6 - I Gotta Be Me: The Remade Woman and Replaying the Woman’s Part in Woody Allen’s Movies

Summary

Abstract

This chapter examines Allen's staging of female identity and the relations between men and women by remaking comedies that impressed and influenced him in his youth. The work explores how Tracy Ullmann's character in Small Time Crooks (2000) replays Judy Holliday's Billie Dawn in George Cukor's Born Yesterday (1950), how To Rome With Love (2012) restages Federico Fellini's The White Sheik (Lo sceicco bianco) (1952), and how the underrated Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001) revisits the ambience of the Bob Hope and Madeleine Carroll pairing in My Favorite Blonde (1942). The chapter explores the ways in which Allen's twenty-first-century take on the woman's experience and his understanding of femininity are deeply rooted in the cinematic past.

Keywords: remake, intertextuality, European cinema

This chapter investigates how Woody Allen used old films to portray new relations between the sexes. It begins this exploration of the rehearsal of past movie tropes in Allen's work with a consideration of Play It Again, Sam (1972), the movie that first posed the question of repetition that pervades so many Woody Allen movies. It then goes on to investigate three clusters of films in which Woody Allen consciously stages female identity by remaking stories that impressed and influenced him while growing up in New York. In Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001), Allen traces the relation between men and women by drawing on the ambience of the Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour or Rhonda Fleming pairings in such films as My Favorite Blonde (1942) or The Great Lover (1949). The chapter then turns to how Tracy Ullmann's character in Small Time Crooks (2000) replays Judy Holliday's Billie Dawn in George Cukor's Born Yesterday (1950). Finally, the essay unpacks the ways in which Allen has restaged Fellini's movies, and therefore his women, exploring Sweet and Lowdown's (1999) mirroring of La Strada (1954), and To Rome With Love's (2012) re-enactment of The White Sheik (Lo sceicco bianco, 1952).