Throwback Thursday #TBT

Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don’t see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy. 

Love and Death

Years ago, I saw a trailer for a Woody Allen film, it might have been “Stardust Memories”, where the voice over complained, “remember when he used to make funny movies?”. As a matter of fact I do, and this was the last in his earlier films that were absurdist more than introspective. I have no problems with the later movies, many of them can proudly stand as some of the best films ever made, but there is a clear demarcation point where Woody stopped being a Mel Brooks sort of film maker, and tacked off in a different direction.

The film is sort of a take off on Russian Literature. Much like Mel Brooks did parodies of Westerns and Hitchcock, this film is sort of a parody of Russian novels, particularly those by Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, such as The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, and War and Peace. There are so many characters and they are intertwined in ways that requires a diagram to make sense of it. Here is a nice example of Allen mocking the absurd convolutions of some Russian Novels, this is a line of dialogue spoken by Jessica Harer late in the film:

“It’s a very complicated situation,cousin Sonja.         

I’m in love with Alexei. He loves Alicia. 

Alicia’s having an affair with Lev.

Lev loves Tatiana.

Tatiana loves Simkin.

Simkin loves me.

I love Simkin,

but in a different way than Alexei.

Alexei loves Tatiana like a sister.

Tatiana’s sister loves Trigorian

like a brother.

Trigorian’s brother

is having an affair with my sister, who he likes physically,

but not spiritually.

The exception here is that the names are not nearly as complicated and similar as you might find in some of that literature. That’s OK because Woody uses names for characters that are actually in the plot, which are : Anton Inbedkov, Leon Voskovec, Countess Alexandrovna, Boris Grushenko, Vladimir Maximovitch, Old Nehamkin and Young Nehamkin.

In addition to the Russian Literature, European films get a little tweak as well. Ingmar Bergman, one of Allen’s heroes, has his visage of Death from the “Seventh Seal”, played with well before Bill and Ted got ahold of it. There is alo a clever shot of Diane Keaton and Jessica Harper which replicates an image from persona.

In spite of the serious pretentions of those themes, the movie is closer to slapstick than satire. Allen engages in ridiculous wordplay with other characters, some of which sounds like it came right out of a Daffy Duck/Bugs Bunny cartoon. The training sequence when his character of Boris is being prepared to be in the army, fighting against Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, is a series of comic shots that use simple images as gags, like a rifle that falls apart or a bayonet that can’t be withdrawn from a practice dummy. This material could easily have come from “Blazing Saddles” or “History of the World Part 1”.

Woody gets only a little more serious when he does some verbal comic riffs on the metaphysics of existence and on morality. As a long time instructor in argumentation, I enjoyed his twisted version of the famous Aristotelian Syllogism:

“murder… the most foul of all crimes. What would Socrates say? All those Greeks were homosexuals. Boy, they must have had some wild parties. I bet they all took a house together in Crete for the summer. A: Socrates is a man. B: All men are mortal. C: All men are Socrates. That means all men are homosexuals. Heh… I’m not a homosexual. Once, some cossacks whistled at me. I happen to have the kind of body that excites both persuasions. You know, some men are heterosexual and some men are bisexual and some men don’t think about sex at all, you know… they become lawyers.”

The story does not have to make much sense, it just has to give Allen and Diane Keaton a chance to go wild with the long winded quotes and the shocked double takes that break the fourth wall at times, but then this could easily have been one of Allen’s stand up routines from his early days. Add to those amusingly drol moments, the silly puns and visual jokes, like Boris’s fathers piece of pand, and you have a great example of someone making a movie to make us laugh rather than to make a point. This may have been the transition between the pointlessness of films like “Bananas” and Sleeper” and the later gems like “Annie Hall” and Hannah and Her Sisters”. Both types of films deserve our attention, but for different reasons.