Baby Love

It is not as if Lolita was the first or only time that the motion picture industry has dealt with the subject of older men's fatal infatuations with younger women. Perhaps the most memorable treatment of all was The Blue Angel, the 1930 film that made Marlene Dietrich an international star. In that film, a doddering old professor played by Emil Jannings falls hopelessly in love with a cabaret singer wearing ruffled panties, a garter belt and a top hat. It can happen. But the relationship doesn't work, nor did it ever have a chance of working. Yet The Blue Angel is one of those films that has been a staple on art-house programs for more than half a century. Therefore, we know, without a shadow of a doubt, that Woody Allen had to have seen it at some point in his career, and may even have seen it several times. Yet for some strange reason he chose to ignore its message.

He also chose to ignore the message of Baby Doll, the 1956 Elia Kazan film in which the downwardly mobile cotton-gin operator Karl Maiden has his life ruined after falling in love with a 19-year-old girl who still wears ruffled baby-doll pajamas and sleeps in a baby crib. Hey, the heart wants what it wants. Although this film is the trashiest of the trashiest, even by the standards of mid-'50s, Johnny-Reb film noir, we know that Woody Allen had to have seen it because it was directed by the cultural avatar Elia Kazan and was based on a screenplay by the unbelievably pretentious Tennessee Williams, and therefore became a staple on the art-house circuit for decades. Yet for some strange reason he chose to ignore its message.

The list of arty films warning older men not to screw around with teeny-boppers goes on and on. In 1978, the incredibly pretentious French director Louis Malle explored the subject in Lolita Does the Big Easy, also know as Pretty Baby. This film features putative human Keith Carradine as a pretentious photographer, totally obsessed with his art, who helps the downtrodden Susan Sarandon start a new career using her in his pictures, and who then starts screwing around with her gorgeous daughter. Boy, is this deja vu or what? Pretty Baby has been a staple on the art-house circuit for years; it was released a year before Allen's Manhattan. Woody Allen, an incredibly pretentious guy who is totally obsessed by his art, who helped Mia Farrow start a new career by putting her in his pictures, and then got involved with her luscious daughter, had to have seen it. Yet for some strange reason he chose to ignore its message.

Even before Louis Malle sank his teeth into it, the unbelievably pretentious Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci had explored the subject in his 1973 film Last Tango in Paris. Although this film has quite a bit more stuff about conventional sodomy than any of the other films we have mentioned, it nonetheless contains a reasonably straightforward moral message: Don't mess with the young stuff. Last Tango has been a staple on the art-house circuit for 20 years, so we know that Woody Allen has to have seen it. Yet for some strange reason, he chose to ignore its message.

Since the disclosures about Allen's affair with Ms. Previn have become public knowledge, there has been much discussion in the press about the striking similarities between Allen's masterpiece Manhattan and his own life. In that film, it will be recalled, the twice-divorced Allen character, having broken up with the neurotic Diane Keaton, ends up patching things up with Mariel Hemingway, the cuddly high-school girl he jilted earlier in the film. In the final scene, Allen seems to be saying that it is possible to fool around with borderline jailbait and get away with it, the very opposite of the message conveyed in The Blue Angel, Lolita and Pretty Baby, all of which are unbelievably pretentious art-house films that we can be pretty certain he saw. How was it possible for someone like Woody Allen to have ignored the warnings he was being given in these films?

The answer is actually quite simple: He saw those pictures on a double bill with films like Sabrina and Georgy Girl, and those flicks confused the issue. In Billy Wilder's 1954 classic, Sabrina, the pixieish chauffeur's daughter Audrey Hepburn is torn between falling in love with William Holden, a man 10 years too old for her, or Humphrey Bogart, a man 30 years too old for her. She finally settles on Bogie, and the two live happily ever after. In Georgy Girl, Silvio Narizzano's 1966 classic, James Mason plays a dirty old man who falls in love with a girl 30 years younger, and ends up marrying her. Sabrina and Georgy Girl have both been staples on the art-house circuit for years, and almost certainly appeared on the same bill as pictures like Lolita, Baby Doll, Pretty Baby and Last Tango in Paris many times over. Woody, who seems like an impressionable man, may have been confused by the contradictory messages he was receiving from the morally self-canceling double bills, and decided that screwing around with girls 30 years younger was a judgment call. This almost certainly contributed to the cradle-robbing mentality we first saw in Manhattan, and have now seen in Manhattan.

Another contributing factor to Woody's moral confusion was the fact that most of the movies that dealt with this subject in the past decade--while Ms. Previn was growing up--were trashy, low-budget productions that Allen would never have seen, not only because they would never make it onto the art-house circuit, but because the art-house circuit in New York no longer exists; developers tore down all the art-film houses. Here, we are talking about movies like Blame It On Rio, Sunset, Creator and the spectacularly ungodly Butterfly. In each of these movies, an old coot, played, variously, by Michael Caine, James Garner, Peter O'Toole and Stacy Keach, falls in love with a girl roughly 30 years younger, usually with disastrous results. But Woody Alien would not have seen Blame It On Rio, because Joseph Bologna is in it; would not have seen Creator, because Vincent Spano is in it; would not have seen Butterfly, because Pia Zadora is in it; and would not have seen Sunset, because Bruce Willis is in it, and because, well, nobody saw it. Let's face it: the man who is arguably America's greatest living director did not get that way by wasting his free time watching Vincent Spano movies.

Thus, even though the movie industry, all through the '80s, continued to churn out movies warning senior citizens like Woody Allen to keep their hands off youngsters, those films were no help to Woody because they were so awful they never made it onto the art-house circuit, which doesn't exist anymore anyway, so he never got to see them. He had to rely on old standbys like Sabrina and Georgy Girl, and they clouded his judgment.

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