Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen

“Now You See Him, Now You Don’t” by Peter J. Bailey

Peter J. Bailey “Now You See Him, Now You Don’t” Woody Allen’s Vanishing Act in Scoop Foragoodwhilenow,WoodyAllenhasbeenexpressingreservationsabout appearing in the films he scripts. In 2005, he complained to Eric Lax that writing himselfintoscriptscommitsthefilmtoabroad(and,afterallthese years, somewhat predictable) humor that overdetermines the rest of the film. “When I’m in comedies, they tend to be comic in the tradition I enjoy playing and feel comfortable in, which is light and frivolous,” he told Lax. “But now I feel I’d be better off doing serious pictures without me in them.”1 Four months later, Allen talked even more critically about casting himself in his films: “It’s hard to write good films and accommodate my character. It’s always been a problem. That’s why I’d just as soon keep out of my movies in the future and I won’t burden myself and I won’t burden the audience and I’m free to do any movie I want and not have to face the problem of creating a good story and one that also has a funny part for a limited actor—me.”2 The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001), he insisted, would have been a better film with another actor in insurance inspector C. W.Briggs’srole;heplayedHarryBlockinDeconstructingHarry(1997)only after Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Elliott Gould, and Albert Brooks declined the role,3 and Allen has often regretted the Cliff subplot of Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), insisting that it was much less compelling than the Judah/Dolores murder plot. Many viewers of the PBS American Masters series presentation Woody Allen: A Documentary (Robert B. Weide, 2011) suspected that Allen was involved in numerous decisions about his depiction, perhaps including which films would be excerpted and which Bailey•“Now You See Him, Now You Don’t” 123 would not: Mighty Aphrodite (1995), Small Time Crooks (2000), Anything Else (2003), The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Hollywood Ending (2002), and Scoop(2006)—thelastsixfilmsinwhichheappeared—wererepresented in the documentary only by interviews with other actors who appeared in them. Allen has often remarked that he never enjoys watching the films he hasmade;clearly,heenjoysevenlesswatchingtheonesinwhichheappears. Myargumenthere,oneslightlymuddiedbyToRomewithLove(2012),in which he wrote himself a small role, is that Scoop, an otherwise unremarkable film of the Allen canon, is intriguing because it represents, somewhat self-consciously, Allen’s farewell to portraying the protagonist in Allen-directed films.4 Richard A. Blake was the first Allen critic to speculate that SidneyWaterman’sdeath-by-driving-on-the-wrong-side-of-London-roads representedmorethanacomic-macabreendingforalightweightfilm.Blake asked, “Could this be Allen’s way of telling his audience that he is finally layingtorestthenebbishcharacterheembodiedindozensoffilmsoverthe lastfortyyears?”5 GivenAllen’slifelongantipathyforanyformofceremony or occasion, however, his withdrawal of the “Woody” protagonist from his films must necessarily be muted, getting signaled—if at all—only by largely comic allusions to earlier Allen portrayals. Consequently, I’m contending that his enactment of Sidney in Scoop contains numerous echoes of other Allen roles (Jewish characters in particular) as a distinctly hedged acknowledgmentofAllen’svaledictoryperformance.Althoughwe’llnotice in Scoop echoes of a few other Allen movies in which he has screen time, the film most consistently alluded to throughout is Broadway Danny Rose (1984), a highly significant choice because Danny Rose was the role in which Allen invoked most emphatically his Catskills entertainment heritage and therefore drew most substantially (with affectionate satire) upon whatSidneyWatermancharacterizesashis“Hebrewpersuasion.”Although these two films could not be more different in terms of tone and sincerity of dramatic purpose, they evoke each other in the showbiz effusiveness of theirprotagonists’sharedidiolect,onethat,forAllen,recallsfondlyhisearly years as a gag writer and stand-up comic. To recognize the significance of Waterman as Allen’s farewell to acting in Scoop, however, we have to notice notonlythatheisemphaticallyJewishinawayreminiscentofDannyRose butalsothatheisaself-consciouslyJewishmagician—“Splendini,”whose name derives, no doubt, from Harry Houdini, a Jewish Hungarian. And 124 Schlemiel Theory although his films’ attitude toward magic is always somewhat equivocal, Allen’s later movies generally cleave to the pattern established in Stardust Memories (1980) when Sandy Bates is interrogated by his fans: MAN: Do you believe in magic? I know, I’ve read all your interviews. SANDY: No. No, no, I don’t. I used to do magic tricks when I was a kid, but, but no more. Scoop, I’m contending here, contains a thoroughly tacit argument predicated upon Allen’s increasing skepticism toward magic to vindicate Allen’s personal withdrawal from acting...