NEWSWEEK's movie mastermind David Ansen unpacks the history of the neurotic New Yorker--the peg being Whatever Works, Woody Allen's latest film and the director's cinematic return to NYC after a several-picture series in Europe. Whatever Works stars Larry David in the Allen-esque role of over-obsessive misanthrope -- and Ansen makes the claim that neither David nor Allen could've succeeded without the torch-bearing Oscar Levant. An excerpt from the piece, below:
Has the Neurotic New York Jew lost his power to make us squirm? Watching David enacting one of Allen's archetypal alienated souls, I couldn't help but think that neither of these angst-ridden schmoes could have existed if it weren't for Oscar Levant, the man who almost single-handedly introduced The Neurotic into the pop-culture lexicon. Levant, initially renowned as a gifted classical pianist and the foremost interpreter of Gershwin, frequently popped up in movies (An American in Paris, The Bandwagon) as the comically cynical sidekick. But it was his appearances on TV in the 1950s that left an indelible and twisted stamp. Brilliant, hypochondriacal, mordantly and sometimes cruelly witty, both drug-addicted and manic-depressive, he turned his mental instability into subversive vaudeville. As savage on himself ("Underneath this flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character," he told Jack Parr) as on his targets (When Frank Sinatra Jr. was kidnapped, he said "it must have been done by music critics"), Levant was a blinking, twitching affront to the can-do optimism of the Eisenhower era. He got thrown off the air in 1956 with his comment on Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe's Jewish wedding: "Now that Marilyn Monroe is kosher, Arthur Miller can eat her."
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
