Woody Allen

Woody Allen
1935-

Woody Allen has made over forty feature films since 1969 - that’s one a year.  They range from slapstick comedy to existential tragedy with everything in between. His early movies were thinly-plotted comedies drawing on his years of comedy-writing for TV, short stories, and the stage.  These include Take the Money and Run (1969), Bananas (1971), and Sleeper (1973).  Then came Annie Hall (1977) which combined his rich comic abilities with his emerging story-telling and genuine pathos.  Annie Hall won the Oscar for Best Picture. Several great films followed in the late 70’s and early 80’s including Manhattan (1979), Stardust Memories (1980), and Hannah and her Sisters (1986).  But then Allen’s movies thinned out to the point that some couldn’t be kept in memory long enough to throw away your Junior Mints box.  Shadows and Fog (1992), for example, an homage to German filmmakers like Fritz Lang, looks like it was written on the back of a napkin.  Recently, with the help of Europe’s most beautiful cities, Woody has returned to his old form with Match Point (2005), Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008) and Midnight in Paris (2011) although even these movies rest of the thinnest of themes (tennis as a metaphor for life’s capriciousness, anyone?)

I like Woody Allen’s movies, though, especially the early, funny ones.  Watching Midnight in Paris I noticed that the humor is in the concept and the story but not in the lines.  Where did the ol’ zingers go?   I dug through IMDB to excavate some of Woody’s funniest lines and, as I suspected, I found them in the 70’s and 80’s. Here are some of my favorites.   

Bananas

Fielding Mellish: That's very wise, you know...? That's, I think, pithy. 
Nancy: It was pithy. It had... great pith. 
Fielding Mellish: Yeth. Pith.

Nancy: You're immature, Fielding. 
Fielding Mellish: [whining] How am I immature? 
Nancy: Well, emotionally, sexually, and intellectually. 
Fielding Mellish: Yeah, but what other ways?

Fielding Mellish: I object, your honor! This trial is a travesty. It's a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham. 

Play it Again, Sam

Allan: That's quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn't it? 
Museum Girl: Yes, it is. 
Allan: What does it say to you? 
Museum Girl: It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of Man forced to live in a barren, Godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror and degradation, forming a useless bleak straitjacket in a black absurd cosmos. 
Allan: What are you doing Saturday night? 
Museum Girl: Committing suicide. 
Allan: What about Friday night? 

Sleeper

[a 22nd century historian shows Miles a videotape of Howard Cosell] 
Historian: We weren't sure at first what to make of this, but we developed a theory: we feel that when people committed great crimes against the state, they were forced to watch this. 
Miles Monroe: Yes. That's exactly what it was. 

Love and Death

Soldier: He was from my village. He was the village idiot. 
Boris: Yeah, what did you do, place? 

Sonja: Judgment of any system, or a priori relationship or phenomenon exists in an irrational, or metaphysical, or at least epistemological contradiction to an abstract empirical concept such as being, or to be, or to occur in the thing itself, or of the thing itself. 
Boris: Yes, I've said that many times. 

Annie Hall

[Alvy addresses a pair of strangers on the street] 
Alvy Singer: Here, you look like a very happy couple, um, are you? 
Female street stranger: Yeah. 
Alvy Singer: Yeah? So, so, how do you account for it? 
Female street stranger: Uh, I'm very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say. 
Male street stranger: And I'm exactly the same way. 
Alvy Singer: I see. Wow. That's very interesting. So you've managed to work out something? 

Annie Hall: Sometimes I ask myself how I'd stand up under torture. 
Alvy Singer: You? You kiddin'? If the Gestapo would take away your Bloomingdale's charge card, you'd tell 'em everything. 

[Alvy and Annie are seeing their therapists at the same time on a split screen] 
Alvy Singer's Therapist: How often do you sleep together? 
Annie Hall's Therapist: Do you have sex often? 
Alvy Singer: [lamenting] Hardly ever. Maybe three times a week. 
Annie Hall: [annoyed] Constantly. I'd say three times a week. 

Alvy Singer: [narrating] After that it got pretty late, and we both had to go, but it was great seeing Annie again. I... I realized what a terrific person she was, and... and how much fun it was just knowing her; and I... I, I thought of that old joke, y'know, the, this... this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, "Doc, uh, my brother's crazy; he thinks he's a chicken." And, uh, the doctor says, "Well, why don't you turn him in?" The guy says, "I would, but I need the eggs." Well, I guess that's pretty much now how I feel about relationships; y'know, they're totally irrational, and crazy, and absurd, and... but, uh, I guess we keep goin' through it because, uh, most of us... need the eggs. 

Manhattan

Yale: You are so self-righteous, you know. I mean we're just people. We're just human beings, you know? You think you're God. 
Isaac Davis: I... I gotta model myself after someone. 

Isaac Davis: I got a kid, he's being raised by two women at the moment. 
Mary Wilke: Oh, y'know, I mean I think that works. Uh, they made some studies, I read in one of the psychoanalytic quarterlies. You don't need a male, I mean. Two mothers are absolutely fine. 
Isaac Davis: Really? Because I always feel very few people survive one mother. 

Isaac Davis: Why is life worth living? It's a very good question. Um... Well, There are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. uh... Like what... okay... um... For me, uh... ooh... I would say... what, Groucho Marx, to name one thing... uh... um... and Wilie Mays... and um... the 2nd movement of the Jupiter Symphony... and um... Louis Armstrong, recording of Potato Head Blues... um... Swedish movies, naturally... Sentimental Education by Flaubert... uh... Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra... um... those incredible Apples and Pears by Cezanne... uh... the crabs at Sam Wo's... uh... Tracy's face... 

Stardust Memories

Young Girl: I understand you studied philosophy at school. 

Sandy Bates: Uh, no, that's not true. I-I-I did take - I took one course in existential philosophy at, uh, at New York University, and on, uh, on the final... they gave me ten questions, and, uh, I couldn't answer a single one of 'em. You know? I left 'em all blank... I got a hundred.


Sandy Bates: But shouldn't I stop making movies and do something that counts, like-like helping blind people or becoming a missionary or something? 

Voice of Martian: Let me tell you, you're not the missionary type. You'd never last. And-and incidentally, you're also not Superman; you're a comedian. You want to do mankind a real service? Tell funnier jokes. 

The Purple Rose of Cairo
Cecilia: I just met a wonderful new man. He's fictional but you can't have everything.

Hannah and her Sisters

Mickey's Father: How the hell do I know why there were Nazis? I don't know how the can opener works! 

Mickey: And Nietzsche, with his theory of eternal recurrence. He said that the life we lived we're gonna live over again the exact same way for eternity. Great. That means I'll have to sit through the Ice Capades again.




My favorite Woody Allen scene:





Question of the Day: What's your favorite Woody Allen movie?  Why?