Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway (1994)

Tonight’s film is our third and final Woody Allen movie this year. Allen has directed 40 feature films since 1966. That’s almost one a year. Clearly the Wood-man has something, some talent, respected enough to maintain his work year after year. What is it? What brings loyal fans back to a Woody Allen film time after time?

Part of it is an affinity for Allen’s humor; his New York self-deprecating neurotic voice comes out of his early career as a stand-up comedian, capable of riffing on anything and turning it into something funny or thought-provoking. In many ways, Allen’s career (and one might argue that he has had a number of mini-careers) reminds us of the great work of someone like Chaplin. It has an arc, and it is driven not by plots or genres or technology, but by genius. That’s a big word, so perhaps we mean it in the more Renaissance sense: the unique spirit of an individual. Woody Allen films are, above all else, Woody Allen films.

Even those that do not star Woody Allen, in fact. Bullets Over Broadway is the first since (after 23 previous films in which he did star). But the humor, the pacing, the feel is all Allen. Does John Cusack play a “Woody Allen” character? We’ll leave that up to you to decide.

Another defining element of the Allen film is its emphasis on community. No matter what style of film he’s working with, every film features an ensemble cast, which if you don’t remember the term, refers to a large group of people, no one of whom stands out as protagonist. The group is the protagonist. In addition, most of his movies have moments which remind one of being at a sort of cocktail party. Yes, we know you don’t go to cocktail parties (does anyone, anymore?), but that’s the feel. It’s the moment when people seem to gather and just have a relatively intellectual conversation that doesn’t go in any particular narrative direction. It’s very naturalistic, so much so that one can be a little surprised when a screenwriting credit turns up at the end of the film. You mean it wasn’t all ad-libbed?

Allen’s ability to capture this kind of moment, to explore it, to use it to build theme, to find what it is that makes people human is probably, for your humble narrator, the most specific reason why he returns to Woody Allen films regularly. William Saroyan has a novel (1943) called The Human Comedy, and I’ve always felt that would be a good title for Allen’s collected works because he’s so deft at capturing upper-middle class East Coast people in their environment and so often his exploration leads to wry observations about the human condition.

Finally, Allen films rarely pass without what I’d call an indelible moment, something unforgettable that people talk about and remember over the years. In Sleeper it might be the orgasmatron or the orb, two objects that satirize 1970s self-absorption. In Annie Hall it’s probably the lobster scene, which emphasizes Alvy’s less-than-heroic nature (he’s scared of the lobsters he’s trying to cook for Annie) and makes us aware of just how formulaic romantic involvement can become, of the hyper-defined roles that we play, male and female, in relationships. Tonight, in Bullets Over Broadway, see if you don’t walk out repeating Dianne Wiest’s famous line from the film. Ask yourself: What makes such a simple line so memorable? And what does it tell us about her character? And what is the broader target of Allen’s humor at that moment?

What we might like most about Allen’s films is that after they’re over there is always something to talk about over a soda. He has invited us into the conversations of his movies so often that it’s clear we, his audience, are also part of the films’ communities. So the next time an Allen film comes out (there’s one due out in a few months called You Will Meet a Dark Stranger), you can be sure – you’re invited back.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Franklin Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes (1968)

None of us at Film Club would argue that Franklin Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes is the best movie of the late 1960s or even one of the best. There are too many remarkable films from the period between 1967 and 1970: Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, In the Heat of the Night, M*A*S*H, Patton. We could go on. So it’s easy to dismiss Planet of the Apes as simple sci-fi, post-apocalyptic cheese with Charlton Heston chewing scenery, not unlike Richard Fleischer’s topical sci-fi of the year before, Fantastic Voyage. But upon a bit deeper reflection, while it may not be the best, it might be the most reflective film of its time.

The late ‘60s were a period of upheaval in American life – politically, generationally, racially, culturally. The politics of the time were dominated, of course, by the Viet Nam war. Planet divides its ape community into three parts – chimpanzees (a sort of youthful simian middle-class), orangutans (the elder, wise men and law-makers), and gorillas (the warriors). Each of these also presents an allegorical version of contemporary American society: the idealistic students, the government, and the military. So it’s more than a moment of narrative tension when Schaffner stages chimpanzees protesting, with radical Berkeley-esque fervor and signage, decisions by the orangutan rulers. If you see the reference, then the film becomes part of the anti-war conversation.

We can make a similar connection if we think about what the movie has to say about the rise of youth culture. The two principles in the film, Cornelius (played by Roddy McDowall) and Zira (Kim Hunter), not only present youth as heroic (in the face of intransigent and entrenched policy-making and brutal militarism) but also represent it as far more reasonable than their other ape counterparts. Their idealism, their questioning, their anti-authoritarianism all come at moments when it is just to be so.

Like the drama over Viet Nam, the U.S. also was in the heat of the civil rights movement. Ask yourself, as you watch, what Schaffner is suggesting about race and where he makes specific reference to contemporary social attitudes. Are the apes and humans, two different species, just a stand-in for the different races? Does the film support or caution the viewer about America’s growing black militancy?

Schaffner also uses his film to mine a growing mistrust of religious fundamentalism. It’s evident in the scriptural foundation of the ape community’s laws, and their hypocrisy about challenges to that scripture. It’s also evident in the clear Darwinian attitude about evolution and social advancement. Ask yourself how religion is specifically depicted? What happens to its icons? The more we dig into this film, the less it seems like science fiction. After all, what technological “what if” is really in question here? Yes, our hero, Taylor (Charlton Heston), is an astronaut who pilots a space ship through time and to an unknown place, but the film really has nothing to do with this exploration or its vision of man’s exploratory future. The film focuses first and foremost on the clash of cultures – both ape/human and within the ape society – after Taylor crash lands on the planet.

And none of this is to forget the film’s iconic moment of irony, a statement itself that is more about culture than science or technology or space ships. So, when Heston utters his famous line at the end of the film, can we still hear it now, 32 years later, for the warning it was to the community watching in the seats? Questions worth asking. It’s always impressive to us that films from this period, even the cheesy ones, seem so much more socially relevant than those we get today.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser