Who Knew?
Who knew Woody Allen and I had so much in common? I will explain in a minute. But first, a story:
About a decade ago I thought very seriously about trying to write a biography of the pioneering tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins. What ultimately dissuaded me as much as anything else was reading a piece in the New York Times Book Review about a new biography of Louis Armstrong. The reviewer made mincemeat of the book. Whether it was cowardice or wisdom I don’t know, but I had a vision of myself spending years of my life writing about somebody else’s, only to have one review send up my hard work in a puff of smoke.
This Christmas my sister gave me a copy of Pops, a new biography of Armstrong, written by Terry Teachout . . . the man who wrote that review. Ponder that a moment.
I’m enjoying the book. I just got to the part about “Potato Head Blues,” probably my favorite of Armstrong’s tunes, and was happy to see that Teachout seems to share my opinion.
Which brings me, believe it or not, back to Woody Allen. “Potato Head Blues,” Teachout writes, “was cited by Woody Allen in Manhattan as one of the things that make life ‘worth living,’ along with Marlon Brando, Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, Frank Sinatra, ‘Swedish movies,’ the slow movement of the Jupiter Symphony, Gustave Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale, and Paul Cezanne’s apples and pears.”
A Sentimental Education, that wonderfully vivid, completely unsentimental novel! Brando, of The Godfather and On the Waterfront!Those great reds, yellows and greens of Cezanne’s apples! I leave it to Woody to explain his personal life, and you could count the black actors in his films on the fingers of one thumbless hand, but when it comes to taste in art, the man and I are linked. Now to see Manhattan again . . .
Terry Teachout’s conflict of interest is not surprising at all. He is an ideological hack working at Commentary. One of his most recent pieces was an attack on Hitchcock (though I suspect Hitchcock’s reputation will surive) in which he quotes the usual suspects whose opinions get selected for a repeated airing every time someone decides to draw a bead on Hitch. Thus, we get Ingmar Bergman’s ancient criticism of him (though this did not keep Bergman from ripping off Hitchcock for “Hour of the Wolf”) and no contrary indication of the myriad filmmakers who revere Hitchcock. Teachout’s method is not just to ignore contrary evidence, it simply doesn’t exist for him. I cannot speak to the merits of his book on Armstrong as I have not read it. But his appalling ignorance of the cinema would disqualify him from being a film critic anywhere other than the precinct in which he resides.
So what’s your take on Manhattan? What’s better, it or Annie Hall? Not that it’s crucial to rank everything.