Woody & Mia: The Films

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It's Thanksgiving and "Hannah and Her Sisters", a true Thankgiving film, has the most votes.

Broadway Danny Rose. Because it’s the only movie where she actually played a character.

Notice though how she never takes off her big sunglasses in it. Because if she had revealed her waif eyes at any point It would have taken you right out of the movie.

Still, a great performance.

Hannah and Her Sisters is nearly perfect. Nicholson would’ve been better in the Michael Caine role, but Caine was fine.

I voted Husbands and Wives. Crimes and Misdemeanors is great, but everyone in the cast overshadowed her. Actually that's true of all the movies, but I like H&W better.

In hindsight, I think Hannah and Her Sisters is when something changed in their collaboration/relationship and it seemingly started to sour. Except for Radio Days, he only really cast her as a drip from then on.

I voted for Broadway Danny Rose which I find to be hugely entertaining- I watch it on a yearly basis and never fail to see something new.

Radio Days is perfection, but now that most of my family (who grew up in that era) has passed, I find it unbearably sad.

However there's not a weak film in the bunch, they are all fascinating and very entertaining. It truly was Mia's Golden Era.

Radio Days.

Love a few but I choose Purple Rose. Funny and heartbreaking, Mia is just perfect in it. There are lines I quote to this day. Also, I think Judy Davis is freakin’ hilarious in Husbands and Wives. “Don’t defend your sex!”

I loved Manhattan Murder Mystery.

"Zelig" is my favorite, but "Purple Rose" is probably the best of the roles he wrote for Mia.

^omg I misremembered Mia as being in it. It came out in ‘93, a year or so after the Soon-Yi debacle. I think Diane Keaton played the role that would’ve been Mia’s.

R6, I'm with you on those two films. They are comedy classics. Absolutely perfect.

I like Mia’s adaptation of her ex-husband’s ex-wife’s pop hit “With My Daddy in the Attic” that she quoted from in Woody’s child abuse trial.

I haven't see every film listed, but of those I watched, it's Mia's performance as Sally White in Radio Days. I love her before and after voice lessons persona ("hark I hear the cannons roar...") and Mia falls back into the before version during the New Years celebration at the movie's end briefly and then recovers herself and rallies everyone to the rooftop. Delightful to watch.

And for me, Radio Days is a marvelous film, as well cast as Broadway Danny Rose and Purple Rose. Each of those movies showed there were still really fine actors who were not "Hollywood beautiful", working.

I think she was most effective in Purple Rose. She had more chemistry with Danny Aiello and Jeff Daniels than she ever did with Woody.

My mother always hated Woody Allen but I played Radio Days for her and it brought back such strong memories for her, she was the same age as Allen and the memories he had were many of her own. The music, the memory of the girl who died in the well after the heroic effects to save her, the songs, the life and the whole memory of those days in New York so perfectly constructed in that movie that it made her cry. I felt so bad for showing it to her while she said, 'so many good men lost in that war, so many good memories of the way things were in those days'. He had made such a lovely tribute to it. I always think of my mother when I see that film which is very hard for me to do actually. The ending when the characters are on the roof on New Years and the neon sign of a top hat going down while he says "And I've never forgotten any of those people...or any of the voices we used to hear on the radio. Although the truth is...with the passing of each New Year's Eve...those voices do seem to grow dimmer and dimmer" always breaks my heart and makes me think of my mother who is gone now, herself.

R17, oh man, you do sum up Radio Days nicely. It's a small and lovely film and Allen's closing voice over is a pitch perfect code. And Mia is delightful in it.

Lovely, r17.

R17 You are bringing tears to my eyes.

Did Mia ever show her tits or fanny?

If you were talking about the best film featuring Mia, it would have to be Radio Days or Hannah and Her Sisters. But if you wanted the best performance by Mia, it would definitely be Purple Rose Of Cairo. It's the only Woody film where she was perfect for the role.

R12 ironic because that role plays like it was written for Diane. I cannot imagine Mia doing well in that role for a minute - it’s just not her wheelhouse at all.

Diane in ]Manhattan murder mystery was great. 'You're such a fuddy duddy" cracked me up. Diane stepped in when the whole Woody/Mia thing blew up. It did seem more like it was written for her instead of Mia and that may just have been Woody's style. Too bad he didn't marry Diane and not get in so much trouble but ce la vie. I can't tell you how many times I've watched Hannah and her sisters. I love that movie. Mia fit that part to a tee. Did you all realize that Soon-yi is in that movie? She looks like a little girl but she was born in 1970 and that movie came out in 86 so she is either 16 or 15 when they shot it. She's in a few scenes, so is Moses Farrow.

I really liked Mia's real mother in it, Maureen O'Sullivan.

Crimes and Misdemeanors is the best film, but Purple Rose of Cairo is Farrow's best performance for him. Possibly her best for anyone.

[quote]In hindsight, I think Hannah and Her Sisters is when something changed in their collaboration/relationship and it seemingly started to sour. Except for Radio Days, he only really cast her as a drip from then on.

Yes. It is significant to me that their characters are shown as right for each other in Zelig and Broadway Danny Rose; as amicable exes in Hannah; and then with a negative outcome in New York Stories: Oedipus Wrecks, Crimes, and Husbands.

But I think she always got good roles in his films. Some were just more central than others. She was far along in pregnancy at the time of Another Woman, and he found a way to make that symbolically important in the story, with the childless older Rowlands character opposite her. Alice was a real comedic showcase for Farrow, and she was up to it. In Husbands, Gabe and Sally's breakup scene is so well written...one of my favorite individual scenes in an Allen film, even though Judy Davis and Sydney Pollack steal the picture.

I watched Radio Days a few weeks ago, and ever since, I’ve had a hankering for meatloaf after seeing the actress molding a huge meatloaf in a big glass casserole while sitting on the front room Davenport….Who the hell makes meatloaf sitting down?

[quote]that role plays like it was written for Diane. I cannot imagine Mia doing well in that role for a minute - it’s just not her wheelhouse at all.

I think he reshaped Manhattan Murder Mystery's script with the recasting. The original plan was that Farrow would be the more cautious and reserved member of the couple, and Woody would be the one who wanted to break into the maybe-killer's apartment to look for clues and all that. With Keaton, it called for a different dynamic. She was the one with suspicions she couldn't get out of her mind, and he was the nervous sidekick.

[quote]My mother always hated Woody Allen but I played Radio Days for her and it brought back such strong memories for her, she was the same age as Allen and the memories he had were many of her own.

Mine too (also gone now), R17. She disliked WA as a rule, but she loved Radio Days, because she remembered that period so vividly. The other two I can remember her enjoying were Zelig and Take the Money and Run.

I like Mia in September.

I like Mia year-round!

Manhattan Murder Mystery was initially a subplot in Annie Hall, but they wnt in a different direction and excised it from the script.

[quote]Gabe and Sally's breakup scene

"Gabe and Judy's," I meant.

R25 - I always found Sydney Pollack a better director than actor. I think Mia said Woody offered her either female part in Husbands and Wives but it's hard to imagine her in the Judy Davis part.

A pleasure to just remember and appreciate their film collaborations.

Purple Rose of Cairo is Woody's valentine to Mia. Sometimes a director reveals his adoration unexpectadely. He did so in many films with Farrow - because he took her previously wan persona and let her do EVERYTHING she was capable of. She was capable of so much. Hannah and her Sisters is not just a love letter - and Broadway Danny Rose is fantastic and Radio Days is crazy good story telling with Mia (and Diane Keaton) in outstanding juxtaposition to the sentimental story. I'm a Woody Allen fan and his best films are the ones he made with Mia. She was his great muse. How sad it all turned out.

By the time of Husbands and Wives he utilized less comedic and attractive aspects of her character. MIA delivered the damn WORK.

Another Woman and Alice are also pretty great films.

We can SEE how much in LOVE Woody was with Mia in his films with her. All of her.

And they're damn good movies too. He always finds something interesting for her to do and she always finds a way to be interesting. Crimes and MisDemeanors is one of his greatest and most jaded films and Mia is not the center of it. But she glows and gives hope, but later happily sells out in a more clean way than the major characters. I don't think he's sending a big message about them - but he presents her once again as his lovely intelligent muse - and allows her to escape the moral dilemma.

It wouldn't play out that way in life for them.

Yes, r25. You said it very well. Thank you.

R21 Not in any of Woody's films but she showed her tits in Robert Altman's A Wedding (1978).

R36 did she take off her knickers too?

Mia was no Bette Midler.

Why did Woody do this? Is wasn't one of his movies.

r28 He must've been friends with Paul Mazursky.

Ironically, soon after Mia split with Woody, she and Paul played a married couple in Miami Rhapsody, which is just like a Woody film right down to the opening credits. SJP stars, basically playing a dry-run of Carrie Bradshaw.

R38, I can't believe a film with Woody Allen and Bette Midler , and not a damn funny moment in the whole film.

Love all the mentions of Manhatten Murder Mystery. Not a film that gets a lot of critical attention, but just totally silly and funny. So much chemistry between Keaten (who I don't usually care for) and Allen. Farrow tended to be such a downer in Woody's films (although it worked in PROC)

Wasn't Manhattan Murder Mystery the one where Woody and Diane talked all the way through the Guys & Dolls overture?

yes he also had people talking in movies like in Crimes & Misdemeanors and Match Point.

Re: Scenes from a Mall. Allen liked Paul Mazursky and his previous movies, and he liked Bette Midler. He says in his book that actually making it was a good time. It was an easy shoot, as the mall interiors were filmed in Queens and Connecticut. He was well compensated, even though the movie had a low budget for a '90s Touchstone movie with big stars (which actually allowed it to be a modest hit financially; it made three times its budget).

It was an awful movie, though. It has minor historical significance as the movie that made Pauline Kael say "basta," although with the state of her health at the time, that was going to happen sooner or later anyway. From an interview in 1999 or 2000: "The week I quit, I hadn't planned on it. But I wrote up a couple of movies, and I read what I'd written, and it was just incredibly depressing. I thought, I've got nothing to share from this. One of them was that movie with Bette Midler and Woody Allen, Scenes from a Mall. I couldn't write another bad review of Bette Midler. I thought she was so brilliant, and when I saw her in that terrible production of Gypsy on television, my heart sank. And I'd already panned her in Beaches. How can you go on panning people in picture after picture when you know they were great just a few years before?...It's awful, particularly if you loved an actor's earlier work. And Woody Allen didn't deserve to be as bad as he was in Scenes from a Mall. I don't feel great enthusiasm about his recent movies, but I thought parts of Husbands and Wives were quite stunning...It really is depressing. You can't explain some of these things, except that it's the wrong material, the wrong costars, everything goes wrong in a movie when something goes wrong, and it's just too damn depressing to spend your life writing about that."

R37 No. Just topless standing in front of a portrait of her sister in the film.