Woody on Rye by Vincent Brook Marat Grinberg

Author:Vincent Brook, Marat Grinberg [Vincent Brook, Marat Grinberg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781611684810
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
Published: 2013-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

The other reason for quoting Danny at length is because Sid Waterman of Scoop so regularly echoes Danny Rose, though I’ll be arguing that Danny’s Runyonesque register and Waterman’s differ because of the level of sincerity each of these protagonists projects. Before we move on to that contrast, however, we need to address the other highly significant aspect of Sidney Waterman, one to which numerous essays on Allen’s films have been entirely devoted: magic. Waterman, I’m suggesting here, is a culmination of Allen’s career-spanning, deepening skepticism about magic, a prestidigitator whose most impressive trick is his concealment from his audience of his contempt for their incredulity toward his act. On the other hand, Danny Rose’s tomato juice concoction that transforms drunken Lou Canova to a performance-ready lounge act seems a genuine species of magical intercession, as do his conversions of Tina and the comedians gathered in the Carnegie Deli to his optimist’s ethic. (For all his insistences that he’s just a sports fan who happens to make movies,13 it seems Allen intuits that only someone touched with at least a bit of genius could write and produce forty-two movies in forty-two years, and that he doles out a bit of that specialness to some of his protagonists: Andrew Hobbes in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy; Sandy Bates in Stardust Memories; Hyman Kleinman in Shadows and Fog; Alice of Alice; Sheldon Mills and his mother in “Oedipus Wrecks”; Harry Block, the “black magician” of Deconstructing Harry; Emmet Ray in Sweet and Lowdown; Val Waxman in Hollywood Ending; and Gil Pender in Midnight in Paris are a few of them.) Of course, magic so pervades Allen’s work that it’s not necessary to seek it where it must be cunningly inferred.

Characteristically phlegmatic when being interviewed, Allen was anything but that in expressing his childhood enthusiasm for magic to Eric Lax. Recalling the magic catalogs he pored over, Allen recalled that “everything looked so wondrous and fabulous. If you’re hooked on it, you’re hooked on it, and I was just completely, absolutely hooked. I had a big drawer and it was full of magic tricks and I had these books and that was almost all I cared about.”14 That fervor for magic is glimpsed in Stardust Memories (1980) when Sandy Bates projects his juvenile magician self into a show that he and Daisy (Jessica Harper) are watching. As “the Amazing Sandy” causes a glowing globe to levitate, the audience bursts into applause, and Judith Crist, host of the Sandy Bates film festival, effuses, “The boy’s a natural. I’ve never seen anything like it. A born magician.” (Crist wasn’t always so unequivocally positive about the Woody Allen art that Sandy’s magic symbolizes.) But Allen is seldom unequivocal about anything, most particularly in Stardust Memories, and Crist’s “born magician” testimonial cuts to Sandy’s mother, who responds, “Well, he should be. He sits in his room alone and practices for hours.” An unidentified skeptic wonders if Sandy wasn’t doing something else in there: “Oh, he does that,

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