Parky at the Pictures (DVD 13/10/2011)

Allen first ventured into movies as the writer and co-star of Clive Donner's What's New Pussycat? (1965), which sees Parisian fashion editor Peter O'Toole consult psychiatrist Peter Sellers to help him resolve his feelings for Ursula Andress, Paula Prentiss and Capucine before committing to fiancée Romy Schneider.

When producer Charles K. Feldman purchased the rights to Hungarian Ladislas Bus-Fekete's play, Lot's Wife, he hoped to turn it into a vehicle for Cary Grant. However, Warren Beatty had assumed the lead by the time that Feldman caught Allen's live stand-up act and offered him the chance to make his screenwriting debut.

Peeved by the pathetic fee, Allen also wrote himself the role of strip club wardrobe man, Victor Shakapopolis. But he made the mistake of ignoring veteran scenarist I.A.L. Diamond's earlier attempt at an adaptation - for fear of being both swayed by its style and daunted by the expertise of Billy Wilder's longtime collaborator - and structured the scenario as a loose assemblage of gags and set-pieces, which bore more resemblance to a TV sketch show than a Hollywood narrative.

Initially, this didn't bother Feldman, as he had envisaged adopting a monochrome nouvelle vague-like approach. But Beatty (whose famous chat-up line had been commandeered for the title) disliked the anarchic style and resented Feldman's refusal to cast then-lover Leslie Caron in the Schneider role. So, the highly unsuitable Peter O'Toole was hired as his replacement and he proceeded to ally himself with Peter Sellers in circumventing the script, which Allen had polished in conjunction with director, Clive Donner.

Keen to prove he still had it after the heart attack that had forced him to withdraw from Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid (1964), Sellers insisted on boosting his part (which Allen had originally intended for Groucho Marx) in a series of self-indulgent improvisations that utterly altered the picture. Moreover, everyone seems to have an opinion about the much-amended ending, including Schneider, who had a clause inserted into her contract blocking her on-screen marriage to a weed like Woody.

Allen managed to retain joke references to movies like Mervyn LeRoy's I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), John Huston's Moulin Rouge (1952), Vincente Minnelli's Lust for Life (1956), Terence Young's Dr No (1962) and Federico Fellini's 8½ (1963). But he followed threats to remove his name from the picture by disowning it - even though it actually explored several themes that would recur in his more mature work.

Following an equally unfortunate experience on the 007 lampoon Casino Royale (1967), United Artists offered Allen the chance to make his directorial debut, providing he did it in Britain, in black and white and for $750,000. There was even talk of a collaboration with Jerry Lewis before Allen persuaded Charles H. Joffe and Jack Rollins to produce Take the Money and Run (1969). Keen to avoid actorly ego and producorial interference, Allen turned the project into something of a one-man operation, although Mickey Rose co-wrote the screenplay, which was based on the Naked City type of TV show to chronicle the life and crimes of a petty hoodlum who finds love with a laundress between botched blags and stints on a chain gang. But it was only after the picture wrapped that any problems became apparent.

Allen's preparation was reasonably thorough. Having screened a documentary on Eleanor Roosevelt to gauge the narrative and visual style of a newsreel, he studied such features as I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre sa Vie (1963), Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966) and Bo Widerberg's Elvira Madigan (1967). He also borrowed the escape episode from Stanley Kramer's The Defiant Ones (1959) and the blaze of bullets finale from Bonnie and Clyde (1967), whose director, Arthur Penn, Allen consulted before production began.

Shooting also went smoothly enough. But test audiences found the picture wholly unfunny and editor Ralph Rosenblum was called in to do a similar salvage job to the one he had just performed on William Friedkin's The Night They Raided Minsky's (1968). With Allen on tour with the stage version of Play It Again, Sam, Rosenblum had a freeish hand to reconstruct the essentially sketch-like material into a coherent casebook narrative and set-pieces like the `gub' bank robbery and the cello playing in a marching band found their place alongside running gags like the smashing of Allen's glasses. Rosenblum even suggested the use of New Orleans jazz on the soundtrack (which was supplemented by Marvin Hamlisch interludes), which became a staple of future Allen projects.

Yet still only two prints were struck and it took Vincent Canby's New York Times review to secure the film an audience. Even then, seven years were to elapse before the production company turned a profit on its $1.53 million investment. However, Allen did much better with Bananas (1971), in which he starred as a gadget tester who fakes a fascination with Third World politics to impress intense activist Louise Lasser and finds himself enmeshed in the civil disturbances splintering the fictional South American republic of San Marcos.

Loosely based on Richard Powell's novel Don Quixote USA and originally entitled El Weirdo, Allen's second outing as writer-director-star is an erratic concoction that overcomes its lack of continuity and coherence to pack in satirical, surreal and slapstick gags at a frantic pace. The first cut ran for two hours, but Ralph Rosenblum persuaded Allen to excise some 37 minutes of footage (with the casualties including an attack on the guerillas' camp by a rhumba band and a parody of Bob Hope entertaining the troops) and the celerity and brevity go some way to disguising the mediocrity of some of the material.

Opening and closing with sequences in which sportscaster Howard Cosell commentates upon the assassination of the President of San Marcos and the consummation of Allen and Lasser's marriage, this is a film about America's tendency to trivialise everything for mass consumption, whether it's the advertising of cigarettes or the reporting of a major political story.

It's also a satire about dissemblance in a society in which nothing lives up to expectation and no one fulfills their promises. Like the Execusisor machine, revolution seems to offer an easy solution to the problems of a developing country, but President Carlos Montalbán's pledge to reform simply results in the imposition of twice-hourly underwear changes and Swedish as the national language. Only in such a cockamamie world could a man in a fake Castro beard (who couldn't even successfully buy a porn mag, let alone deter subway muggers back in New York) become an icon.

Although there are fine homages to Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Sergei Eisenstein and Harold Lloyd, this is a scattershot offering full of apolitical mockery. Yet, Allen frequently patronises Latin America and not even the scathing assaults on the State Department quite atone for his careless choice of clichés and caricatures. But he would learn from his mistakes and, in Play It Again, Sam (1972), he stumbled upon the nebbish persona that would become his screen trademark.

Despondent after being abandoned by wife Susan Anspach, Allen takes the advice of his movie hero, Humphrey Bogart (Jerry Lacy), and reluctantly allows himself to be cheered up by his best friend Tony Roberts, only to find himself falling for his wife, Diane Keaton.

This engaging adaptation of Allen's hit 1969 stage play was inspired by his impending divorce from second wife, Louise Lasser. However, he would veer off into the future (Sleeper, 1973) and the Napoleonic past (Love and Death, 1975) before returning to this archetypical New Yorker in Annie Hall (1977). Ironically, an east coast union strike forced Herbert Ross to shoot the picture in San Francisco, but the Bogie-dependent loser is essentially the template for Allen's Manhattan Man.

Perhaps just as significantly, the Broadway production also brought Allen into contact with Diane Keaton. He had only agreed to a casting call to appease producer David Merrick, but was instantly struck by the kooky Californian and began to rework the scenario to her advantage. Indeed, so intense was their personal and professional attraction that, part way through the 453-performance run, Keaton briefly moved into Allen's apartment, where he was in the process of reworking the screenplay for Take the Money and Run.

Woody was initially content for either Dustin Hoffman or Richard Benjamin to play the lead, as he still saw himself primarily as a comedian rather than an actor. But the success of Bananas persuaded Paramount to stick with the original stage trio of Allen, Keaton and Tony Roberts - although this was to be the last time that Allen would allow another director to handle one of his screenplays.

Allen opened out the play by adding a couple of party and disco sequences and some self-lacerating reveries involving his ex-wife. However, the storyline retained its original three-act structure and this staginess is occasionally intrusive. But he was still able to imbue the action with a passion for cinema, not only through the memorabilia in Allen's apartment and Bogie's ethereal appearances, but also through the clips from Casablanca that reinforced the central celebration of movies as an escape from the pressures of daily life.

By the time he came to make Manhattan (1979), Allen had won Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for Annie Hall. He had also been nominated for Best Actor. But he was so distraught at seeing the rough cut of his follow-up that he asked producers Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe if United Artists would consider destroying every frame if he did his next film for them for free. However, thanks to editor Sandy Morse, this paean to his home town emerged as Allen's most effortlessly European feature.

Disatisfied with his lot and uncomfortable in his relationship with teenage drama student Mariel Hemingway, Allen's burnt-out TV writer begins work on a novel. However, he quickly becomes besotted with Diane Keaton, a neurotic intellectual who is having an affair with his best friend, Michael Murphy.

Accompanied by George Gershwin's sublime Rhapsody in Blue, the shots of the fireworks over Central Park, of Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State Building and dawn coming up over the skyscrapers may seen quintessentially New York - and some have even claimed the picture as an East Coast equivalent to Orson Welles's The Lady from Shanghai (1948). But this is, in fact, Allen's take on Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960), with his character discovering the empty decadence of the city's chattering classes in much the same way that Marcello Mastroianni realised the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of Rome's elite.

Filmed by Gordon Willis in Panavision on Technicolor stock that was printed in monochrome, this is not just Allen's most beautiful film, it's also the most personal. The absence of colour reflects Allen's disillusion with both his career and the circle of friends with whom he has surrounded himself. They are all writers - Murphy is working on a biography of Eugene O'Neill, Keaton is a critic and columnist and ex-wife Meryl Streep (who left him for her lesbian lover) is writing a feminist tract on their marriage that he knows will lead to his socio-sexual humiliation. Moreover, their conversation is peppered with allusions to creative artists, from Strindberg and Kafka to Fellini, Ingmar Bergman and Groucho Marx.

Yet, Allen consistently denigrates the one person who offers him an escape from all this shallow pretension and he only realises Hemingway's importance when he includes her in his charming litany of crucial pleasures. Typically, the critics chose to castigate Allen for choosing a 17 year-old blonde as his soulmate. But she symbolises the energy and excitement that he had forgotten existed within his privileged enclave and her parting exhortion to have faith in people is the solution to his emotional and artistic crises.

Stung by a hostile article by novelist Joan Didion and the Academy's snubbing of Interiors (1978), his first stab at serious drama, Allen changed the tone of Stardust Memories (1980) - his treatise on creativity and celebrity - so that the amusing soul-searching became a sour, disillusioned assault on the critical community and the movie-going public.

Unable to think of a suitable ending for his new movie, Allen attends a weekend film seminar, where he seeks release from the pressure and cheapness of celebrity and memories of former lover Charlotte Rampling in meaningless flings with married French mistress Marie-Christine Barrault and violinist Jessica Harper.

Basing his living nightmare on Judith Crist's Tarrytown seminars, Allen launched a pitiless fusilade against gnomic academics, sycophantic columnists and fans in all their eager ignorance. But the people he was most scathing towards were the liggers who hoped to cash in on their encounters with the famous, by pushing a script, seeking charitable patronage or simply putting a high-profile notch on their bedpost. Indeed, had he not met Mia Farrow during post-production and embarked upon a new romance, this might have been an even more pessimistic diatribe, as Allen resisted the temptation to kill off one character and decided to leave his anti-hero feeling vaguely positive about his relationship with Barrault, despite the mixed response accorded the movie that had near driven him to distraction.

Although it occasionally referenced Ingmar Bergman, this was very much Allen's 8½. Indeed, he even opened it with a train sequence that echoed the ending that Federico Fellini had discarded from his 1963 reverie on the torment of creative block. But while Allen's angst recalled that of Fellini's alter ego (Marcello Mastroianni), other incidents were clearly autobiographical. Rampling's character was modelled on Louise Lasser (who took an uncredited cameo, along with many other satirical victims), while Og the alien got to repeat the fans' favourite lament by asking Allen why he no longer made movies like his `early funny ones'.

But critics and audiences alike found Gordon Willis's wide-angled close-ups unnecessarily cruel and the edge imparted by new art director Santo Loquasto and editor Sandy Morse a touch too strident. Moreover, the murder of John Lennon shortly after the film went on release eerily mimicked Allen's dream of dying at the hands of a demented devotee and added to the melancholic mood that has since hung over this frank, if ungallant confessional tirade.

The imminence of a Directors' Guild strike in the summer of 1981 prompted Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe to rush the period confection A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982) into production. Buoyed by the experience of shooting the human chameleon gem Zelig (which was now in its extensive post-production) and the freshness of his relationship with Farrow, Allen wrote the screenplay in just three weeks.

The amorous temperature rises when pompous professor José Ferrer and his younger fiancée Mia Farrow come to stay with his cousin Mary Steenburgen, her amateur inventor husband (Allen) and his doctor friend Tony Roberts and his free-spirited nurse, Julie Hagerty.

Although Allen always denied the similarity, it's hard to resist comparisons with both Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) and A Little Night Music (1973), the Stephen Sondheim musical it inspired. However, the luminosity of Gordon Willis's photography also recalls Jean Renoir's rural delight, Une Partie de Compagne (1936) and his darker chateau melodrama, La Règle du Jeu (1939).

Allen insisted Smiles was his least favourite Bergman film and, unfortunately, this is one of his own least persuasive pictures. Even in the mouths of turn-of-the-century intellectuals, the very modern conversation rings hollow too often and, despire the Mendolssohn on the soundtrack, the atmosphere stubbornly refuses to become whimsical.

Part of the problem lies in Allen's own inability to tailor his standard delivery style to a flightier than usual character. But, more damaging is the suspicion that he doesn't really believe in his material. It may have been written in the throes of passion, but, for all its midsummer madness, the script regularly casts doubt on the wisdom of falling in love and succumbing to the foolish fancies that it invariably compels normally rational people to pursue. Moreover, Allen betrays a nagging doubt that his own personal and professional idyll will last and this fatalism introduces a faintly cynical note that curdles the action's exuberance and romantic idealism.

Ferrer (who was mischievously cast for his inveterate grandiloquence) and Roberts are much more convincing, as the pompous urban bourgeois seduced by their return to nature, while Farrow's fragile beauty perfectly captures the ethereality of the film's fleeting wit. But Steenburgen and Haggerty are perhaps most amusing, as the mirror opposites afflicted by guilt-racked frigidity and gleeful promiscuity.

Leo Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina that `all happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way' and Allen always claimed the Russian's novel was his primary inspiration for Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). However, its focus on three siblings recalls Interiors, while the linking of autobiography, showbusiness and family celebration also echoes Ingmar Bergman's late masterpiece, Fanny and Alexander (1983).

Indeed, the film referencing continues when Allen (whose neuroses and hypochondria had briefly driven him towards Catholicism) finds salvation in the Marx Brothers classic Duck Soup (1933). Yet, for all its screen antecedents, the use of voice-overs and the 16 chapter headings give the action a distinctly bookish feel.

The acting, however, occasionally tends towards theatricality, with Michael Caine being particularly guilty of deliberated delivery in his Oscar-winning turn. In mitigation, however, he found Allen's working methods less than conducive and was reined in when he attempted to be more overtly comic. Max von Sydow and Barbara Hershey were likewise told to stick to the grand design when they suggested an alternate reading of the showdown between their disenchanted lovers.

Along with Allen, Mia Farrow seems most comfortable with the tone, although she was less than amused to discover just how much of their own lives Allen had slipped into the screenplay. The brain tumour related to the director's own scare during Manhattan (1979), while he conceded that the three male characters reflected facets of his own personality. But Maureen O'Sullivan (Farrow's real-life mother) refused to play opposite her daughter unless some of the more blatant references to Mia and her sisters, Tia and Stephanie, were removed.

Several scenes involving Caine and Hershey's affair were also cut. But, ultimately, Allen had to add the climactic dinner after friends at preview screenings objected to the ambiguous Interiors-like ending. The resulting picture was his most mature work to date and his witty, literate screenplay deserved its Oscar as much as Dianne Wiest's superbly realised Best Supporting performance.