The Talkies / Woody Allen's Interiors

...her replacement (Maureen Stapleton...

...Or was it the other way 'round...

...But it remains that, in a full account of the life, the author inevitably has to deal with many scenes and episodes which Boswell has already described unforgettably...

...But Interiors is no comedy: Wait as we may for the gaglines, they never come...

...BOOK REVIEW Samuel Johnson W. Jackson Bate / Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich / $19.95 Christopher Booker The sport of climbing Everest has become so popular these days, we are told, that to forestall overcrowding on the South Col it is necessary to book one's place in the queue several years in advance...

...and "How's Richard...

...Obviously by far the greatest obstacle in writing a full-scale chronological biography of Johnson—as opposed to a "study" or critical appraisal—is simply that so much of the story is familiar...

...Keaton struggles with writer's blockand resents Hurt's relationship with Marshall...

...It was a wretched little hovel of earth, I think, and for a window had only a small hole, which was stopped with a piece of earth, that was taken out occasionally to let in light...

...Johnson...

...Johnson wanted to see the inside of the...

...But he would not "hurt her delicacy" by enquiring further...

...Let me begin with, as it were, the dispraise...

...But as soon as graphs could be drawn, the plight of the overtaxed citizenry became plain to see...

...Without it, man could not draw graphs...

...She thought this meant Johnson wanted to go to bed with her...

...It's obvious from the interviews he's given in the last few years that he doesn't like being stuck in the image of funnyman, and this portentous film could be his revenge...

...Well, what was it doing in his wallet...

...THE TALKIES by Ben Yagoda Woody Allen's Interiors All of these things are said in Woody Allen's new movie, Interiors: "An enormous abyss opened up beneath our feet...

...Let's go in" said he...

...These cadences are familiar to readers and watchers of Allen's previous work: the pseudophilosophy that says nothing, the obsession with feelings (especially regarding death), the flat, literal language with psychoanalytic overtones—all have been exploited to unique comic effect in his films and parodies...

...In recent months, however, the reception accorded on both sides of the Atlantic to the vast new 640-page life of Johnson by Professor W. Jackson Bate of Harvard has held out the promise that this time things really may be different...

...There is the germ of an idea—the contrast between the order of the family's life before Page lost control and the disorder of their present plight (represented by recurring shots of the raging ocean)—but it never grows into something more...

...in a feeble attempt to keep things moving...

...All of Bismarck's economic advisors studied there...

...The French Revolution was a hopeful sign, but things took a turn for the worse when an anarchistic left-winger in Germany thought up progressive tax rates...

...But did that mean that no one was...

...three daughters (Chekhov...

...The results make one wonder if he was really kidding before...

...If so, then this is undoubtedly a major literary event...

...This coquetry, or whatever it may be called, of so wretched a being, was truly ludicrous...

...Marshall...

...My answer to that question, as will become clear in the course of this review, is mixed...

...I lighted a piece of paper and went into the place where the bed was etc...

...Johnson, looking about the hut, asked where the old woman slept...

...First, Bate: Leaving Inverness on horseback, they rode south along Loch Ness, and at one place saw an old woman at the door of a hut...

...his wife (Geraldine Page), a decorator whose craziness leads her to become his ex-wife...

...This point was wholly lost on British socialists, whose reputations were saved by the fortunate intervention of the Great Depression...

...So prosperous was Venice in those days that no one imagined that in a few centuries it would be necessary to create a fund to keep Venice from sinking...

...Interiors is about a wealthy New York family reminiscent of Salinger's Glasses, though brought up to date and deprived of their wit...

...Lear...

...a poetess (Diane Keaton), an actress/photographer/ editor/ copywriter (Marybeth Hurt), and another actress (Kristin Griffith...

...When the guide translated this into Erse, she became very indignant...

...It is at tithes pretty laborious...

...In places one feels, as one English reviewer has pointed Christopher Booker is a frequent contributor to the London Spectator...

...One wonders why Woody Allen chose to make his first non-comedy so relentlessly humorless...

...Jordan struggles with his drinking, his literary failure, and—in an embarrassing rape scene—his sister-in-law Griffith...

...Nevertheless I do believe that today, thanks in part to Bate's efforts, we may stand on the edge of a radical reappraisal of Johnson—and above all that we may begin to understand why his almost timeless, legendary figure has such a peculiarly haunting appeal to our own confused times...

...If you think this sounds like a soap opera, you have put your finger on the pulse of the film...

...In the middle of the room or space...was a fire of peat, the smoke going out of a hole in the roof...

...Soon, people lost interest in paying taxes altogether, and government revenues declined...

...He hit upon the idea of tax deductions for charitable contributions, and the arts flourished...

...Thank God Rene had wit enough to invent analytic geometry...

...Nonetheless, no one has learned anything from the history of Western civilization...

...My own anger scares me...

...Johnson would not hurt her delicacy, by insisting on seeing her bedchamber, like Archer in The Beaux Stratagem...

...However Boswell—his own curiosity now aroused—lit a piece of paper and poked his head into the place, behind a wicker partition, where she slept...

...A perennial best-seller since, "The Sensuous Taxpayer" paved the way for a whole series of bawdy, do-it-yourself tax guides...

...Taxes are high, productivity declines, and government is bigger than ever...

...the intimacy of it embarrasses me...

...All of the above gems are solemnly uttered, accorded the utmost respect by writer/ director Allen...

...Despite the fact that Prof...

...It remained for Rene Descartes to link tax policy with ontology...

...And Gordon Willis' cinematography, combined with the production design of Mel Bourne, is exquisite...

...All I can say is that things were different when I was a boy...

...For all itsallusions to Bergman and Chekhov, its highfalutin talk, its rampaging angst, Interiors is an empty film...

...Everyone agreed that no one had, therefore no one paid...

...Except for Griffith, whose Hollywood High inflections are all wrong for a New Yorker, the actors are creditable or better...

...It is under the influence of these publications that the government's revenue curve has come to resemble a large breast...

...Perhaps, too, he felt that what he had to say was too important to joke about...

...Hurt agonizes over her career, gets pregnant to her dismay, and resents Keaton's relationship with Page...

...It led to the first taxpayers' revolt, sometimes called the French Revolution...

...If so, he was wrong...

...Grossenpaer stressed that there was no way out, a grim conclusion that gave rise to the famous emblem of the economics department of Goettingen University, "Taxel's Triangle...

...I'm feeling good about myself' ' ; "I suddenly became hyperaware of my body...

...I'm overwhelmed with feelings about life...

...There is an attorney (E.G...

...I feel a real need to express something, but I don't know what it is I want to express, or how to express it...

...Their books have all been respectfully received, without exactly setting the Thames alight or persuading us that we now have such an entirely new perspective on the great Doctor that we shall never see him in quite the same light again...

...Compare this flat and, as it turns out, even slightly inaccurate retelling with the wit and delicacy of Boswell's original: When we had advanced a good way by the side of Lochness, I perceived a little hut, with an old-looking woman at the door of it...

...The rest is gratuitous words, words, words—or, as Jordan ordan says of a novel he's reviewed, form without any content...

...I pay, therefore I am," wrote the great French thinker...

...Nevertheless, there is much more to writing a life of Johnson these days than just rehashing Boswell...

...and even when he does take the risk of covering the same narrative ground as Boswell, he often does so with an almost wearisome air, as can be seen from placing side by side these two descriptions of a comparatively trivial incident during the famous tour of Scotland in 1775...

...We dismounted, and we and our guides entered the hut...

...I can't seem to shake the real implications of dying...

...A mark of the difficulty this poses is that Bate so often has to refer to "the famous story" of this, or "the well-known episode" of that...

...In the course of the film Stapleton tries to commit suicide twice (successfully the second time...

...Not only does the plot consist of these pieces of melodrama, but it is advanced precisely in the manner of "Another World": People are forever exchanging cups of coffee and meaningful glances, there are awkward and sudden transitions between topics of soul-baring, and Keaton and Hurt are constantly being asked "How's Frederick...

...Bismarck would not have been able to lay the groundwork for World War I had he not set about to reduce the taxes of the average German...

...In The Allen Notebooks, for example, we read: "Good Lord, why am I Ben Yagoda is a free-lance writer living in New Ydik: so guilty...

...Is it because I hated my father...

...Its leader was Minimillian Taxpierre, who claimed to speak for all oppressed taxpierres...

...This was a natural outgrowth of Calvinist theology, best expressed by Taxel Grossenpaer's legendary inversion of the Cartesian theorem: "I have, therefore I pay...

...It is true that four-fifths of Boswell's great biography deals with only the last twenty-one years of Johnson's life, and that the carefully composed sequence of immortal scenes, like a series of painted 18th-century "conversation pieces"—Johnson at the Thrales, Johnson at "the Club," Johnson at home with the curious menage of down-and-outs he took under his protective wing—does leave an enormous amount of his life in shadow, or omitted altogether...

...I thought here might be a scene which would amuse Dr...

...Increasing thoughts about death just seemed to come over me...these feelings of futility in relation to my work...

...and finally, Keaton and Hurt's men, respectively a novelist (Richard Jordan) and a radical filmmaker (Sam Waterston...

...I said it was he who alarmed the poor woman's virtue— "No, sir (said he), she'll say 'There came a wicked young fellow, a wild dog, who I believe would have ravished me, had there not been with him a grave old gentleman, who repressed him...

...Johnson and I afterwards were merry upon it...

...The trend was reversed in 1951 with the appearance of IRS pamphlet B74c218, "The Sensuous Taxpayer...

...The Doge established the world's first sinking fund for the retirement of the public debt...

...Probably it was the veal-parmigian incident...

...Do such eulogies as that of Robert Penn Warren ("bids fair to be unsurpassed by any biography of our time") justify Bate's own claim of Johnson that "it is only within our own generation that we have at last begun to discover his real greatness" ? Has Bate really found something new to say about Johnson...

...So ludicrous a notion amused Johnson greatly...

...Johnson was curious to know where she slept...she answered with a tone of emotion, saying...she was afraid we [my italics] wanted to go to bed with her...

...Perhaps most important, all of the feeling is unearned: Since the film has no conception of life outside the family, it has nothing to say about how or why the characters reached their present pass, and uncritically accepts their solipsism...

...In the past few years alone, we have seen John Wain, Christopher Hibbert, and Peter Quennell all clambering round this same mighty, well-trod rock...

...On the whole, a soap would be preThe American Spectator October 1978 29 ferred, but there are compensations in Interiors...

...hut, which was very primitive—a fire of peat, with smoke going out of a hole in the roof...

...Bate has been lecturing on Johnson at Harvard for thirty years, has already written one book on the subject, and regards all the immense volume of work he has hitherto published as merely "a preparation for this biography," it is not an unalloyed triumph...

...A great debate ensued...

...out, that one is reading the notes for a book rather than the book itself...

...but when he gets out of the sight of his tutor, I'll warrant you he'll spare no woman he meets, young or old.' " "No, sir (I replied), she'll say 'There was a terrible ruffian who would have forced me, had it not been for a civil young man who, I take it, was an angel sent from heaven to protect me.' " Dr...

...But my curiosity was more ardent...

...The climactic sequence—Page's suicide—is dramatic and moving, mostly because something is finally happening...

...Page gives a harrowing portrait of a woman on the edge, and Stapleton, as the "vulgarian," lends the film its only spark of life...

...His most recent book is The Neophiliacs...

...Similar precautions may soon have to be taken in respect to the writing of lives of Samuel Johnson, the most traversed mountain in literature...

...Indeed, for some forty years now, ever since Hugh Kings30 The American Spectator October 1978...