Pre-Bananas

By Richard Zoglin

The question used to be which Woody Allen you preferred: the later, "mature" one (who made Crimes and Misdemeanors) or the earlier, funny one (Bananas). Now, after the tabloid headlines and a few box-office flops, the issue is starker: Is Woody Allen still a viable filmmaker? In this year's Bullets over Broadway, he retreated to the sort of schematic period piece that friendly critics usually lap up, and they did. Now he has regressed further -- back to his first play, Don't Drink the Water. What's more, he has cast himself in the lead and directed it for TV, his first foray into the medium since 1969.

In the ABC movie Allen plays Walter Hollander, a New Jersey caterer vacationing in Eastern Europe along with his wife and daughter. They are mistaken for spies, and take refuge in an American embassy being run temporarily by the ambassador's bumbling son (Michael J. Fox). Despite its dated cold war plot, the 1966 play shows that Allen even at this early stage was a skilled farceur. The Hollanders' presence in the embassy causes mounting chaos involving a visiting emir, a fugitive priest who does magic and a stuffy embassy official who gets conked on the head and thinks he's the Wright Brothers. Both of them.

As in Bullets, Allen renders scenes in long, uninterrupted takes, when cuts and close-ups would serve the comedy better. But the old gags still work, and Allen is at home as the neurotic Jewish father, worried about indigestion, his daughter's boyfriends and escaping from the Reds on sore feet. "I can't chase," he says. "I got arch supports the size of barbells." Ah, the old days.