Playing the Parlor Game: Estimating & Investigating, Debating & Evaluating, Ranking & Rating the Movies, by Fred Krumbein

Hick Planet magazine

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Friday, 2022 Febuary 4th

issue 13

the first 49 ¹/3 of Woody Allen’s movies

Playing the Parlor Game

Estimating & Investigating, Debating & Evaluating, Ranking & Rating the Movies

Now we play the parlor game. We here look at the 49 ¹/3 movies that Woody Allen’s made (which is to say, that he has directed) so far. We have rated the movies within eight tiers, and we’ve ranked all of these movies.

astounding masterpieces (top tier)
		(13 comedies, 1 drama-cum-comedy, 5 dramas)

#1	greatest comedy		1979	Manhattan
#2	greatest drama		2013	Blue Jasmine
#3	2nd best comedy		1986	Hannah and Her Sisters
#4	3rd best comedy		1977	Annie Hall
#5	4th best comedy		1996	Everyone Says I Love You (a musical comedy; the only musical)
#6	5th best comedy		1994	Bullets over Broadway
#7	6th best comedy		1980	Stardust Memories
#8	2nd best drama		2008	Vicky Cristina Barcelona
#9	7th best comedy		1987	Radio Days
#10	8th best comedy		1990	Alice or (original working title) The Magical Herbs of Dr. Yang
#11	9th best comedy		1995	Mighty Aphrodite
#12	10th best comedy		1991	Shadows and Fog
#13	3rd best drama		2007	Cassandra’s Dream
#14	11th best comedy		1998	Celebrity
#15	12th best comedy		1992	Husbands and Wives
#16	4th best drama		2005	Match Point
#17	greatest drama-cum-comedy		1989	Crimes and Misdemeanors
#18	5th best drama		2010	You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
#19	13th best comedy		1997	Deconstructing Harry

2nd tier (superbly excellent movies)
		(3 comedies, 2 dramas)

#20	14th best comedy		2011	Midnight in Paris
#21	6th best drama		2015	Irrational Man
#22	15th best comedy		2020	Rifkin’s Festival
#23	16th best comedy		1993	Manhattan Murder Mystery
#24	7th best drama		2017	Wonder Wheel

3rd tier (extremely good movies)
		(3 comedies, 1 drama-cum-comedy, 1 drama)

#25	17th best comedy		2009	Whatever Works
#26	2nd best drama-cum-comedy		2004	Melinda and Melinda
#27	8th best drama		2016	Café Society
#28	18th best comedy		1985	The Purple Rose of Cairo
#29	19th best comedy		1984	Broadway Danny Rose

4th tier (quite good movies)
		(3 comedies, 3 dramas)

#30	20th best comedy		2002	Hollywood Ending
#31	9th best drama		1999	Sweet and Lowdown
#32	21st best comedy		1983	Zelig
#33	10th best drama		1988	Another Woman
#34	22nd best comedy		2001	The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
#35	11th best drama		1978	Interiors

5th tier (fairly good movies)
		(5 ¹/3 comedies)

#36	23rd best comedy		2000	Small Time Crooks
#37	24th best comedy		2014	Magic in the Moonlight
#38	25th best comedy		1975	Love and Death
#38v	ranked just behind 25th best comedy		1989	Oedipus Wrecks (a vignette; one of three that comprise the anthology movie New York Stories)
#39	26th best comedy		2006	Scoop
#40	27th best comedy		1982	A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy

6th tier (slightly good movies)
		(5 comedies, 1 drama)

#41	12th best drama		1987	September
#42	28th best comedy		1972	Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)
#43	29th best comedy		1973	Sleeper
#44	30th best comedy		2003	Anything Else
#45	31st best comedy		2012	To Rome with Love
#46	32nd best comedy		2018	A Rainy Day in New York

7th tier (somewhat interesting)
		(2 comedies)

#47	33rd best comedy		1971	Bananas
#48	34th best comedy		1969	Take the Money and Run

8th tier (nearly merely diverting)
		(1 comedy)

#49	35th best comedy		1994	Don’t Drink the Water (a made-for-TV movie; the only one)

This is all subjective of course; it has to be, as with all works of art. We are merely the beholders, just movie watchers. Being subjective is what our role is, naturally.

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In making our choices of how to rate and of where to rank each of these movies, we’ve used two simple criteria. The first we consider to be very important:

how good is the story

And we think of the second criterion as being many orders of magnitude more important:

how well is that story told

The reader is invited to join us in playing this parlor game, to think of how high you would rate any of these movies, of where you would rank them, and of what criteria you feel are best for making your picks.

In addition to his 49 ¹/3 movies, a handful of others occasionally are mistakenly included in Woody Allen’s filmography. Over the years, he has appeared in a number of other moviemakers’s works. He did write the scripts for two of these, from during and before his first moviemaking period, but was not given the opportunity to direct them. (He hadn’t yet, as it were, gained the clout to insist on being the one to make them.) While they are therefore beyond the scope of this brief primer, we have rated and ranked them, and as a bonus, we here look at these two movies as well.

4th tier (quite good movies)

#29w	ranked just before 20th best comedy	1972	Play It Again, Sam

8th tier (nearly merely diverting)

#49w	ranked just behind 35th best comedy	1965	What’s New Pussycat?

A movie named What’s Up, Tiger Lily? was released in 1966 that credited him as the director. Once the viewer starts watching, it right away becomes obvious that he had nothing to do with making it—he actually even explains this to the audience in a commentary that is added at the beginning of the movie. He described how this came about in an interview year before last [

*]:

Some guy called me and said he bought a Japanese film: would I dub it with comic American? I don’t—I don’t count that as anything. I—I—I was even gonna sue to keep that from coming out, uh, because I was—I thought it was such junk. And—and uh, you know, it was successful, so my manager at the time said, “Shut up, and go with the flow, and don’t make a fuss.” And I didn’t.

He didn’t have any involvement in the writing or making of the movie Don’t Drink the Water in 1969. The only connection is that it was based on his play of the same name that played on Broadway from 1966 to ’68. He in fact remade it himself as a TV movie in 1994. So his made-for-TV version is a remake of a screen adaptation of a stage play; self-mocking echoes of this are heard in his brilliant comedy masterpiece Celebrity, from 1998—the culmination of his second moviemaking period (and the most recent of the six black-and-white movies that he’s made so far)—wherein one character at the hoity-toity screening of a movie points out celebrities who are attending it, and he says of one of them, “big star: he’s in New York filming an adaptation of a sequel of a remake”; Allen carries on the coy self-derision by having this character say of the director of the movie being screened, “Oh, yeah, he’s very arty, pretentious: one of those assholes who shoots all his films in black and white.” (Similar examples of such self-mockery are again deftly served up in dream sequences and daydream sequences portrayed in his superbly excellent comedy Rifkin’s Festival, from 2020.)