Shadows and Fog

Shadows and Fog (Woody Allen, 1991) When Woody Allen makes a film in the style of Ingmar Bergman (Interiors), it's done in deadly earnest.  But, when he takes on German Expressionism, entering the angular world of Lang, Murnau, with a para-nod towards Kafka, it's a comedy.  Not quite sure why; maybe he has an affinity towards one stylization and the other he just finds phony, but the different approaches are like, well, day and night.  Allen explored that theme—taking the same story and interpreting it as either comedy or tragedy—in Melinda and Melinda, a bit of a mis-fire—but one suspects that the Nordic tradition he buys completely, and completely dismisses the German (God knows why).

Here, the visual is pure dread, but the subject matter is a mixed bag of precision and vagueness, comedy and darkness.  Allen plays Kleinman, a passive-aggressive bookkeeper, who is recruited in the middle of the night by a vigilante mob (including David Ogden Stiers and James Rebhorn) to roam the streets looking for a serial strangler.  Being a professional coward, and only dealing well with facts and figures in black-and-white, Kleinman is ill-suited for the activity and begs off, inviting suspicion from the group.  When there is speculation that maybe he won't do his duty as a citizen because he might be the strangler, Kleinman caves.

On his dark journey through the city streets (the largest set ever built in New York's Kaufman-Astoria Studios, making this Allen's most expensive film), he runs across an all-star cavalcade of slothful potential victims: a philosophy student (John Cusack) with a weakness for prostitutes (among them Lily Tomlin and Jodie Foster, madamed by Kathy Bates), a circus love-triangle tangentially related (with John Malkovich, Mia Farrow and Madonna) and the town coroner (Donald Pleasence), who has a purely scientific interest in the killer.*

Kleinman soon realizes that life simply doesn't add up, that a little slippage occurs, especially when it comes to illusion and reality (in the form of a very handy and practical magician named Armstead, played by Kenneth Mars).  The film struggles with the dichotomy throughout, as highly contrasted as the black and white photography, never truly meshing, and finally ends, as many of Allen's weaker films—and one of Allen's strongest ones (Hannah and Her Sisters)—do, with a Deus ex Machina** that buttons everything up inexplicably, leaving no questions but a lot of raised eyebrows.

Which is fine for the purposes of the film, but it's hardly what you'd find in an example of German Expressionism, where the punishment fits the crime...and where things really are in black and white.  

* Yes, the film is top-heavy with fine actors (and Madonna), but if you look in the darkened nooks and crannies of the film you'll also find Fred Gwynne, William H. Macy, John C. Reilly, Josef Sommer, Wallace Shawn, Kate Nelligan, Kurtwood Smith and Philip Bosco.  Was this film cast or filmed at a SAG convention?

** Here's a question:  It's a Woody Allen film; Can there be a Deus Ex Machina if there's no Deus?

Olde Review: Rosemary's Baby

This was part of a series of reviews of the ASUW Film series back in the '70's. Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the kid I was back in the '70's a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts.

This Saturday's ASUW films in 130 Kane are Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby," and Robert Wise's "The Haunting."

"Rosemary's Baby" (Roman Polanski, 1968) "Rosemary's Baby" opens with this theme:* it's a lullaby, sung charmingly off-key by Mia Farrow, its star, but underscored with even more off-key, sometimes baleful accompaniment. And as this lullaby oozes out on the soundtrack, the image we see is of a line of New York apartments--not an unusual opening shot for the beginning of a movie, in fact, it's pretty much of a cliche. And so is the opening situation--two young newly-weds-in-love house-shopping. We've seen it hundreds of times. It's an everyday occurrence. The apartment is lovely, the couple buys it, and everything is quite normal. Until a new-found friend of Rosemary's commits suicide, and Rosemary's relationship with her eccentric neighbors turns rather familial, and a bizarre fate befalls the fellow who got her husband's job. Now, that it looks like success for them, they decide it's time to have a kid...and see, there's this chocolate mousse...

Well, I don't have to go any further for I'm sure the legend of "Rosemary's Baby" has preceded it. But what separates "Rosemary" from other gothics is the perverse outlook of its director, Roman Polanski. Yes, everything's normal, and it is that very normalcy that makes the intrusion of Demonic Forces so doubly terrifying. One can accept odd happenings on a dark and stormy night on a cliff-top castle, but on a sunny day in a New York apartment complex?** It makes the horror so much more palpable to be surrounded by normalcy for it increases the possibility of something happening to you. And thus, Polanski places threats in such "normally" innocent and reassuring things as a chocolate mousse, or Ralph Bellamy (who had hawked aspirins for years on the tube) playing a "witch" doctor, if you'll excuse the pun. It's an unorthodox approach to the Gothic Horror Story...at least it was in 1968, when it was released, and to paraphrase an ad for Polanski's latest film, "The Tenant," "No one does it to you like Roman Polanski."***--not William Friedkin in "The Exorcist," or Richard Donner in "The Omen." Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby" is head and shoulders...and horns, above them.

Still true, but, my God, after Polanski's conviction of child-rape, that's one hell of a movie tag-line on "The Tenant!" Polanski's arrest, trial and conviction would come later two years after that film was released, but it sure is the ultimate sick joke.

As for "Rosemary's Baby," it still takes the prize as the best "Devil Walks Amongst Us" movie, and it's no small part due to Polanski's sick sense of humor--Orson Welles referred to him as "one of those morbid boys"--and his way of mixing the mundane and the sacrilegious. The most entertaining part of "Rosemary" are the elderly and uncomfortable neighbors--the legacies of the Bramford Hotel, and the best of them is sprightly Ruth Gordon, who won an Oscar for her role. It resurrected Gordon's career, and she went on to star in a long list of films in her twilight years.

Broadcast on KCMU-FM on October 22 and 23, 1976

* Yeah, there's nothing wrong with your computer--there is no song. I usually backed my radio-reviews with an appropriate piece of music, and for this one, I used the actual theme on the soundtrack.

** Ironically enough it's the high-end and rather exclusive Dakota building, standing in for the "Bramford." John Lennon would be shot in front of the Dakota a decade later.

*** EEE-Yikes!

Zelig

"Zelig" (Woody Allen, 1983) One of The Woodman's most experimental films, playing not only with the story-telling form but the way film documentary can be distorted. "Zelig" was an early example of the "mock"-umentary, telling the tale of Leonard Zelig (Woody Allen), famed in the Roaring '20's as "The Human Chameleon" for his ability to "blend" with whoever he's with. Zelig is "the ultimate conformist" changing views, attitudes, dress and skin color in order to feel safe and accepted. Contemporary "interviews" are interspersed with amazingly integrated historical footage that places Zelig at Yankee Stadium, in a ticker-tape parade down Wall Street, at the Vatican with Pope Pius, and, hilariously, on the dais behind Hitler at the Munich rally. The interviews are fine with such folks as Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag and Dr. Bruno Bettelheim playing along, although there are some shifts in the folks playing older versions of the subjects of the "found" footage. There is a verbal disconnect between the actresses playing Dr. Eudora Fletcher (Ellen Garrison and Mia Farrow), and Farrow's portrayal is flat and mousey, though she serves the purpose of Allen's straight man, especially in a scene where she calls Zelig's bluff about posing as a fellow psychiatrist ("You've got problems, lady!"). The satire has depth, showing Zelig's "influence" on society with a wealth of tin-pan alley songs, including "Chameleon Days" sung by "Betty Boop" herself, Mae Questel. And one can't argue with the moral of the story: "It just goes to show what you can accomplish when you're a total psychotic!"