Woody Allen

I said yesterday that I would write about Woody Allen tomorrow and as tomorrow is today I'll write it today instead of tomorrow.

I always loved Woody Allen films for as long as I remember but I remember seeing Manhattan in Northampton for the first time. 

We moved there in the 70s and I was in 13 plays (I think) at the local theatre – the Royal.

We stayed on after I had finished the season and reared our three children there.

I did an 'A' level in Film Studies at the college there which, I think, is now a university – I hate the term 'uni' – the same as the drama school I went to in Birmingham is now a university. So I have two university alma martas!!

Northampton a small town maybe of 100,000 and is one hour up the M1 from London which is why we moved there. 

One hour by car or one hour by train but everyone knows what that really means: twenty minutes walk in to the station and then maybe half an hour or so to the destination where you are working. Nine times out of ten it would be the BBC which is around half an hour away by tube. So the travelling puts four hours on the work day.

So I was surprised to see Manhattan playing at the town centre cinema. When I got there I could see a queue stretching around the block; it was a duplex cinema and the other film was Scum which was about a borstal – a prison for the young. 

I guessed that that was what the queue was for but I was wrong; it was for the Woody Allen film.

I'll always remember the first time I saw it as it not only blew my mind it kind of blew me out of my seat. It was a Saturday screening and if it hadn't have been the final time the movie was playing I would have come again the following evening.

I kind of remember some of the lines; it opens with a shot of Manhattan with the opening bars on the clarinet of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue!

There is a narration by Woody and he is playing a writer writing a book so the first line is 'Chapter One.'

He starts a few times then goes back to chapter one and one of the lines is New York was always a city, no matter what the season, in black and white.

And that says it all.

That film is about, apart from the city, a romance between a character played by Woody and a young nubile school girl – I don't know what age she is supposed to be but it can be seen straight away that he is too old for her but, more to the point, she is too young for him. The actress who played her was 18 at the time.

When I say she was too young for him I mean – well what are you going to talk about?

That part of the action I found hard to believe but Woody wanted to make a film about the city that he loved. At the time, in real life, to use a silly phrase, Woody was dating some of the most beautiful women in the world.

These women were not after his power, or his money as they were rich movie stars. Diane Keaton for one was one of them and when we grow up we realise that women don't only go for people like Robert Redford they also go for angst intellectuals like Woody Allen, Albert Einstein etc.

Back to real life again – about twenty years ago Woody Allen married a Korean girl who was Andre Previn's daughter; his adoptive daughter when he was married to Mia Farrow. Woody was 64 and his new wife was 27 at the time.

When Woody was Mia Farrow's lover he met her adoptive daugher and they fell in love. This was something that upset Mia and Andre Previn the adoptive parents as it was like Déjà vu because when Mia was married to Frank Sinatra he was 25 years older than she was at the time and her step children were older than her – Frank Sinatra Jr etc.

So she didn't see any good in Woody and her step daughter, and accused Woody of a sexual offence against one of her daughters.

It was investigated at the time and nothing was proved and in fact another of Mia's children, a boy, said he was in the house at the time of the alleged incident and didn't believe it - and so on . . . .

But:

He has not been convicted of anything and a couple of actors have sent the fees they received from the Woody Allen films they was in to charity because of the alleged offence. 

An alleged offence that happened many years before Colin Firth worked for Woody.

I sometimes get fed up with the writings of Hadley Freeman who seems to have gone to town writing about bad men since the flood of accusations against powerful men, recently, but she, at least, kind of pointed out that Woody Allen hasn't been convicted of anything. 

And not only that but the fact that Manhattan was about an older man and a young girl shouldn't have anything to do with that old phrase – real life!

I mean look at the photo above - it's still a movie.

When I saw Manhattan that time in Northampton I kind of wished it had been someone like Robert Redford in the Woody Allen role – or even me, in my dreams, because it's a great love story.

Here is the opening – love it and be prepared to have your mind blown on two minutes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mwZYGcbQCo