The Talkies
Stein, Benjamin
"The Talkies" cure of government censorship would be considerably worse than the disease, and is clearly not even to be considered. One might even argue effectively that if the American public enjoys this...
...Cloning" is the process of developing a complete organism from a single cell...
...The movie then, as the sum of its parts, is transitory, full of "in" jokes, and uneven though it has its funny moments...
...Allen suddenly goes into a trance and imagines that he is Blanche DuBois, from A Streetcar Named l:lesire...
...That is a funny idea, and giggles are evoked just by the sight of the solitary nose on the operating table in a huge operating theater...
...Alien's comic sense is most acutely shown in the individual scenes and dialogue...
...Similarly, Allen's constant harping on his Jewishness is funny to those familiar with that kind of humor, but to the huge mass of Gentiles in this country, it might appear at best unfamiliar and at worst sick...
...The "I~ader" of the society has been killed by a rebel bomb, and only his nose was found in the wreckage...
...Still, it is too much like a Las Vegas night club act...
...They seat him, in a drugged state, at a table and two of them pretend to be his mother and father talking to him in heavily accented English, generously laced with Yiddish phrases...
...Again, terribly funny, but oh, so chic...
...One need not, however, remain silent-for the sooner the public grows weary of this trendy trash, the better...
...But how many people know about that...
...It is too topical, too fluffy...
...S/eeper is the adventures of a man who went into a hospital for a routine stomach operation and was instead frozen in a time capsule...
...When he is shown artifacts of the 1970s, he describes them in ways which are quite predictable, but nevertheless always draw a laugh...
...Iris girlfriend, Diane Keaton, tries to bring him out of it by imitating Marion Brando's Stanley Kowalski...
...It does not work...
...He makes funny what is commonplace in life by looking at it in an exaggeratedly serious way...
...S/eeper is a movie whose appeal is to the few, and its appeal is only brief...
...He can set a scene which is hysterically funny at first glance, but he often does not seem to know how to get out of it...
...Allen is told that there was a great nuclear war caused by "someone named Albert Shanker getting hold of a nuclear warhead...
...He has her sing a song when she joins a group of rebels against the modern superstate: Rebels are we, Born to be free, Like fish in the sea...
...Allen makes enormous fun of ,Diane Keaton, his inamorata in the movie, and she takes it without much of a whimper...
...He is asked who Nixon was...
...The Talkies Sleeper SLEEPER IS A Szechuanese movie...
...His interrogator says that the only thing that archaeologists can figure out about him is that he must have been a person who was once a leader, but did something so horrendons that all written evidence of him has been expunged...
...When his time capsule is thawed out, Allen, who plays the leading character, is found to have been wrapped in wrinkled aluminum foil, just as hamburgers are wrapped when put into a freezer--aluminum foil for science fiction, ho-ho...
...It is high time we sent them packing...
...They have been asked to "clone" a person from a nose...
...It is delicious, tangy, and satisfying while you are watching it, but it leaves nothing behind...
...That is a funny joke to people who know Shanker from his teacher's union leadership role in New York City...
...Where almost all of the audience could empathize with Chaplin's love and worship of women who seemed to be far above him, a far smaller group might understand Allen's falling madly in love with women whom he hates and is disgusted by...
...One might even argue effectively that if the American public enjoys this type of humor, then they are getting precisely what they want, and what they deserve...
...His interchanges as a pathetically weak man with sexy, demanding women have a quality which sometimes approaches the Chaplinesque, but his resentment of women is so pronounced that it narrows the appeal of the sequences far beyond what Chaplin realized with his idealized, pedestalized women...
...The vast majority of television viewers are teenagers and preadolescents...
...They will yield, at most, a little more cash for those wonderful men who have learned to exploit the sophomoric cynicism which these shows peddle as the new American wisdom...
...Even the self-selected audience which cannot help but love themselves shift uneasily in their seats...
...Still later, Allen, asked by Keaton what he believes in, says "Sex and death two things which come once in a lifetime...
...You cannot help but laugh, even if you wonder why Allen likes her so much...
...The list of funny episodes is long...
...At one point, for instance, people in 2173 are trying to reorient Allen to his life in 1973...
...Indeed Allen's movie is so heavily by Benjamin Stein focussed on New York that parts are almost regional jokes...
...In his work as a director though, Allen is, most clich6d of all words, uneven...
...He is thawed out two hundred years later into a society which is only superficially different from the one he came from...
...But where Lucy was merely mindless, M*A*S*H and its ilk are actively pernidons...
...It is a cheap shot, but it works...
...It is a small group of selfselecting, self-reinforcing young people who are familiar with current events and modes, especially with goings on in New York...
...Still, the movie has its hilarious moments...
...Near the end of the movie, Allen and Keaton are in an operating theater for an attempt at a truly funny concept...
...There is nothing wrong with attempting to make television shows more realistic, and today's viewer probably no longer considers I Love Lucy an acceptable reflection of his world...
...Allen is the feckless-looking comic impresario who at thirty-five is the envy of everyone who looks like a schlemiel but knows that he has what it takes to be a movie superstar, if he could but be discovered...
...One can only guess at the effect of week-in, week-out exposure to this tripe on their view of this nation and its history...
...In that joke Allen sums up the feelings of frustration of a larger body of people whose lives are demarcated by frustration and envy...
...This much, however, is clear--All in the Family and its brethren on the boob-tube will produce neither better thinkers nor more responsible citizens...
...But Allen does not seem to know what to do with it...
...Sometimes his misogyny, even when it breaks through the outer limits, and deep into the heart of male chauvinism, is funny though...
...In a few years, certainly in a decade, it will have lost its humorous appeal for all but those with a really extensive memory for nostalgic trivia...
...Primarily it works for the same reason that most of Allen's jokes work in Sleeper--Allen kno~s his audience...
...The Alternative April 1974 23...
...As everybody knows, S/eeper is Woody Allen's latest cinematic venture...
...The movie, for example, lacks the elements of truly lasting humor which are present in the Marx Brothers movies...
...He and Keaton chase each other around the operating theater and generally try to inject slapstick into a decidedly cerebral situation...
...But for the kind of diversion you would hope to see in the lounge at Caesar's Palace, it is superb...
...It has been kept alive in the hope that the "Leader," white suit, white tie, white shoes, and "Dry Look" hair-do, can be recreated...
...That has its humor to a small audience, but even to that small audience, it has a slightly self-hurting quality...
...It is profoundly unsubstantial except in the most transitory way...
...It obviously takes a rather small group of people to think that showing a bitchy, demanding woman is, on its face, funny...
Vol. 7 • April 1974 • No. 7
