Last year, Woody Allen received some of the very worst reviews of his career, twice over: first for Cafe Society, which opened the Cannes film festival - out of competition, thank god - with a resounding dud; and then for Crisis in Six Scenes, his much-reviled Amazon ministries that launched in September. Woody has always been a monster of productivity (he says making movies is the only thing that alleviates his existential panic). So now's as good a time as ever to be reminded that, like it or not, Woody's career has always been rocky, with the true masterpieces, the sturdy films and the outright terrible ones comfortably coexisting over his five decades in movies.
Through January 18, Babylon Mitte will be showing 30 films written or directed - although usually both - by the nervous comic, from 1965's star-studded psychoanalytic trip What's New Pussycat? to his latest Cannes-panned period piece. In between, this less-than-comprehensive retrospective, representing about two-thirds of the director's output, gives ample opportunity to immerse yourself in Woody's neurotic oeuvre, saturated with sex and riddled with angst at levels rarely seen below 72nd street.
Woody has always been up front about his influences and his borrowings from Fellini (Radio Days, Stardust Memories, Sweet and Lowdown, Celebrity) and Bergman (Interiors, Deconstructing Harry, A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy) show his inimitable mix of New Yorkerish and European Art House sensibilities. But Woody's best work has always been the stuff for which there is no existing template: the sui generis stand up romance of Annie Hall; the grandly tragicomic Manhattan; the urbane and ethical entanglements of Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors. My personal pick for the series is Love and Death, a profoundly silly send-up of Tolstoy that closed the chapter on his early slapstick period (Sleeper, Bananas, Take the Money and Run) and announced him as a serious filmmaking talent. This was clearly the thinking when Love and Death was awarded a Silver Bear for "outstanding artistic contribution" at the 1975 Berlin Film Festival.
The German mania for dubbing had wrought untold destruction on this land's film going culture, but the effects on Woody Allen films have been especially catastrophic. I am still haunted by the experience of once watching Stardust Memories, incorrectly advertised as OmU (original with subtitles), and hearing how the German voice actor turned the nebbish into a deep-voiced, smooth operator. Woody fans will be relieved to learn that the Babylon retrospective consists entirely of original language version prints.
On a final note, the series will feed in seamlessly to the Babylon's celebration of Ernst Lubitsch, occasioned by the 125th birthday of the Berlin and Hollywood director. "I, personally, am a Lubitsch fan," Woody told Film Comment, "because Lubitsch was cosmopolitan and sophisticated, and unsentimental to the end." Surveying the vast output of Woody's career, one feels certain that the director put the crucial question to himself on several occasions: "What would Lubitsch do?"