Allen’s movies make finals’ week slide by a little easier

By Gary Schlueter

During the inevitable post-Thanksgiving “home-stretch” toward finals week, thoughts tend to wander from the rambunctious and concentrate more on bound materials, bounced check notices and calming, inexpensive activities.

With a working VCR in a cozy living room, students can realize the soothing and hilarious effect the works of Woody Allen have on fried and frazzled nerve endings.

Allen’s film career can be viewed, somewhat accurately, in two stages. In his early films, from 1964-74, Allen relied on his impish and comical physical presence to employ his uncanny talent at performing hilariously well-timed visual pranks which, early on, were scoffed at as being a mere extension of Three Stooges-style slap stick. These critics were quickly silenced when his topical diversity became evident.

“Take the Money and Run,” the first of two fictitious “documentaries” Allen would conceive (the second being “Zelig”) and the first film that he wrote, starred in, and directed, is the story of a bumbling criminal who never wanders further than arm’s length from the law. He misspells a note given to a bank teller he’s trying to hold up; his parents allow themselves to be interviewed only while wearing a fake nose and mustache; and he pays the dinner check with change after breaking into several gum ball machines.

In “Sleeper,” another of Allen’s early films, Allen is defrosted and brought back to life nearly 200 years after he entered a hospital for a dyspeptic ulcer. “My doctor said I’d be up in five days. He was off by 195 years,” his character says. “I knew it was too good to be true…I parked right near the hospital.”

In 1975, “Annie Hall” made it apparent that Allen saw more than just a physical reflection in the mirror. This light romantic-comedy which won the Academy Award’s Best Movie of the Year, introduced a more sociological approach to comedy. This film allowed the audience to observe the act (and at one point read the minds) of two people falling in and out of love.

“Hannah and Her Sisters,” nominated for an Academy Award, tells the story of one large family by focusing on its many different members at many different times in their lives. Allen, the constant hypochondriac, bolts out of bed moaning, “I’m dying. I’m dying. I’ve got a tumor in my head the size of a basketball. I can feel it every time I blink.” Fans of Woody Allen are knocked out by this, his most enjoyably intricate film ever.

Woody Allen, cinema’s master of man’s social instincts (does he have any competition?), can very well help these next two weeks slide by a little easier.