Michael F. Duggan
Woody Allen has announced his retirement from filmmaking.
I will not attempt to justify his private life, and I have not followed his legal troubles closely, but one of the tenets of popular wisdom to which I subscribe is: “to be great is to be abnormal.” And Woody Allen is a great director. With the possible exception of Francis Ford Coppola, he is the greatest living American director.
From his standup comedy in the 1960s, to his madcap early films like Take the Money and Run, Bananas, Sleeper, and Love and Death, to his great period with Annie Hall, Manhattan, Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, Radio Days, and Crimes and Misdemeanors, to his later films like Husbands and Wives, The Mighty Aphrodite, Sweet and Lowdown, Match Point, Midnight in Paris, and Blue Jasmine, Allen has proved himself to be a world-class artist and commentator of the times.
He is a cross between a borscht-belt comedian, an East Village comic of the New Left, and an existentialist philosopher (“Not only is there no God, but try finding a plumber on a Sunday”). There is also something strikingly original about his work. He is unique and his films have a feel that cannot be duplicated. More than any other director, he captured the Zeitgeist (and angst) of the times in which he lived (or at least a New York version of them). Over 55 years, he directed, wrote, and/or acted in 65 films, about half of which are good and half of those are classics. Without him there would have been no Seinfeld or any number of lesser artists.
I admit that his private life has been a mess (although I’d wager that few people reading this have read all of the court transcripts and investigation interviews in the cases against him, which are apparently available).1 But the art must be taken on its own merits, just like that of other morally-problematic artists, like Mozart, Beethoven, Byron, van Gogh, Hemingway, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Jackson Pollock.
If you doubt his greatness as a director and storyteller, watch Annie Hall this week.
Notes
1. John Kendall Hawkins, “Woody’s Wicked and Wicked-er Gravity,” CounterPunch, April 15, 2020.