Funniest of Woody’s later films

Press, 19 August 1985, Page 4

Funniest of Woody’s later films

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hans petrovic

ZELIG Written and directed by Woody Allen

“Zelig” (Westend) would easily be the funniest film made by the mature Woody Allen.

Looking out at you from this mostly black-and-white film is the worried, lined face of a man of undetermined age, his melancholy distraction evidence of the rough deal life has dealt him.

He is Leonard Zelig, a nonentity of a person who grew up in a Jewish family where the older children hit the younger, the mother hit the older and younger children, the father hit the mother and children, and the neighbours hit the whole family. To punish the young Zelig, his parents used to lock him in a dark closet; and to yunish him even further, >;hey got in with him. Wait a minute, that dour

man in this austere-looking movie who is doing all the Peter Sellers-like impersonations of everyone under the sun definitely is still the same Woody Allen I used to know; and that continuous deprecatory patter sounds exactly like the lines from the man that made “Bananas,” “Casablanca” and “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex.”

Yes, this is the same Allen whose films you saw at late-night screenings more than a decade ago, His over-all concept for this film is as Goonish as some of his early movies, and his one-liners, bordering on backyard surrealism, are just as funny. On the other hand, “Zelig” is the work of a much more mature man, who now has film-making down to such a fine art that he can hide its technical brilliance behind a deceptively low-key, seem-

ingly low-budget presentation. The humour also has been polished and, if you care to listen, there is an added subtlety to what may once have passed as only standup routine. Presented as a documentary, utilising stock vintage footage of the 20s and 30s, intercut with ancient-look-ing new material, Allen’s film asks whatever happened to Leonard Zelig, a man who so desperately wanted to be like everyone else that he could transform himself, before your eyes, into anyone he stood next to.

In the company of a black trombone player, he also becomes a black musician; with a group of fat men, he noticeably increases his girth; and with psychiatrists, he comes out with “a conglomeration of psychological double-talk that seems to make sense.”

A national phenomenon, this human chameleon in-

spires not only motion pictures, but a dance craze: “Make a face like a lizard, feel the beat in your gizzard.” He manages to have his picture taken in the proximity of great and other wellknown men: Presidents Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge, Jack Dempsey, even Adolf Hitler.

In the style of other films which take themselves seriously, like Warren Beatty’s “Reds,” Allen’s “Zelig” is interspersed with modernday reminiscences by other notables, including Susan Sontag, Saul Bellow, even Irving Howe. Zelig is kidnapped by his half-sister, who takes him on a sideshow tour, until she is shot in a showdown with “a mediocre and cowardly bullfighter.” A well-meaning psychiatrist, Dr Eudora Fletcher (Mia Farrow), becomes interested in Zelig’s case, manages to cure him and, in the process, falls in love with him.

Finally, after a sojourn in Nazi Germany, Zelig is given a hero’s ticker-tape welcome back to America for being the first man to fly acrosss the Atlantic up-side-down. With echoes of Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane,” Allen’s “Zelig” shows a little of the Hearst empire and entourage at play, and flirts

with such ponderables as the press, publicity, paranoia and the penalties of fame. However, if Allen intended this 80-minute film to be an allegory of some kind, the point has eluded me, for I have taken “Zelig” as pure comedy, based on a crazy premise, as which it succeeds. Any hint of paranoia probably is Alien’s own, for he is a brilliant example of the highly talented little man, who writes, directs and acts his own excellent work, yet manages to keep up an image of self-effacing modesty.

After a stint in more serious movies (“Manhattan,” “Interiors”), it is good to welcome Allen back in fine comic form, and the word is that he keeps it up in his next two films, “Broadway Danny Rose” and “Purple Rose of Cairo.”