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A refreshing burst of honesty

Earlier this month, I wrote:

Hollywood is of course notorious for this sort of thing, where actors and actresses have their notions of their own worth and talent over-inflated by agents, publicists, and the media.

So it is only fair that I point to this welcome exception to the rule – the mediocre Woody Allen:

“I’ve disappointed myself most of the time.

“People think I’m an intellectual because I wear glasses and they think I’m an artist because my films lose money.

“My relationship with the American audience is exactly the same as it has always been. They never came to see my films, and they don’t come now.

“I’ve often said that the only thing standing between me and greatness is me.”

I have a similar problem with greatness, and I’m glad to see that I am not the only one!

33 comments to A refreshing burst of honesty

  • John East

    Another troubled comic with a good selection of quotes is Spike Milligan. I suspect most of us could sympathise with:
    “All I’ve ever wanted in life is the chance to prove that money can’t buy happiness.”

  • Karl Rove

    In what way did the Gringos never go to see his films?
    If so, they’d never be shown. So how cd the Grings go and see em? F-g t-ss-r. (D’they have that word in clean-living Oz?

  • I like Woody Allen films, but he exasperates me somewhat, probably because I feel he could do better.

    When he dies, he will, I think, be remembered as someone who created a lot of truly great movie scenes, rather than a lot of truly great movies. His attitude, and I think he often says this, is that if you “step up to the plate” often enough, you will score hits, but the hits he scores are not entire movies, on the whole, just occasional bits of movies.

    My favourite bits are when the boy gets hit on the head and becomes right wing (much to his posh liberal parents’ horror), and the bit where the Woody Allen character meets up with some aliens, in Stardust Memories, which for some reason I can never find on DVD, even when all the others seem to be there.

    Oh yes, and the Greek chorus scenes in the one in which Mira Sorvino plays a prostitute. (“This is Zeus – I’m not here right now, but leave a message …”)

  • Luniversal

    Spike Milligan: self-pitying, foul-mouthed, unpleasant cove who did most of his best work before he was 40 and moaned that he wasn’t given enough opportunities by a BBC who sustained his sloppy, self-indulgent ‘Q’ series for years on titchy ratings.

    Woody Allen: falsely modest. His films *do* make money– not a lot, but more than most– which is why he has worked longer than almost any US director alive. They have a niche middlebrow/arthouse audience in the States, a good following in continental Europe and the ‘name’ actors work for low fees and prestige, as in subsidised theatre. He’s like a one-man Merchant Ivory in that way.

    Allen’s best work, like Milligan’s, was completed in the first decade of his career, up to c. 1978; he has since embroidered on it and imitated himself with diminishing returns, but nebbish humour larded with elementary metaphysics is not for everybody, least of all when its author is a near-recluse who no longer has any clue how most of his fellow Americans think, talk or act, let alone Brits. (Preview audiences for ‘Match Point’ were sniggering in the wrong places at his faux pas.)

    Allen often panders to superior European notions of the uncultured Yank, but, like Godard, he is commercially shrewd enough to have plenty of good-looking young actresses wandering around in his films. Still. at least he eschews the worst profanity and crudity of the contemporary American cinema, shuns CGI, doesn’t let his runtimes sprawl and tries to be literate, which is a lot to get away with in these dreadful days.

  • John East

    Luniversal,
    “Spike Milligan: self-pitying, foul-mouthed, unpleasant cove….”

    You didn’t like him then. A more sympathetic interpretation would be that he was a manic depressive, troubled by mental problems all of his life.

    As for Woody Allen, I agree his earlier stuff was good, especially Sleeper, it’s a shame that little of his output ever appears on TV.

  • Verity

    The same day, or the next, they ran an interview with Mel Brookes and that was funny! He is redoing The Producers as a complete musical film. After that, he is going to make Young Frankenstein into a theatrical musical.

    The interviewer said, well if you’re redoing your old movies as musicals, you have enough material to keep you going for the next 20 years.”

    Brookes replied, “But will God keep me going for the next 20 years” Pause. “Let’s hope he dies first.”

  • John K

    Spike Milligan: self-pitying, foul-mouthed, unpleasant cove who did most of his best work before he was 40 and moaned that he wasn’t given enough opportunities by a BBC who sustained his sloppy, self-indulgent ‘Q’ series for years on titchy ratings.

    Or then again a brave chap who fought in North Africa and Italy, and never really got over the nervous breakdown he had after being pinned down under mortar fire for several hours, despite which he revolutionised the stale world of comedy in the 1950’s.

  • Johnathan Pearce

    What John K. said. Milligan’s war memoirs are brilliant.

  • Yeah Milligan is alright in short bursts. I have friends who adore him and he did inspire my fave group of comedians Monty Python.

    Allen on the other hand has not really recovered from shagging/marrying his adopted daughter. That did not help him much in the US.

  • J

    “self-pitying, foul-mouthed, unpleasant cove..”

    Sure, and that makes his jokes less funny how exactly?

    Anyway, you try getting conscripted into the army and shelled for hours and see how much fun you have afterwards.

    What he did with the Goons was not only genuis, and very funny, but also revolutionised comedy for the next 50 years, and onwards. The fact that he went mad and didn’t do much afterwards is neither here nor there.

  • Verity

    AID – He didn’t shag and marry “his adopted daughter”.
    He shagged/married his then girlfriend’s adopted daughter. Allen was not a father figure to any of her 12 or so adopted children. In fact, he avoided them by living in an apartment on the other side of Central Park. He never moved in with Farrow.

  • Kim du Toit

    Dork Humor: Woody Allen is not funny. [/unclothed emperor warning]

    Broad Comedy: Mel Brooks is NOT FUNNY AT ALL. [points to “unfunny” in OED, where pic of Brooks can be found]

    Surreal Comedy: The best thing one can say about Milligan is that he was screamingly funny DESPITE severe mental illness. Setting the world speed record on a Wurlitzer beats the fart scene in Blazing Saddles by about a million miles, and Neddy Seagoon would have kicked Woody’s dorky ass (hell, Eccles could have kicked Woody’s ass).

    And Hercules Gritpipe-Thynne could have buggered them both, and should be an example to us all.

  • Verity

    Kim du Toit = FUNNY!

  • Karl Rove

    How can you marry a woman and not adopt her children, at least in your affection?

    But then, as Wooden himself said, masturbation is sex with the one person you really care about.

    Still, like Spike, he is quite funny.

    Python wd’ve happened anyway, with or without Spike.
    Surrealism is amusing in itself (as a Ding an sich, as the Germans say).

  • Verity

    Karl Rove – Woody Allen never married Mia Farrow. He never even moved in with her. He was just her boyfriend. He kept a big distance between them. Central Park is huge and he lived on the other side.

  • John Rippengal

    I always thought that Grippipe Thynne was a Peter Sellars character??

  • John- Yes, Sellars did the Gridpipe-Tynne voice (and the British Army’s finest, Major Dennis Bloodnok, and Bluebottle, and Henry Crun) but Milligan was the moving genius behind the Goons and wrote the scripts. Sometimes he had help, sometimes they ad-libbed, but, it was Milligan behind it all.

  • The fart scene I cold do without, but the Yidish speaking Indians is a classic!

    BTW, Scott, I bet that Woody’s refrshing burst of honesty had at least something to do with him looking at the mirror now and then.

  • Mel Brooks’ last film (Life Stinks) er stunk…but otherwise I rather like his movies.

  • Luniversal

    The fact that Milligan was a coward under fire does not affect the proposition that he was funny for only 15 years afterwards.

  • Verity

    C’mon! Allen wasn’t being honest. He was being an entertaining nebbish (sp). Disarming, unaffected. The interview was interesting because he totally manipulated his interviewer – the dire Andrew Marr, if I remember right – throwing him off guard all the time. Woody Allen dominated the interview because he has a quicker intelligence and wit. He kept throwing the interviewer onto the left foot with his apparent transparent sincerity.

  • Verity, I agree. I quoted Scott’s title verbatim, but it should have read “modesty”, instead of “honesty”. I still think that his looks (oy!) help him keep things in perspective, an advantage most other celebs don’t have.

  • Johnathan Pearce

    Luniversal writes that Milligan was a coward under fire. Is it just me or is Luniversal just full of sh*t?

  • karl Rove

    Verity
    you’re wrong as usual.
    They weren’t married, true. But they adopted 2 kids together (some distance!) and had one child, Satchel.
    (Some distance!). Satchel (!) is now estranged.

  • Julian Taylor

    Wow, shellshock is cowardice? Luniversal you would have been right at home under General Haig and maybe you would have been more content if Milligan had been shot at dawn for leaving the remains of his howitzer after it and most of his battery had been blown up?

    Certainly some very famous comedy shows in the UK are directly attributable to Spike Milligan’s humour – The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin is certainly one of them and John Cleese acknowledged that without Milligan and The Goon Show then That Was The Week That Was would not have existed and consequently Do Not Adjust Your Set/Monty Python’s Flying Circus would have been canned by their commissioning editors. Cleese refers to Milligan as “the great god of us all”.

    What I found particularly funny, and I am sure that Milligan would also have found that hilarious, was that after his death the church refused to permit anyone to put on his gravestone his chosen epitaph – “I told you I was ill” — instead it was decided that it should be written in Irish, to prevent any offence to the English.

  • Verity

    “I told you I was ill”. Hardly original. That was what Dorothy Parker threatened to demand for her gravestone back in the 1920s.

  • John K

    The fact that Milligan was a coward under fire does not affect the proposition that he was funny for only 15 years afterwards.

    What a rotten thing to say. Milligan did his bit on active service until he could do no more. He stayed friends with his army mates for years afterwards, and that doesn’t happen to cowards.

  • Karl Rove

    VERITY.

    Satchel.

  • Verity

    Karl Rove, I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about and won’t be responding to any more of your snide, hate-filled, aggressive posts.

    Go back to your lovefest with Tomahawk.

  • Karl Rove

    Verity – no need to be hysterical.

    Satchel is the son of Woody & Mia. You maintained that they were never close. Having a child together might be seen as close.

    Who’s Tomahawk?

  • Luniversal

    John K: “What a rotten thing to say. Milligan did his bit on active service until he could do no more. He stayed friends with his army mates for years afterwards, and that doesn’t happen to cowards.”

    Not strictly true. It is not so much that he was a coward (I admit that was unfair) as what happened after. Milligan never returned to active service following his ‘nervous breakdown’, but got a cushy number building up his intended showbiz career. Some of his ex-comrades, such as his best friend Harry Edgington, were so appalled by his semi-fictitious memoirs that they broke with him. We may suspect that guilt lay behind his obsessive raking-over of a brief period most old soldiers prefer to file away. (FWIW my father, a gunner officer in Italy at that time, loathed Milligan and would never watch him.)

    Spike was one of nature’s ingrates: monstrously selfish, a fake-suicider and fake Irishman. and a prima donna with racist and violently misanthropic tendencies that cannot all be blamed on his wartime misfortunes. Thousands of servicemen emerged as more decent specimens of humanity.

    Many of those pros who paid fulsome tribute to Spike’s ‘influence’ (dubious– he cribbed much from Beachcomber, the Marx Brothers and ITMA, and the future of comedy after the music-hallish Goons lay in the naturalism of sitcom, which Milligan’s egotism could not encompass) had blackballed him after bad experiences.

    I’m afraid there is a revisionist deluge coming about Milligan. There were hints in Humphrey Carpenter’s biography, which grows more disparaging as it progresses, but once Milligan’s wife dies the floodgates will open. At that point I shall be ready to stand up for Spike, but the soppy glow in which he is still bathed is unmerited.

  • John K

    Milligan never returned to active service following his ‘nervous breakdown’, but got a cushy number building up his intended showbiz career.

    Quite, but he did more than many. There were a lot of people who did well out of the war. Milligan did more than many, equally he did less than many others. Once he was invalided out of the front line with what would now be called PTSD I doubt there was much point putting him back in it, so the army employed him on rear echelon duties. That’s just the way things were. He wasn’t a coward, he wasn’t a hero, he was a conscript soldier who lasted as long as his nerves would let him.

    We may suspect that guilt lay behind his obsessive raking-over of a brief period most old soldiers prefer to file away.

    He may indeed have felt guilt over this. I don’t think that reflects badly on him.

    FWIW my father, a gunner officer in Italy at that time, loathed Milligan and would never watch him

    That would be of interest if your dad knew him, less so if he had just heard he was some sort of coward.

    Spike was one of nature’s ingrates: monstrously selfish, a fake-suicider and fake Irishman. and a prima donna with racist and violently misanthropic tendencies that cannot all be blamed on his wartime misfortunes.

    Well we can’t all be perfect.

    Many of those pros who paid fulsome tribute to Spike’s ‘influence’ (dubious– he cribbed much from Beachcomber, the Marx Brothers and ITMA, and the future of comedy after the music-hallish Goons lay in the naturalism of sitcom, which Milligan’s egotism could not encompass) had blackballed him after bad experiences.

    Everyone is influenced by what came before them. Spike certainly took comedy in new directions. Sometimes it worked brilliantly, often he fell flat on his face, but at least he had a go.

    Anyway, at least we are agreed that it is not fair to call him a coward.

  • Johnathan Pearce

    Luniversal does at least have the shred of decency to admit that his accusation of cowardice at Milligan, who served his country in North Africa and Italy, was unfair. Calling people cowards like that is disgusting, particularly if – as I suspect – the accuser has no experience of military life.