At the end of the showing in the ICA, an elderly man asked if they’d changed the film in any way, in the re-release. It's only a new print, but his reaction shows the freshness the film retains.
Most great US movies of the 70s were created on an epic scale – Coppola, Cimino et al. A few weeks ago I met someone who had been smuggled into Studio 54 when she was a teenager. She described an excess and a hedonism that has left anything else she’s seen in the shade.
There’s barely a hint of this in Allen’s Big Apple. He might appear drunk once, but that’s all. Instead, the film harks back to the twenties, thirties, forties. The dramatic use of the Manhattan skyline, which dominates the first five minutes, escorted by Gershwin, is as epic as it gets.
Which is a relief, and might explain why the film has aged so well. Men and women will always create drama in their lives, no matter what’s going on in the big wide world. The film’s keynote scene, with Allen having a showdown with his friend Yale in the presence of a Neanderthal- seeming skeleton drives this point home. It’s also the only scene where Allen seems prepared to accept that there is such a thing as a ‘wrong’ way of waging the battle of the sexes. He is genuinely aggrieved that Yale can twist and turn so recklessly, ruining at least two and perhaps three relationships at the turn of a Porsche ignition key.
Allen being Allen he retreats from any inclination to moralise. In his New York it may be as big a sin to criticise Bergman as it is to sleep with another man’s wife or another woman’s husband. The one guarantee of relationships is that they will cause pain, something he recognises by claiming the August Strindberg award for himself. And in a way, the movie seems to suggest, there’s nothing too wrong with this, because that pain lends meaning to life, which keeps us going.
And these things will carry on, no matter how the streets of the city might alter, no matter the prevailing trends in facial hair. Mistakes will be made and people will have to learn to live with them. Allen’s recognition of this is what lends his film a timelessness that revived me as much of a dull wintery London afternoon in 2006 as it might have done on a similar dull afternoon thirty years ago.
Most great US movies of the 70s were created on an epic scale – Coppola, Cimino et al. A few weeks ago I met someone who had been smuggled into Studio 54 when she was a teenager. She described an excess and a hedonism that has left anything else she’s seen in the shade.
There’s barely a hint of this in Allen’s Big Apple. He might appear drunk once, but that’s all. Instead, the film harks back to the twenties, thirties, forties. The dramatic use of the Manhattan skyline, which dominates the first five minutes, escorted by Gershwin, is as epic as it gets.
Which is a relief, and might explain why the film has aged so well. Men and women will always create drama in their lives, no matter what’s going on in the big wide world. The film’s keynote scene, with Allen having a showdown with his friend Yale in the presence of a Neanderthal- seeming skeleton drives this point home. It’s also the only scene where Allen seems prepared to accept that there is such a thing as a ‘wrong’ way of waging the battle of the sexes. He is genuinely aggrieved that Yale can twist and turn so recklessly, ruining at least two and perhaps three relationships at the turn of a Porsche ignition key.
Allen being Allen he retreats from any inclination to moralise. In his New York it may be as big a sin to criticise Bergman as it is to sleep with another man’s wife or another woman’s husband. The one guarantee of relationships is that they will cause pain, something he recognises by claiming the August Strindberg award for himself. And in a way, the movie seems to suggest, there’s nothing too wrong with this, because that pain lends meaning to life, which keeps us going.
And these things will carry on, no matter how the streets of the city might alter, no matter the prevailing trends in facial hair. Mistakes will be made and people will have to learn to live with them. Allen’s recognition of this is what lends his film a timelessness that revived me as much of a dull wintery London afternoon in 2006 as it might have done on a similar dull afternoon thirty years ago.
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