Woody Allen: "Death Knocks" (pp. 1095-1102)-3

ASSIGNMENT 13

Woody Allen (b. 1935)        

Woody Allen is one of film's best-known figures.Writing and directing a movie most every year since 1965, his collection ranges from comedy to the dramatic. Allen retains significant creative control over his projects, eliciting envy from almost any other film producer in Hollywood. Despite small production budgets, he also commands the ability to attract top-name talent to his films.  His most recent film, Midnight in Paris, is up for an Academy award this year.

Woody Allen was born Allan Koningsberg on December 1, 1935, in Brooklyn, New York. As a child, he was introverted, hated school and spent most of his free time alone in his room practicing magic tricks or playing his clarinet. As a teen, he began his career by reading his own one-line jokes to New York columnists Walter Winchell and Earl Wilson. In 1952 he changed his name to Woody Allen. Since that time, Allen has created over thirty films, as well as books, plays and comedy work.  Covering a wide variety of genres, from documentary (Zelig), to laugh-a-minute comedies (Sleeper, Love and Death), to theater-style dramas (Interiors, September), to musicals (Everyone Says I Love You), and everywhere in between (Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and her Sisters), Woody Allen has always given his audience a film well worth their time and money.

 

“Death Knocks” (pp. 1095-1102)

Those familiar with Woody Allen’s films will know that death is one of his continuing preoccupations and will probably agree that his is the kind of mind that could turn the solemn subject into an uproarious farce.  From the medieval play Everyman to Ingmar Berman’s The Seventh Seal, the appearance of Death to announce to the protagonist that his time has come has been the subject of the most solemn examinations of the meaning of life.  We might say of Allen’s farce that it is typically modern in its implications that death (like much of life) can best be seen as a farce.

Allen’s play depends on a long literary tradition in the dramatization of Death’s calling. , especially to Bergman's great The Seventh Seal (Allen paid high tribute to Bergman's films just after the great filmaker's death in early of August of this year). Death is in black, of course, as he must be, but Allen hilariously has him in a black hood and skintight black clothes.  Death appears, as he always does, unannounced, but Allen’s figure is a fumbler and bumbler who barely makes it into Ackerman’s house in one piece.  Ackerman, who has probably seen Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, naturally wants to play chess to gain time, but Allen’s unintellectual Death doesn’t play chess–he plays gin rummy and, of course, loses.  And, having lost, he is turned out of doors penniless, with no money to pay for a motel.  What a humiliation for the most awesome figure of the human imagination.