Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen WOODY, CHEECH & CHONG LOW COMEDY IN A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS SEX COMEDY, Woody Allen plays a turn-of-the-century inventor whose Rube Goldberg creations, such as an aerocopter that's pedaled like...
...This is really a classy joint," he remarked to Harpo in his inimitable stage whisper, and with a leer in the direction of La Grande Dame Astor, who was crowded into the elevator with them...
...They insulted everybody equally, not only in their movies, but in Teal life...
...I'd never seen them in their former incarnation as the idols of teeny-boppers, but I took them for a couple of genuine lunatics...
...Pedaling hard in the aerocopter is supposed to generate enough lift to make you fly, too...
...Allen's problem as a moviemaker has always been that he's too taken with ideas that look good on the drawing board, but don't work in comic practice (or at least need more practice than he's willing to give them...
...Though Allen may not have played directly opposite Farrow himself, the character of the professor he created to be her lover seems made too much in his own image...
...In Sex Comedy, Allen permits himself only a few scenes with Farrow, who plays the libertine fiancee of a waffling academic (Jose Ferrer...
...But Cheech and Chong don't belong even in a pantheon for has-beens...
...As MUCH as I admire bad taste, there are limits...
...They also enjoy sending up the rich, but not just for being rich...
...It gave the impression of having been thought up and worked out on the spot, of being the sort of carefully perfected improvisation on which Chaplin used to spend most of his time and money when making a movie...
...Cheech and Chong are something else, however...
...In fact, the plot of Sex Comedy is about as clever as a porn flick with the explicit sex left out...
...They represent racism in its purest form, masquerading as comedy...
...The movies they've made since then have been so completely without value, though, that I'm embarrassed now to remember how enthusiastic I was...
...I'd give Cheech and Chong a little longer, about ninety minutes, which was the length of that first feature...
...They are the most vulgar, stupid, bloodthirsty roles imaginable...
...In their new movie, Things Are Rough All Over, the real butt of the joke isn't money...
...This gabby personage also has too cerebral a conception of life...
...It's Arabs...
...Now, the Marx Brothers were in really bad taste, democratic bad taste...
...They're more discriminating than Groucho in this regard...
...They were just a flash in the pan to begin with...
...Neither does the movie...
...In these scenes Allen appeared able to trust in his relationship with Keaton rather than his preconceptions of his movie, and the result was a new high in his work...
...The discrepancy between how these people look and how they sound-they sound as if their dialogue had been written by Woody Allen, of course-is supposed to generate the laughs...
...The scene had a feeling of spontaneity...
...Maybe Allen's present relationship with Mia Farrow hasn't reached the point yet where she loosens him up, or builds his self-confidence, the way Keaton did at the time of Annie Hall...
...I'm thinking particularly of the early scene in Sleeper, where, as a futuristic zombie, Allen gets out of control in a self-propelled wheelchair...
...Enough cross-fertilization goes on among these couples to supply a plot for a porno movie...
...The theory in the new movie is that if you set a sex comedy in a little colony of high-minded, forward-looking people of yesteryear, and then have them talk and act like the neurotics of today, the result will be amusing...
...They are, along with a satyric doctor (Tony Roberts) and his uninhibited nurse (Julie Haggerty), weekend guests at the country home of the inventor played by Allen and his wife (Mary Steenbergen...
...And Cheech and Chong have reached them...
...Screen WOODY, CHEECH & CHONG LOW COMEDY IN A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS SEX COMEDY, Woody Allen plays a turn-of-the-century inventor whose Rube Goldberg creations, such as an aerocopter that's pedaled like a bicycle, never quite get off the ground...
...I liked Cheech and Chong's first movie...
...Not since the depiction of Jews in the German movies of the thirties have caricatures like the two Arab brothers Cheech and Chong play in this film been seen on the screen...
...Allen's career as a comedian in movies peaked at certain moments in Sleeper or Annie Hall when he seemed capable of breaking through this kind of programmatic, overly conceptual approach to being funny...
...Let's hope that it's an act of symbolic exorcism...
...Annie Hall had even more impromptu, candid scenes in it, moments when the fun Allen was getting personally out of being with Diane Keaton at the time was put back into the movie-the scene in which a lobster they are trying to cook gets away from them, for instance, or the one where he passes comment on an assortment of characters they watch parading around the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park...
...He comes up with plots, situations, and gags that are funny only in theory...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Riding up in the elevator to a cocktail party at the apartment of Vogue publisher Conde Nast, Groucho once used Lady Astor as a foil the way he might have used Margaret Dumont in Animal Crackers...
...He is the least sympathetic character in the movie-an old fuddy-duddy, really-and in the end Allen kills him off...
...Cafe society was never quite the same again...
...We have seen the decline of a lot of filmmakers who looked ten years ago as if they might be among the immortals: John Cassavetes, Peter Bogdanovich, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, and, last but not least, Woody Allen...
...Andy Warhol once suggested that everybody ought to be famous for fifteen minutes...
Vol. 109 • September 1982 • No. 16
