[What's Up, Tiger Lily?] abounds with clichés about Orientalism that relate to Allen's Jewish, sex, and loser jokes. All four patterns constitute a central theme: a narrow perspective is being imposed on an alien reality. (p. 116)

[Two] jokes converge when Wing Fat and Shepherd Wong argue over whether Wong looks Chinese or Japanese: the tradition of "But you don't look Jewish," and the Occidental's inability to distinguish among Orientals. All these Western-bias jokes about the East emphasize the fact that this film imposes an outsider's perspective on the action, and that such a perspective can only distort its material.

As though further to distort perspective, the film often refers to the fact that it is a film by offering film parodies. For example, Cobra Man not only speaks in a Peter Lorre voice but at one point complains, "Oh, my throat. This Peter Lorre imitation is killing me."…

This formal self-consciousness works in several ways. It is another example of the film's disjunction. Just as the soundtrack is always at madcap odds with the action, so the film references undercut any lingering pretense to realism. Furthermore, the obvious disparity between character and role is a variation on the basic point of the film's structure, which is the imposition of an Occidental viewpoint on the Oriental world. (p. 117)

Allen stands apart from the material which he presents in What's Up, Tiger Lily? Moreover, he transforms everything he shows by what he says. This interplay between the serious image and the reductive tone is the basic element in all his work—in his parodies, his mock-heroic pretenses, and his ironic persona projection. Seen in this light, almost everything in Allen's later comedy can be found in embryonic form in his first film. (p. 118)

Woody Allen's first complete feature film, Take the Money and Run, derived from the style of his monologues. It comprised a series of absurd skits depicting a nebbish's comic attempts to become a master criminal….

More specifically, the film parodies the cinéma-vérité documentary film form. Popular in the 1960s, it characteristically attempted to convey the impression of recording life as it happened, without staging or distortion by editing. (p. 120)

[Although] Virgil Starkwell is Allen's familiar loser, the central tension in Take the Money and Run derives from Allen's juxtaposition of the supposed realism of cinéma-vérité with the romanticism of the gangster-film tradition. Allen contrasts the glories that his hero wishes to emulate with the failure that is his lot. The fact that Virgil may be vulnerable because he wants to be what his myopic eyes see may explain the running gag in which various people—urchins, an iceman, hoodlums, a judge, and finally Virgil himself—smash his glasses….

In its structural similarity to the monologues, this film suggests that Allen was feeling his way into the medium. His parodic themes enable him to exercise the language of film rhetoric and conventions while he learned how film works. (p. 127)

Many of the comic turns [in Bananas] are variations on a single theme—the contrast between Inside and Outside. Allen plays his usual role of an outsider who wants to come in from the cold, but here this motif is varied and amplified to become the film's dominant theme. Thus Mellish is much concerned with doors and doorways, symbols of admission/exclusion. (p. 129)

The In and Out metaphor is most explicit in the scene in which Mellish regains consciousness in the rebel camp—"Blood! That should be on the inside"—but the motif occurs everywhere. (p. 130)

[The] film depicts a lunatic world, a world gone bananas. Thus President Mellish and the United States Ambassador converse in clear English but they accept the intercession of an awkward, accented translator—afterward identified as an escapee from an asylum. In addition to implying a general madness, the title relates the film to the noble tradition of banana-peel slapstick comedy.

The most important implication of the title, however, is its association with exploitative politics. San Marcos, a nation of marks or victims, is a banana republic. As the film details the political machinations between America and San Marcos, and between the mutually exploiting factions within the nation itself, this aspect of the title is the most important unifier. For Bananas satirizes different kinds of imperialist exploitation. The most obvious kind is political: the cyclical tyrannies of Vargas and Esposito; the American government's abuse of the nation's citizenry; and American interference in San Marcos affairs. Although Allen claims that "Bananas was coincidentally political," it has very clear political implications. From Mellish's first appearance in a red-white-and-blue striped shirt, he functions as the muddled, idealistic American citizen. For the bulk of the film he is manipulated and victimized by his own government and that of San Marcos. (pp. 132-33)

The nebbish hero of Bananas would like to live by [the idealism of loving, giving, and sunshine], but the bananas world does not nourish those values. Bananas satirizes the variety of ways that man conspires to exploit others—politically, religiously, culturally, and romantically. The sense that this exploitation is a lunatic waste of life gives this chaos of comedy its remarkable and sober cohesion. (p. 135)

[Sleeper] provides a hilarious slapstick adventure story with a serious underpinning. As the title alerts us, Allen's central metaphor is sleep, which can be taken to represent non-commitment either in one's political or emotional life. (p. 152)

In the tradition of negative utopias, the world to which Miles awakens in 2173 is a cautionary extension of our own; the country is called the Central Parallel of the Americas. The central parallel between Miles's new world and ours is its hedonistic apathy. Lost in the stupor of pleasure, Luna's society literally has a ball (large and silver) on drugs. Sex has been reduced to a mechanical convenience—the orgasmitron—to which a character can repair in midsentence for an orgasm—partner optional. As the characters are lost in their pursuit of pleasure, the joke about the cloning of the leader quite literally posits a society that is led by the nose.

Luna's pleasure-seeking friends are contrasted to the rebels and to the activists who revive Miles. While they do not convert Miles to political commitment, they do awaken him to the realization that his own survival depends on awareness and activity….

Sleeper warns against the loss of human personality, individuality, and vulnerability, by positing an age of imposed equality, technological dominance, and the replacement of human responsibility with the debasing efficiency of the machine. (p. 153)

The Dostoyevskian opening [of Love and Death] dwindles into bathetic comedy. This device, bathos, is the primary source of unity and meaning in the film. Throughout Love and Death, an elevated expectation is established only to be comically deflated. As a result man seems too small a creature to assume the mantle of heroic philosophy woven by the great writers. (p. 159)

[The] film's title promises the profound ether of the Russian novel but Allen's literary expressions in the film are reductive….

Allen's major theme in Love and Death [is that] philosophical and literary speculation are essentially irrelevant to the business of living. To this end Allen continually introduces philosophical passages only to turn away from them in favor of man's basic appetites—food and sex—the drives by which man ensures his survival both individually and generically.

Allen's deflation of profundity often involves religious subjects. Thus Boris demands that God prove His existence with a miracle, like the traditional parting of the seas or—more practically, perhaps—by making "my Uncle Sasha pick up a check."… What begins as a traditional statement of religious quest is deflated by the practical concerns of the modern, urban intellectual's struggle to reconcile old faith with his present education and needs. As in Bergman's work, the voice of God cannot be heard; but Allen fills the silence with one-liners. (pp. 162-63)

Annie Hall seems more fruitfully located in the myth of Pygmalion than in Allen's life story. It is the story of an artist who falls in love with his own creation and loses her when she blossoms into full life. (p. 172)

The power of art to compensate for the limitations of life is the primary theme of Annie Hall. This concern happens to be central to the first book that Alvy buys Annie, Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death…. Alvy's gift … raises the specter of man's death, of his inability to resist the processes of time and loss.

That Annie has not contemplated death is dramatized in her emotionally uncertain story about the old man who died in a fit of narcolepsy while waiting in line for his free war-veterans' turkey. In this anecdote, death is an amusing, puzzling, vaguely unsettling continuation of the sleepy, passive life. As Annie does not see death as a unique and overwhelming problem, she is confused by her own story and uncertain both as to what it means and why she feels compelled to tell it. (p. 179)

Even as a boy, Alvy was aware of man's doom. The lad's sense of not just man's mortality but the limited life of the universe resisted Dr. Flicker's advice that "We've got to try and enjoy ourselves while we're here, huh? Huh?"—he laughs, smokes, and coughs. Allen cuts to the Singer home, which quakes under the impact of hedonists blithely enjoying a roller coaster ride, while Alvy ponders his blood-red and quivering bowl of tomato soup. Alvy's consciousness of death prevents his enjoying the pleasures known by simpler souls. For Allen, the unexamined death is not worth living. Therefore he contemplates death and loss, and reaffirms the values of life, art, and love.

This theme is supported by the striking liberties that Allen takes with narrative convention in Annie Hall. As if to demonstrate man's need to control and to reshape reality, he violates various principles of film rhetoric. For example, his opening direct address denies the usual gap between film-image and audience. (pp. 179-80)

Alvy's statement on the fluid state of photographic rhetoric may also justify Allen's liberties with form: "The medium enters in as a condition of the art form itself." Both as he confronts death and loss, and as he contemplates his art form, Allen exercises the freedom of a life and art in flux. Alvy's young classmates admitting their adult failures, Annie's recollection of narcoleptic George, Alvy's closing montage of scenes with Annie from earlier in the film, Annie and Alvy revisiting scenes from their past, indeed all Allen's liberties with film rhetoric assert the power of art in the struggle against the transience of love and life. All are denials of death. (p. 180)

Alvy literally uses movies as a means of avoiding problems in his real life. A tension with Annie is deflected into a quarrel over whether or not to enter a theater showing Bergman's Face to Face … once the screening has begun. Later he prevents a useful opportunity for her to see Tony Lacy by going yet again to see Ophuls's The Sorrow and the Pity….

Indeed one could take all the film references in Annie Hall as the coordinates of Allen's relationship to film. If the Snow White sequence expresses Alvy's infantilism, it also expresses the abiding influence that art has on one's life. The Ophuls film relates to the hero's Jewish sense of alienation, but also represents one function of film: to confront issues of political and historical significance, and to provide an understanding of the past. The Bergman references represent the use of the medium to explore the artist's psychological nature. (p. 182)

More generally, the Snow White and Ophuls inserts represent the artist's social function, in which he speaks to and for his community, while the Bergman and Fellini context represents the use of art to express and to explore the artist's private tensions. These four coordinates embody the balance between personal experience and general metaphor that makes Annie Hall the culmination of Allen's work, especially in its inflection of his persona. The film references also confirm the self-reflexive stance of the film: "the medium enters in as a condition of the art form itself."

Annie Hall deals with the use of art as a means of confronting man's helplessness before time, loss, and death. (pp. 182-83)

Allen's use of art as a means of confronting death is consistent with Becker's argument [in The Denial of Death] that the artist's work "justifies" him by "transcending death by qualifying for immortality": "he lives the fantasy of the control of life and death, of destiny, in the 'body' of his work."…

As Becker defines it, Annie would represent Alvy's "romantic solution" to his anxiety about death. Man fixes "his urge to cosmic heroism onto another person in the form of a love object" and looks to that love partner for "the self-glorification" that he needed in his innermost nature. (p. 184)

[The Becker context is confirmed by Allen's choice of title. We can read it as Alvy's dedication to Annie.] Alvy's treasuring homage to his lost love becomes Allen's melancholy but affirmative homage to lost life and time. Annie Hall is a character as charming, as absurd, and as elusive as life itself. She embodies Alvy's denial of death through romantic love, and Allen's through art. (p. 185)

[Manhattan is Woody Allen's] most lyrical and emotional film to date. Although it may not be as complex as Annie Hall, Manhattan is a magnificent film, subtle both in expression and feeling. (p. 197)

[The] film details the professional and romantic compromises by which man avoids confronting his insignificance in the cosmos and his inability to control his fate. Both concerns are familiar from Allen's earlier work.

The film's dominant theme is man's need for personal integrity in a decaying culture. (pp. 197-98)

In Manhattan Allen continues his satire against man's foolish applications of logic and culture. Hence the skulls when Yale rationalizes his betrayal of Isaac. Often there is a comical discrepancy between what the characters know and what they can effectively use in their lives. As Isaac admits, "When it comes to relationships with women I'm the winner of the August Strindberg Award." Although he still wants her himself, he warns Yale that Mary is "the winner of the Zelda Fitzgerald Emotional Maturity Award." Both quips combine intellectual knowledge with emotional deficiency…. Man's culture is no defense against his greatest dangers. Greater truths are told by the heart and the senses than by the mind…. Tracy's last line [to Isaac], "You have to have a little faith in people," is really a call to trust his instincts. Tracy's own faith in her relationship with Isaac overrides her sense that "maybe people weren't made for long relationships," but for a "series of relationships with different links."

Though unconventional, Isaac is a character of exemplary integrity. (pp. 200-01)

The theme of integrity relates to the feel of the film. As Isaac describes himself as "a non-compromiser" who is "living in the past," the film assumes a rigorous, classical spirit from its straightforward romantic narrative, its resolute black-and-white photography, and its George Gershwin score. (p. 202)

Manhattan opens with a three-minute abstract sequence…. In describing the city, Isaac's hero—and so Allen's—projects his various moods and conceptions of himself onto the setting. When in the mellow dawn Isaac tells Mary "This is really a great city. I don't care what people say, I'm really knocked out," this is a tribute not to any real Manhattan but to the mood between Mary and Isaac, which the city at that point seems to embody.

Similarly the setting offers both elegant beauty and the rough streets, with a citizenry "desensitized by noise, music, drugs, and garbage." The city is in constant change, as one scene of a demolition crew at work reveals. But which of the innumerable and contradictory aspects will characterize the setting is the individual's choice. (p. 203)

As an emblem of moral and aesthetic choices, Manhattan means something rather different in Manhattan than it meant when Annie Hall compared the insular Alvy Singer to it ("this island unto yourself"). In Manhattan Allen's hero reconciles a compromised, new Manhattan with his old idealized one and extends his rigorous ethics into a romance that exceeds logical and conventional limits. Despite the familiar Jewish, sexual and paranoia jokes, Isaac is Allen's most competent and confident role. (p. 205)

Maurice Yacowar, in his Loser Take All: The Comic Art of Woody Allen (copyright © 1979 by Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., Inc.), Ungar, 1979, 243 p.