280
PARTISAN REVIEW
expresses it is through language, making an alien tongue the instru–
ment of his needs . Yet for the immigrant, as for the pantomime art–
ist, language is the great stumbling block. Out of the delirious word–
play of Perelman, the Marx Brothers develop their own vertiginous
relation to language: Groucho's puns and machine-gun insults,
Chico's zany misunderstandings , Harpo's childlike translation of
words into objects . Language is the weapon with which Groucho
batters the impermeable fortress of Margaret Dumont's bulky re–
spectability. Like Chaplin's, their comedy is directed against all
forms of pompous inflexibility, but it is also more manically destruc–
tive , more absurd and surreal . Harpo's rubbery physicality, so glee–
ful and infantile, is the least common denominator of all human ex–
perience. He is the anarchic id: when he hears the word culture he
reaches for his scissors. And when he destroys a book we are told,
"he gets mad because he can't read.» His attitude towards language is
defensive, prophylactic .
For Woody Allen, whose
New Yorker
stories are an offshoot of
Perelman's, the problem is to get away from language - from the ex–
cess baggage of intellectuality and one-liners that burden his early
movies - and to do something more physical and more visual (two
deeply rooted Jewish taboos). In his best films like
Annie Hall
and
Manhattan
he resolves this not by imitating silent comedy and pop
movie genres, as he had once tried to do , but by going for deeper
characters and real emotions, as Chaplin did when he rejected both
the songs, jokes, and comic routines of vaudeville and the custard
pies and frantic chases of Mack Sennett.
Allen uses more modern and more local material; the brittle
world of the Upper East Side, the regular bulletins he gets from his
analysis . In case he feels too much at home with himself, he makes
the disastrous
Stardust Memories ,
a film that wallows in self-pity,
misanthropy, and classic Jewish anti-Semitism . In
Broadway Danny
Rose,
a gentler film, he pays tribute to the stand-up Jewish comics of
the past, and he himself uneasily plays the agent as Jewish mother
and suffering servant, endlessly nurturing freakish performers who
are born losers. His best recent films,
Zelig
and
The Purple Rose oj
Cairo,
center ingeniously on characters who have no personality at
all, who take on the coloring of the people around them, the movies
they see, and the roles they play. Allen's work shows that even a
Freudian, and one who has made it , can keep in touch with his in–
securities, just as Chaplin kept in touch with his poverty and vulner–
ability even as a wealthy man. Chaplin was physically at home in the
