Woody Allen

I've been thinking about Woody Allen recently, having just read a biography of him by John Baxter. What a difficult, complex personality he has, yet reading about him illuminates a great deal of the darker highways and byways of his life.
I've always loved his films and think that some of them are, and will remain the best films made by an American in the late 20th century. For me, his finest film is Crimes and Misdemeanours, a film I can watch repeatedly, such is its richness and sheer entertainment value, coupled with plenty to think about. I've never managed to sit through his Bergman-esque ventures into seriousness, such as Interiors, though I've heard that Another Woman is worth watching. I think that his best films retain an element of comedy, even when it's deepest black, as in Deconstructing Harry, another favourite of mine.
I've heard he's famously bad with actors - I don't know how true this is, but they seem to queue up to work with him. He's brought the best out of many of them - certainly Mia Farrow has never produced such good performances with anyone else. And Judy Davis, Alan Alda, Martin Landau, Dianne Weist, Barbara Hershey, Max von Sydow among many others have produced their best work for him.
Crimes and Misdemeanours was the beginning of what I believe is his best period - his 1990s films are his funniest and cleverest. Bullets Over Broadway, Mighty Aphrodite, Radio Days, The Purple Rose of Cairo are all films I can watch over and over again. They have an inventiveness, style and lightness of touch which recalls such masters as Preston Sturges.
His work became darker for a while, and Husbands and Wives and Deconstructing Harry are as black as night, but still highly watchable and entertaining, with some great performances.
In recent years his output has been extremely variable - I enjoyed Sweet and Lowdown and Match Point very much, but Melinda and Melinda less so. His most recent work has failed to find a distributor in this country - shamefully, though I suppose it'll eventually find its way to DVD. He's over 70 now, so is finding it difficult to find suitable parts to play, but Woody Allen substitutes can be found, though they vary enormously in quality. John Cusack managed it very successfully in Bullets over Broadway, but I've written elsewhere of Kenneth Branagh's disastrous attempt in Celebrity.
He seems to have fallen in love with London, and Match Point, while it had the same relationship with reality as his portraits of New York, yet I really don't think it matters. After all, film is an imaginative response to life, and produces its own form of poetry. Manhattan celebrates New York, and is a personal response to someone to whom it is central in his life. His portrait of London may be a fairy-tale version, but what's wrong with that? Realism is an overrated quality in film - see the films of Powell and Pressburger, slated when released but now hailed as masterpieces.
Allen's London in Match Point captured perfectly its excitement and buzz - those scenes in Tate Modern with the view over the river had an iconic quality about them. I've heard he's making more films in London, so we'll see....
I've glossed over the Mia Farrow/Soon Yi episode - what can you say? One will never know what really happened, and Allen is clearly a complicated and damaged personality. But Farrow is as well, with her compulsive children-collecting and serial relationships, so there's probably a lot more to it all than meets the eye. But does it affect my view of Allen as a film-maker? Not at all. Deeply unpleasant people of all kinds have made great films, and they should be judged according to their quality not by the personality and private lives of the people who made them.
On the subject of great film directors - I haven't forgotten about the death this week of 2 of the greatest, Antonioni and Bergman, and I'll be writing about them soon, when I've had a chance to think about them at length.