Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Given the maelstrom of Allen's recent life, this engaging new biography is welcome, even if not definitive. Baxter (The Hollywood Exiles) follows Allen's tangled amours and artistic discoveries from his childhood in Brooklyn through his stint as a 1950s comedy writer and onward, exhaustively detailing the making of movie after movie, from What's New, Pussycat? to Deconstructing Harry. Fair-minded but harsher than Eric Lax was in Woody Allen (1991), Baxter has done yeoman work in canvassing the published record (he lacked Lax's access to Allen and his peers). While Baxter unearths eerie tidbits about Allen's relations with two teenage girls, his psychologizing often rests on others' judgments, such as film theorist Maurice Yacowar's views on sex and death, and Allen's ex-partner Mia Farrow's take on the gap between nebbish persona and hard-nosed auteur. He considers Allen's affair with Farrow's adoptive daughter Soon-Yi more a lapse of taste than an indictable offense. Cinephiles will particularly enjoy Baxter's discussions of Allen's influences: he finds an early debt to Jules Feiffer, hears echoes of Fellini in Annie Hall and describes the brief involvement in Stardust Memories of French student radical Daniel Cohn-Bendit. (As a critic, Baxter likes the comedies more than the dramas.) Allen finds real happiness, Baxter concludes, not in his messy private life but in his work. Though the reader might wish for a broader attempt to sum up Allen's prodigious output and place in American culture, this book remains the most detailed look at an American--nay, New York--original. Photos not seen by PW. (Dec.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Woody Allen is one of the few truly independent directors working today. Baxter, who has previously published studies of filmmakers Bu uel, Fellini, and Kubrick, here weaves a narrative about Allen's life and work. He describes Allen's insecurities, phobias, and melancholy; his ambivalent views toward women, sex, and his Jewish identity; and his general neuroticism--a recurrent motif in his films (Allen originally planned to title Annie Hall "Anhedonia," which means the inability to experience pleasure). He also chronicles the filmmaker's early academic and social failures and his escape to Manhattan (where he wrote for Sid Caesar before turning to stand-up comedy and then film directing). Some new information can be gleaned here--readers might be surprised to learn that Allen looked to Bob Hope as a role model, for example--but a fair amount of Baxter's material is marginal, second-hand, or overly familiar, particularly coverage of the Soon-Yi Previn scandal. This likely results from Baxter's being denied access to Allen and most of his colleagues. In the end, Allen comes across as a cold, aloof character who nevertheless helped shape 20th-century filmmaking. Useful mostly for large film collections.--Stephen Rees, Levittown Regional Lib., PA Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
