Woody Allen retrospective: Introduction

Woody Allen released his first film as writer, director, and (in this case, voice-over) performer in 1966--What's Up, Tiger Lily? a Japanese thriller Allen took and redubbed into a ridiculous comedy. Allen had already been writing jokes for TV shows for years, and, between his standup, his short writing for The New Yorker, a Broadway hit (Don't Drink the Water, later adapted for the screen--twice), and other work on stage and screen, he was already a notable presence in the comedic world. But few people then could have expected then that Allen--a scrawny, bespectacled, redheaded New York Jew who dropped out of NYU film school and played a character marked by a combination of incredible neurosis, offhand references to everything from 19th century Russian literature to psychoanalysis to Kierkegaard, and obsessively preoccupied with sex--would not only go on to redefine American comedy, but would, forty-three years later, be one of the single most prolific, praised, talked-about, and written-about auteurs in the history of world cinema. But, forty-three years and forty-one features later (along with a terrific 40-minute short, "Oedipus Wrecks," in the anthology film New York Stories, and with a number of other films in which he has appeared, or which he has written), it is not at all unusual to hear Allen's name listed among the great legendary artists of the silver screen, hear his work compared (not at all unfavorably) with that of Bergman or Fellini, or see his films on lists of the greatest of all time.

With his next feature, Whatever Works, hitting the Broadway theater in Salt Lake the end of July, I'm going to take some time to look at Allen's extensive body of work, film by film (I'm currently at 29--more films than I've seen from any other director by a notable margin, with a whopping 11 to go), starting from the beginning and going through to the present (and there's no sign of stopping, with another pre-production credit listed on IMDb, and slated for release next year). Funny, human, often heartbreaking and just as frequently a deep pessimist, Allen's ouevre (including his work in theater, as a standup comedian, and his delicious pieces for the New Yorker) transcends the craftsman's pace at which he works and his roots in television talk shows and has come to represent one of the great artistic statements of the 20th century.

And the 21st.