Woody Allen: An Everymensch Steps to the Front

These are not easy times for Woody Allen. This month’s release of a four-part TV documentary, Allen v. Farrow, casts his behavior toward his then-seven-year-old adoptive daughter Dylan in the worst possible light. The series was made by the much-honored documentarians Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, who have both earned a reputation for getting ugly things right. I’m hardly a Mia Farrow enthusiast, and some of her son Ronan Farrow’s journalistic crusades strike me as grandstanding. But the story of Allen’s troubling behavior toward Dylan—which he continues to hotly deny—leaves little question that Woody Allen’s once brilliant filmmaking career is essentially over.

 For someone who loves Annie Hall, delights in the goofy pleasures of the early Allen canon (Sleeper, Bananas, Take the Money and Run), and respects the moral complexities of later films like Crimes and Misdemeanors, it’s sad indeed to see a professional reputation destroyed by personal bad behavior.  Allen’s case is hardly unique, though: plenty of great artistic talents were heinous individuals. What complicates Allen’s situation, though, is that he can’t easily be divorced from his work. When we look at a brilliant Gauguin painting, we don’t need to focus on the fact that during his romantic Tahitian sojourn Gauguin apparently spread syphilis throughout the islands. But to watch a Woody Allen film is to watch Allen himself, in the fairly unchanging role of a lovable nebbish, one who’s shrewd but not wise, who frequently screws up but is still able to retain our sympathy. In other words, an everymensch.

 Those thoughts crossed my mind as I watched Allen’s performance in the rare Allen film he did not write or direct. The Front is a 1979 movie that takes us back to 1953, that unfortunate time when—thanks to the dark machinations of some power players in Washington DC—lives were destroyed because of past beliefs and associations. During what we now call the McCarthy Era, Hollywood was especially hard hit. Actors, directors, and particularly screenwriters were banned from pursuing their craft, or lived in fear that they’d be denounced in front of a congressional committee. Two and a half decades later, the late Walter Bernstein wrote The Front, and Martin Ritt directed it. Both had been blacklisted back in the day, as had featured actor Zero Mostel and several of the others taking part. And the script contains such grim true-to-life incidents as a beloved but suddenly unemployable performer hounded into suicide.

 In the midst of this disastrous situation, Allen plays a ne’er-do-well cashier (and sometimes bookie) who’s a longtime pal of a blacklisted TV writer. For a 10% cut, he agrees to put his name on his friend’s brilliant new pilot. Suddenly, he’s the hottest scribe in the industry, especially after two more blacklist victims beg him to front for them as well. All this attention means he’s expected to show up at meetings and generally air his genius. It’s a fascinating role for Allen: as a man living (and profiting hugely from) a lie, he’s trying to wiggle his way through a moral dilemma without giving up too much of his newfound creature comforts, which include a politically idealistic TV-exec girlfriend.

  Woody Allen in The Front gets to call upon a lot of his trademark Woody-isms: the thick glasses, the hapless air, the stammer. He’s not the real Allen (he says at one point he can hardly write even a grocery list) but he sure looks and sounds like the Allen we know and love. Or do we really know him? Regarding who he really is, will we ever be sure?

 

Fiddler on the Reel: Tevye Goes Hollywood

As the holiday season approaches, it’s high time to pay tribute to one of December’s favorite films. No, I‘m not talking about It’s a Wonderful Life or Elf or Home Alone. This post is devoted to a movie that’s been a star of many a holiday singalong: the 1971 screen adaptation of the musical theatre classic, Fiddler on the Roof.  

The whole history of this long-running Broadway hit is captured in a fascinating book by Alisa Solomon, first published in 2013.  It’s titled Miracle of Miracles: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof. Solomon begins with author Sholem-Aleichem and his creation of a lovable Old Country dairyman named Tevye, burdened with three marriageable and strong-willed daughters. Her book’s first section, and its driest, explains early attempts to put the Tevye stories on the American stage. Section Two bursts to life with an insider picture of exactly how the Broadway  hit came to be. Solomon has interviewed the still-surviving members of the Fiddler team and mined the archives to get a full picture of the joys and kvetches associated with the mounting of a Broadway blockbuster that at one time seemed the most desperate of gambles.

In section three, Solomon visits productions of Fiddler in places as far-flung as Israel, Poland, and Brownsville, Brooklyn, where ethnic divisions almost derail a heartfelt junior high production in which most of the young actors are Latino or African-American. But one chapter, “Anatevka in Technicolor,” is devoted to  the big-budget film. What’s striking is how, though the material remains the same, the aesthetics in play and film are so different. Under Jerome Robbins’ brilliant direction and choreography, the stage version avoided kitschy Borscht Belt stylistics to capture the flavor of a fragile community rent asunder both by outside enemies and by inner stresses. But there’s a fanciful folk spirit to the staging, enhanced by Zero Mostel’s larger-than-life portrayal of the leading character. Audiences around the globe quickly came to love the show’s universal qualities, to the point that book author Joseph Stein was asked, at the Tokyo opening of Fiddler, how the team had managed to understand so well the essence of Japanese family dynamics.

When Norman Jewison was invited to direct the film version, he was best known for the Oscar-winning In the Heat of the Night, which for its day was bold in addressing racial discrimination in a small Southern town. Jewison favors what might be called poetic realism on screen. He wanted to show audiences an Eastern European Jewish shtetl that was more real than charming. And he wanted at all costs to avoid turning his characters into outsized caricatures. That’s why he chose as his Tevye a sturdily handsome Israeli, Topol, who was younger and more macho than the various stage Tevyes had been. Filming in what was then Yugoslavia, Jewison captured the look of the fields and forests, the ramshackle homes, and especially the tiny synagogue, modeled after the few still-standing “shuls” that survived in the countryside of eastern Europe. The portrayal of Teyve as an attractive and appealing “mensch,” notes Solomon, made for a nice antidote to the on-screen portrayal of Jewish neurotics of the Woody Allen ilk who dominated the movies of that era.

Still, for all its Jewish authenticity, the film too has inspired those from many cultures to tell their own stories. One Bollywood director dreams of transplanting the basic story to strife-torn Kashmir . And Lin-Manuel Miranda admits that In the Heights, his pre-Hamilton musical about a changing New York Latino community, borrows from his admiration for Fiddler. Who knew?