Woody Allen

Woody Allen (born November 30, 1935, Bronx, New York, U.S.) is an American motion-picture director, screenwriter, actor, comedian, playwright, and author who is best known for his bittersweet comic films containing elements of parody, slapstick, and the absurd but who also made weighty dramas, often with dark themes and bleak landscapes reminiscent of the work of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman—who, perhaps more than any other filmmaker, influenced Allen’s work. Allen was also known as a sympathetic director for women, writing strong and well-defined characters for them. By the late 1970s he was widely regarded as one of the world’s most-accomplished filmmakers, but the unevenness of later films and allegations of sexual abuse tarnished his reputation.

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Youth and early work

According to official documents, Allen Konigsberg was born on December 1, 1935. However, he later wrote in his autobiography, Apropos of Nothing (2020), that his actual birth date was November 30. He grew up in Brooklyn in a family steeped in Jewish culture. Konigsberg was especially close to his younger sister, who would later work with him as a producer. As a boy, he was enamoured of sports, magic, motion pictures, and jazz (taking up the clarinet as a teenager, though his musical idol was saxophonist Sidney Bechet). While still in high school, using the name Woody Allen, he began submitting quips to newspaper columnists—most notably to the nationally syndicated Earl Wilson. Before long, as Woody Allen, he was being paid to write jokes for entertainers. Stints by Allen as a student at New York University (as a film major) and the City College of New York were ended abruptly by poor grades and erratic attendance. In 1956 Allen began writing for television, and in 1958 he joined Sid Caesar’s writing staff alongside Larry Gelbart (later the writer-producer of TV’s M*A*S*H*) and Mel Brooks. In 1960 Allen moved to the Garry Moore Show. At this time he also began performing stand-up comedy at clubs in Greenwich Village, which led to guest appearances on television and to several comedy albums.

While performing stand-up in a nightclub in 1964, Allen impressed actress Shirley MacLaine and producer Charles K. Feldman, who gave him a chance to write the screenplay for the film What’s New, Pussycat? (1965), in which he also appeared. Allen made his first film, What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), by redubbing a James Bond-like Japanese action film, International Secret Police: Key of Keys (1965), and shifting its focus to the pursuit of a top-secret recipe for egg salad. A year later Allen played Bond’s nephew in Casino Royale. In the meantime, he wrote a play, Don’t Drink the Water, which won acclaim on Broadway in 1966. That year also marked Allen’s first contribution to The New Yorker. Writing initially in the style of S.J. Perelman, Allen would go on to contribute dozens of sophisticated humour pieces to the magazine over several decades; these pieces were collected in books such as Without Feathers (1975) and Getting Even (1978).

Take the Money and Run (1969) was Allen’s debut behind the camera. An uneven but often riotously funny pseudo-documentary, it was cowritten by Mickey Rose and Allen, who starred as a hopelessly inept thief who apparently learned his trade from watching old Warner Brothers prison films. Made for under $2 million, the film did well enough to earn Allen a three-picture deal with United Artists Corporation, for whom he would continue to make films throughout the 1970s.

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The 1970s

Before undertaking another feature film, Allen starred on Broadway from 1969 to 1970 in another play that he had written, the romantic comedy Play It Again, Sam. In the 1972 Herbert Ross-directed film adaptation of the play, Allen reprised his role as a shy film critic who seeks romantic advice from an apparition of Humphrey Bogart. Bananas (1971), the first of Allen’s directorial efforts for United Artists, starred him as a hapless, neurotic Manhattanite who is drawn into a revolution in a fictional Central American country. Though somewhat undisciplined, Bananas offered snatches of absurdist humour that rank among Allen’s funniest film moments.

In Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*but Were Afraid to Ask) (1972), Allen satirized David Reuben’s popular sex manual with mixed results. Sleeper (1973), a far more cohesive satire, featured Allen in the role of a neurotic health-food mogul who goes into the hospital for a simple operation and awakens 200 years later to learn that doctors had frozen him and that he is now a stranger in an even stranger land. Sex is forbidden—a notion inimical to any Allen protagonist—so he joins the rebel underground, whose leader is played by Diane Keaton (Allen’s costar in Play It Again, Sam). Love and Death (1975), a parody of Leo Tolstoy’s fiction, Sergey Eisenstein’s filmmaking, and a clutch of other landmarks of Russian culture, was less universally applauded.

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After delivering an excellent “straight” performance as the protagonist in The Front (1976), Martin Ritt’s fine drama about Hollywood blacklisting, Allen made Annie Hall (1977), a breakthrough work that dramatically elevated his status as a filmmaker. An elliptical account of the rise and fall of a romance between the quirky title character (played by Keaton) and a comedy writer (Allen), it was Allen’s first attempt to blend genuine sentiment with his patented theatre-of-the-ridiculous. Although Allen denied its origins in autobiography, the poignant love story almost certainly mirrored some aspects of the real-life relationship that had transpired between Keaton and Allen. The film also marked the emergence of the distinctive on-screen persona that many came to believe was merely an extension of the offscreen Allen: a neurotic, erudite, wisecracking, moralistic, phobia-ridden pessimist who is obsessed with his mortality but finds solace for his existential despair in art and love and who is at base a mensch. Annie Hall won Academy Awards for best picture, best actress (Keaton), best director, and best screenplay (Allen and collaborator Marshall Brickman). Allen, however, chose not to attend the Academy Award ceremony and instead played clarinet at Michael’s Pub in Manhattan, as he usually did on Monday nights.

Allen’s next film, Interiors (1978), was a carefully crafted homage to the weighty psychodramas of Ingmar Bergman. Abjuring humour, this tale of a dysfunctional family (starring Geraldine Page, Maureen Stapleton, E.G. Marshall, Mary Beth Hurt, and Keaton) received a mixed reaction from critics, some of whom saw it as decidedly pretentious. Despite the film’s poor showing at the box office, Allen received Academy Award nominations for best director and best original screenplay.

Allen rebounded with Manhattan (1979). Lyrically photographed (in black-and-white, by Gordon Willis), deftly written (by Allen and Brickman, whose screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award), and wonderfully scored (with music by George Gershwin), it was an ode to the city that Allen loved. The plot centred on the attempts by a television writer (Allen) to find a more meaningful career and a less confused love life—he is involved with a 17-year-old acting student (Mariel Hemingway) as well as with his best friend’s mistress (Keaton). More polished and less sentimental than Annie Hall, while possessing the depth of Interiors, Manhattan has some claim to being Allen’s best film, although it did not enjoy the broad success of Annie Hall.