The Talkies/Gag Me

...The wandering Alaskan was, if anything, in worse shape than I was...

...His physical clock was still set on Anchorage time to the extent that it was set on any'time at all...

...In Hannah and Her Sisters, Allen, in the character of Hannah's ex-husband Mickey, is once again on the case, looking for the meaning of life...

...After a false scare of a brain tumor, he is overcome with the notion of his own mortality and turns first to Catholicism, then briefly to Buddhism (the former perhaps be-cause Allen watched Brideshead Revisited on television...

...Tolstoy only believes this on his off days, but that is another mat-ter...

...He had flown in the night before on the Yugoslav airline JAT...

...and the characters, as they go about their philandering, are not meant to transcend their as-signed indiscretions, even if provided with a compensating dose of guilt...

...We tried the raki, found it watered down, and switched to beer, all while munching As...

...But he seems not to have figured it out...

...It struck home very deeply...

...A soap opera is schematic...

...In good weather the customers drink at marble-topped beer barrels in the alley itself, dining on nuts or shrimp bought from passing peddlers, occasionally serenaded by a wandering street-musician...

...As some of the besotted rose to dance around her, a street acrobat entered and began to defy the force of gravity and good sense...

...This always happens when Allen approaches a big subject like religion—he gets nervous and grabs for the nearest one-liner...

...If you really want a profound treatment of Love and Death and the other subjects I have been joking about for the last two hours, he seemed to be saying, go George Sim Johnston is a writer living in New York...

...Hannah and Her Sisters is in this class of picture...

...I loved the idea of experimenting with that...

...But although Mickey has only the most tenuous relation to the other characters, we spend a lot of time following him and his angst around Manhattan...

...Copies available at a special introductory subscription rate of four issues for $65, or $20 per single issue...

...moral ambiguity does not mingle with the organ music...

...but, unlike Interiors, there is a plentiful supply of one-liners, vintage Allen, to relieve the deep neurotic gloom in which they move...

...Istanbul is a city of mosques in THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1986 33...

...I do not frequent the cicek Pasaji, but I will confess to having deadened my intellect there a time or two, and I can vouch for the fact that in warm weather this description is apt...

...Our condition may explain why I failed to grasp immediately that something was amiss...

...Allen illustrates his problem in the most graphic way by actually flashing a quote from Tolstoy onto the screen in the middle of Hannah, whose gist is that the only thing we can know about life is that it is meaningless...

...Call or write: REGNERY GATEWAY 1815 H Street, N.W., Suite 600, Washington, DC 20006 800.448.8311 DISINFORMATION Soviet Active Measures and Disinformation Forecast 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1986 ~"YY•"Y"'`"•)~ a~ a lvaalA i)t Vl.I1Ci1J matinee, we are left basically with a Jewish intellectual soap opera...

...The characters are well observed and often come out with marvelous lines, but when they actually begin to react to one another—well, we might as well tune into "The Young and the Restless...

...In a recent interview, Allen said that a major inspiration for the film was a rereading of Anna Karenina...

...Here, in Istanbul's infamous "Passage of Flowers," a kaldirim muhendisi can feast his eyes on a passing kaldirim siipiirgesi and, if he has a mind to, ac-cost a kaldirim Sicegi—which is to say, here "a sidewalk superintendent" can consider the merits of "a sidewalk broom" as she sways her hips rhythmically to and fro, and then ponder whether to seek the services of a chunky professional seductress of the sort that the Turks call "a sidewalk flower...

...When he finished his tune, a gypsy cut in with a wind instrument while his companion danced about with a tambourine...

...No one seemed to pay much attention to the artist who offered to draw pencil sketches of the customers—but when the well-endowed blonde at the next table stood up to shake her ample belly, you could almost hear those sitting ' nearby mutter the old Ottoman saying: "She is so beautiful that she has to go through the door sideways...

...Across from our table, an old man played a violin...

...a legpull—maybe) does not redeem a film from the condition of soap opera...

...Mencken would have extended his wholehearted approval...

...she should get some sort of Oscar for best portrayal by an actress of clinical depression...

...Finally, we have Hannah's ex-husband, Mickey, played by Allen, who has nothing whatever to do with the plot until the very end, when he improbably accosts Holly in a record store and ends up marrying her...

...Hannah and Her Sisters is a direct descendant of Allen's most explicit homage to Bergman, Interiors, a knock-off of Cries and Whispers which accomplished the difficult feat of mak-ing the latter seem a cheerful movie...

...The Forecast's authoritative analysis—by leading American and European experts and former Soviet bloc intelligence officials— cannot be found anywhere else...

...to your local museum or bookstore...

...One can, of course, search out a bit of New York if one has a mind to...

...Once again we have three desperate sisters...

...The Pasaj is lined with boisterous meyhanes, raffish curbside taverns where one can enjoy a tasty snack washed down with draft beer or raki, that powerful and intellect-deadening national anise drink...

...Von Sydow, of course, is a Bergman regular, and the stridently misanthropic lines Allen has written for him only underscore how far Allen is from the master's more nuanced command of his material...

...Find out why the Forecast is read in the White House as well as in the Kremlin...

...It would be one thing if Allen were trying to slip a banana peel under writers like Tolstoy, as he often does in those humor pieces he writes for the New Yorker, but no, he is deadly serious...

...One after-noon he comes close to blowing his brains out...

...Some spend their idle hours in the plush establishments inside the Hilton and the Sheraton hotels, but the more discerning lounge lizards make their way to the Plaza Bar in the Manny Hanny building and while away their evenings listening to the lovely afak Yaprak sing "As Time Goes By" and other ballads of yesteryear and today...

...THE TALKIES...

...Then comes the epiphany...

...Apart from making it clear that he didn't know how to end the movie, Allen was, in effect, admitting that he could not quite make the artistic leap from gag writer to the Real Thing...

...The other characters are so shallow that Allen has no trouble landing them all in a happy ending—an ending which belies the whole tenor of what has gone before...

...Since the Pasaj is common ground to the local fish and flower markets, it is a museum of Istanbul sights and sounds and smells, and every odd and interesting character in Beyoglu is sure to pass through there in the course of an afternoon or an evening...

...The cisek Pasaji is a collection of emporia to which the learned, late, and much lamented H.L...

...But the message that Allen should have gotten from watching Duck Soup (or is it Horse Feathers...

...he takes a walk instead and ends up in an Upper West Side movie house morosely watching a Marx Brothers movie...

...is that, like the Marx Brothers, he should stick to gag writing and stop trying to make movies like Ingmar Bergman's...

...Allen once told an interviewer that when he was making Interiors he kept watching soap operas to make sure that he wasn't producing one himself...

...It was as if Istanbul had become a ghost town—or so it seemed up to the moment when we came upon what might have been termed a gathering of the ghosts...

...At the soccer match held that day to determine the city championship, Fenerbahce had tied Besikta, and the fans had descended on the Pasaj to celebrate the fact that this noble struggle would have to be continued yet another day...

...The third sister, Holly, is a depressed, and depressing, professional woman pushing forty and frantically looking for a husband...

...It was almost more than I could manage, just keeping afloat on the tidal wave of sight and sound...

...On this occasion, as so often before, that airline had justified the prejudices of those who argue that JAT is really an acronym for jamais a temps...

...It was not going to be easy for either of us to get up the next morning...

...Turkey is a far cry from Saudi Arabia and Iran, but the influence of Islam over its semi-secular regime is still strong enough to keep respectable Stambouli women off the streets and their menfolk, for the most part, at home after dark...

...Never, however, have I seen it as animated as it was one particular evening last May when I visited the Flower Passage in the company of a visiting fireman who had come to Istanbul to recover from untold debauchery committed in the bars of Alaska...

...With the search for God resolved We're not crying Wolf...

...As the evening progressed, the revelers gathered courage and the volume rose...

...It was 10:30 p.m...

...I have in mind the ciek Pasaji...

...To get a proper drink in this increasingly Anatolian city, you have to journey in a manner of speaking abroad: that is, unless you drive out to the Bebek Bar to gaze upon the Bosphorus and hob with the Stambouli knobs...

...Having characters exchange knowledgeable tidbits about classical music and mention that uicy nave oeen reaamg Nietzsche and Socrates (yes, Socrates who never wrote anything...

...The antics of Groucho and company, like Cezanne's apples, persuade Mickey that life is worth living after all...

...The list, as I recall it, includes such items as Cezanne's rendition of apples and oranges and Flaubert's Sentimental Education—it is a kind of consumer's guide to the higher culture...

...The subject had almost become an obsession—but it, and nearly everything else, soon slipped my mind...

...he wants to possess the vision of the great novelists, as well...

...That night there was no one...

...A hush had descended over the city—a hush rendered all the more dramatic by contrast with the raucous setting that we had just left...

...I thought it would be interesting to do one story about the relationship between three sisters, then one story about somebody else and his obsession with mortality...

...or doff your coat and tie, don dirty blue jeans, an old shirt, and a filthy jacket, and make your way into old Beyoglu—where, if you slip past the serried ranks of mustachioed men who march down Istiklal Caddesi, you can Paul A. Rahe is living in Istanbul on a fellowship from the Institute of Current World Affairs...

...Disinformation Forecast alerts you to Soviet attempts to influence us before they happen...

...THE GREAT STAMBOULI SALOON SERIES ' _ds1(Ift `c e o o~o'~o j , ,~ ° tll°o 1 .III, -_-Ili 1, ill 110111111 lit ~ .. 1111161ii1 i ill willun pp( 111 11 , r Illlllllllllllllilll , YWII 4lYdl1 1~ I Ma., THE CICEK PASAJI An American doing a pub crawl through Europe would be well advised to give Istanbul a miss...

...Ordinarily, at that hour, Istiklal Caddesi is filled with throngs of Anatolians...

...That day, I had been trying to satisfy myself that I finally understood the relationship between by Paul A. Rahe religion and politics in modern Turkey...

...Dianne Wiest is superb in the part...

...In their justly popular guide-book Strolling Through Istanbul, Hilary Sumner-Boyd and John Freely call it the liveliest and most colorful spot in Beyoglu, or in all of Istanbul for that mat-ter...

...But we are obliged to follow him anyway in his Tolstoyan search for the meaning of life...

...If Allen had excised the gags, we would be left with a depressing film indeed...

...Allen was particularly intrigued by Levin, who "can't seem to find any meaning to life, he's terribly afraid of dying...

...kebab, arnavut cigeri ("Albanian liver"), and other Turkish delights...

...The only difference between their messy lives and those depicted on afternoon television is that Allen's characters have to work off heavy doses of Upper West Side angst along with their sex drives...

...Mickey is in earnest—but Allen the gag writer quickly takes over...

...He is not satisfied with beby George Sim Johnston ing one of our best gag writers...

...He wants to give us The Human Condition, as it occurs a few blocks from Central Park...

...But when we turn from Levin in Anna Karenina to Mickey in Hannah and Her Sisters, it becomes clear that Allen should be issued a highly probationary visa for his excursions onto this sort of terrain...

...But whether they sip their double martinis, guzzle their Glenfiddich's, and seek the palace of wisdom by the proverbial road of excess, those who frequent the Plaza Bar will never—while there—be tempted by the suspicion that they are, in fact, in Istanbul...

...But he is, and always will be, a mere tourist among the Great Books...

...Mickey is the plot equivalent of a hangnail...

...Eliot's philandering with Lee and subsequent reconciliation with Hannah are utterly predictable...

...Levin, first of all, is fully integrated into the action of Anna Karenina...

...By the time we left, we were filled to the gills with the good stuff...

...enter the one establishment that no pub crawler stranded on the boundary between Europe and Asia can afford to miss...

...He would do well to read Brideshead Revisited and see how a grown-up writer handles precisely the same theme, that of a despairing man trying to find God...

...We were making our way down Istiklal Caddesi and then through the backstreets of Beyoglu to my apartment in the neighboring district of Cihangir...

...Eliot (Michael Caine) is married to Hannah (Mia Farrow), but lusts after her sister Lee, played by Barbara Hersey, who in turn lives in Soho with a lugubrious artist played by Max Von Sydow...

...Unfortunately, he can't work it even an eighth of an inch below the surface of his screenplays...

...The city has many virtues, but its bars are not among them...

...GAG ME At the end of his 1979 film Manhattan, Woody Allen, who naturally has been depressed since the opening credits, lies down on a sofa and dictates into a tape recorder a list of things which make life worth living, whether or not there is a God...

...I thought, it's interesting how this guy gets the various stories going, cutting from one story to another...

...he selects the easy targets (the Hare Krishna chanters, the tacky religious icons sold around Times Square), and so allows Mickey to reject religion by trivializing it...

...Though he was scheduled to reach Istanbul before 10 p.m., my friend actually arrived well after three in the morning...

...Here we have the crux of Allen's problem...