessons. In the end, he manages to win Miss Keaton and overthrow the Government by posing as the doctor engaged to clone a new head of state from the nose of the deceased one, then holding the nose hostage for the revolution...
Allen's subject may be futuristic, but his method of attacking it links him with the grand tradition of silent comedy. Like such masters of that tradition as Chaplin and Keaton, he deplores the notion that things can be improved through scientific and political "progress." Like them, he obviously believes it his unsolemn duty to subvert such nonsense. Sleeper is his definitive assault on it. And his funniest...
Woody Allen's new movie, Sleeper, will be all over the country by the time this column is printed, and it sounds amazing: Among other things, Allen plays Blanche opposite Diane Keaton's Stanley in a weird version of A Streetcar Named Desire; Allen wakes up (or, rather, is defrosted) 200 years in the future...