Sleeper (1973)

 

100 best Science Fiction Movies, Slant Magazine list

 

#84 Sleeper (1973)

 

Though this is admission of being old, I am still somewhat proud of myself understanding one of the jokes in this film that no one under the age fifty would get.

 

The movie’s plot concerns Miles Monroe (Woody Allen, who was also the Director and, with Marshall Brickman, was Screenwriter), who is shocked to learn that he was frozen in cryogenic suspension in 1973 and awakened 200 years later. The world Miles is now trapped in is Dystopian Nightmare influenced by H.G. Wells novel, "The Sleeper Awakes" (serialized in 1898, official published as a book in 1910) and Aldous Huxley’s novel, “Brave New World” (1932). Miles asks where did the civilization he remembers go? Dr. Orva (Bartlett Robinson) responds that, “A man named Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead.''

 

Shanker was the President of the United Federation of Teachers in a time when this Nation’s Public School Teachers were overworked, underpaid, had lousy working conditions, little job security, and subject to physical threats by radical political forces (much like today, except that in the 1970s they were targeted by Black Nationalists like Sonny Carson but since 2008 they are more likely to be threatened by cynical figures on the Right like Chris Christie or Ron DeSantis). Shanker was aggressive in his tactics, twice jailed for leading Illegal Strikes, and retired Industrialist Fletcher L. Byrom famously said, ''I thought he was a reprehensible character.'' On the other hand, he proved hugely effective and, a decade later, with Teacher attrition accelerating and US Capitalism at risk because of it, Byrom changed his tune, saying, “Al Shanker understands the problems facing public schools better than any other person in the country.''

 

So, there you have it, back in 1973 (the beginning of what is now three generations of Wage-Stagnation in the USA) Woody Allen, allegedly Liberal, was blaming the End of the World on Union Organizing -- but remember, 20 years after that, in 1992, Allen was also exposed as a predatory Pedophile. Allen’s Comedy has always been potent because Allen really knows how people tick, and that’s supposed to be a Virtue, but it’s also an essential skill for the high-end Predator.

 

This film, which still stands as one of Allen’s funniest, comes from a time long before we knew he was a Monster. It’s up to you if that’s good enough excuse to watch it.

 

Allen disgusts me, but I still love this film; it’s a rare SF-spoof that is written by someone who actually understands SF’s content and intents (SF Authors Ben Bova and Isaac Asimov were consulted during the screenwriting) and freely mixes contemporary SF themes with the Comedy stylings of the Silent and Early Sound eras (there are specific homages to Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon, Harold Lloyd, the Keystone Cops, the Marx Brothers, etc). The Silent Film homage aspect goes back to before the project was fully formed in Allen’s head. He'd first envisioned this as a two-film series, the first would follow Miles’ life up to the moment of being frozen, so akin to Allen’s previous work, and the second would be the SF-spoof sequel. United Artists rejected the idea and Allen then re-imagined it as singular, Silent Film set in a Future where Citizens are forbidden to talk. Though that’s not the plot we got, but an abundance of dialogue-free scenes homaging the Silents remained, and that was quite a break for a Comedian who was known as obsessively verbal.

 

Though Allen’s not generally associated with the genres of SF,F&H, a quick review of his credits demonstrates those themes are essential to his many of his plots, and he employs them with great diversity and aplomb. In the film, because Miles has been dead for the last 200 years, he’s the only living person that hasn’t been catalogued by the Computers of the Tyranny. This makes him important to the Underground Resistance that revives him, they need a Secret Agent to go Undercover and discover what the Tyranny’s sinister AIRES Project is (and yes, the word is spelled wrong in the movie too). Miles, a wimp who ran a Health Food store in Greenwich Village in NYC, resists taking on the role as their Hero and Liberator, "I'm not the heroic type, I was beaten up by Quakers."

 

Also, the Tyranny has erased all records of the past, making Miles essential to the Underground’s efforts to rediscover lost Histories. Dr. Tyron (Don Keefer) shows Miles unidentified "artifacts...from 1950 to 2000." Here is a sampling of Miles’ problematic responses:

 

"This is Bela Lugosi. He was, he was the mayor of New York City for a while, you can see what it did to him … This is, uhm, this is, uh, Charles DeGaulle. He, uhm, he was a very famous French chef, had his own television show, showed you how to make souffles and omelettes and everything. This is, uh, Scott Fitzgerald over here. A very romantic writer. Big with English majors, college girls, you know, nymphomaniacs. Uh, very well known ... It's a photograph of Norman Mailer. He was a very great writer. He donated his ego to the Harvard Medical school for study. And this - this I can tell you right away - this is a centerfold from a magazine they used to call Playboy. Which - um - these girls didn't exist in actual life, you know. They were rubberized. You had to blow them up."

The Playboy Centerfold shown to Miles Monroe just happened to be Lena Forsén, her photoshoot was especially popular and soon Photo Processing Labs all over the world would be using her picture as the standard test image in the field of digital image processing,

Regarding an image of then President Richard Nixon, Tryon said "Some of us have a theory that he might once have been a President of the United States of America, but that he did something horrendous so that all records, everything was wiped out about him. There's nothing in history books. There are no pictures on stamps or money."

Miles: "Yes, he actually was President of the United States. But I know that whenever he used to leave the White House, the Secret Service used to count the silverware."

 

In the Real World, Nixon would be forced to resign from office in the year following this film’s release, one of several throw-away gags in the film that proved stunningly predictive.

 

The Resistance plans prove all for naught as the Tyranny’s Storm Troopers raid their Safe Houses repeatedly. Miles escapes the first couple of times (there are several sight-gags concerning how incompetent the Storm Troopers are, inadvertently anticipating the jokes we now tell about the Storm Troopers from “Star Wars” (1976)). The most notable escape is when he disguises himself as a Robot Butler which led to many funny scenes wherein he proves to be a bad Robot at a Society Party that includes futuristic drugs and an orgy. The party is hosted by insipid Poetess and Greeting Card Writer Luna Schlosser (Diane Keaton, who had been romantically connected to Allen, but they apparently broke up before this film was made).

 

At the party Luna recites her latest composition:

 

"A little boy caught a butterfly, and said to himself:

'I must try,

To understand my life,

And help others,

Not just mothers,

And fathers,

But friends,

Strangers too,

With eyes of blue,

And lips full red and round,

But the butterfly didn't make a sound,

For he had turned into a caterpillar,

By and by."

 

Luna’s character was spoofing the then-enormously-popular Poet and Song Writer Rod McKuen who deserves the Death Penalty for prostituting the work of the great Jacques Brel through bad translations and of whom Critic Julia Keller later said, “[H]is work so schmaltzy and smarmy that it makes the pronouncements of Kathie Lee Gifford sound like Susan Sontag."

 

Yet again at risk of capture, Miles is forced to kidnap Luna. On the run, they argue incessantly and inevitably fall in love. When they are finally about to have sex, Miles is finally captured by the Tyranny, then Brain-Washed into being a good Citizen of the Future.

 

Luna escaped into the arms, or really is kidnapped by, the Resistance, and quickly converts to their cause (in another bizarre Real-World parallel, in the year following the film’s release, Heiress Patty Hearst would be kidnapped by a Terrorist group, then allied herself with her Kidnappers, and joined them in their attacks on the Capitalist system). The greatest influence on Luna seems to be the fact that the Resistance’s leader, Erno Windt (John Beck), is pretty hunky.

 

Luna and the Resistance then re-kidnap Miles and de-Program, or re-Brain-Wash, him to their cause. There’s a role-reversal between Miles and Luna underlined in a bizarre reenactment of Tennessee Williams’ play, “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1947) where Miles recites the lines of Blanche DuBois and Luna plays Stanley Kowalski.

 

The final act concerns Miles and Luna going on a dangerous Covert Op; they must sneak into a Top-Secret facility and discover the AIRES Project’s big secret. It turns out that ten months earlier the Tyranny’s Leader died in a fire at his home (the Leader is portrayed by Counter-Culture Guru Timothy Leary in his second acting role (though in this film he doesn’t actually act). His first role was in, “Trip to Where?” (1968) which was, ironically, an anti-drug PSA that also starred Beck). Only the Leader’s nose survived (gee, another Richard Nixon joke, maybe?) and the Tyranny intends to Clone it and make him Immortal. Now, it’s up to Miles and Luna, disguised as Doctors, to stop them.

 

It all ends happily, with Miles and Luna together and Miles still jealous of Erno:

 

Miles: "In six months, we'll be stealing Erno's nose. Political solutions don't work. I told you that. It doesn't matter who's up there. They're all terrible."

 

Luna: "But Miles, don't you see? Meaningful relationships between men and women don't last. That was proven by science. You see, there's a chemical in our bodies that makes it so that we all get on each other's nerves sooner or later."

Miles: "Hey, that's science. I don't believe in science. I'm ... I'm ... You know, science is a, an intellectual dead-end. You know, it's a lot of little guys in tweed suits cutting up frogs on foundation grants."

 

Luna: "Oh, I see. You don't believe in science, and, and you also don't believe that political systems work, and you don't believe in God, huh?... So then, what do you believe in?"

Miles: "Sex and death. Two things that come once in a lifetime -- but at least after death, you're not nauseous."

 

They kiss, fade to black, roll credits.

 

Allen’s comedy always leaned towards the intellectual, though he often chose to disguise that in his early films. This movie has one practically unsettling subtext -- Yeah, the Tyranny is bad, there’s no right of Due Process, they engage in Torture and Brain-Washing, but the future we actually see is pretty clean and tidy, with a high standard of living, recreational drugs that has no negative side-effects in the form a a machine called the Orb, illness and poverty has been defeated, and the Tyranny provides everyone with nice homes, their own personal Robots and an Orgasmatron (a sex toy meant as a joke about the crazed Theories of Dr. Wilhelm Reich who died in Federal Prison in 1957 after being arrested by the US Food and Drug Administrant for distributing a quack-cure medical device called the Orgonon Accumulator), better still, cigarettes, steak, cream pies, hot fudge, and fried food have been proven to be healthy, so no more puritanically oppressive dieting and denialism (this shocks Health Food store owner Miles). Meanwhile, the Marxist-leaning Resistance also engages in Brain-Washing and are clearly just as inept as the Tyranny’s Storm Troopers. Though in the beginning, Miles has a legitimate fear of being harmed at the hands of the Tyranny, by the end he's clearly biting the hand that feeds him, and his motive for disrupting the whole of Civilization seems no more substantive than trying to get into Luna’s pants.

 

For all of the film’s rhetoric about Oppression and Revolution, it’s not nearly as Politically Ideological as it pretends to be. Its main satirical target isn’t an -ism but the complacency of the Bourgeoisie, and despite what Karl Marx wrote, no one is more embarrassed by Bourgeoisie complacency than the Bourgeoisie itself (you know, people like Allen). Empty-headed Luna expresses this embarrassment the best early in the film, "I absolutely do not want to hear about it, Herald. This world is so full of wonderful things. What makes people suddenly go berserk and hate everything anyway? I mean, why does there have to be an underground? After all, there's the Orb, and there's the telescreen, and there's the Orgasmatron. What more do they want?"

Herald Cohen (Brian Avery): "It's hard for us to understand the criminal element. We're artists. We respond only to beauty."

 

“Sleeper” came out at a critical juncture in USA cinema, because its era was one when Comedy was floundering. Looking back, we can all remember great Comedies from the ‘70s, but that’s hind-sight and compression of a whole decade into a short list. At the time, both Roger Ebert and Vincent Canby looked and Allen and Mel Brooks as kinds of saviors of a dying Art Form, and when I reviewed of the US films of 1973 I saw lot of good Drama, Crime, Action, SF, and Horror, but not nearly so much to laugh about. Hell, 1974 featured the powerful Drama “Lenny,” about rise and downfall of legendary Comedian Lenny Bruce, and one of the more notable aspects of it was its refusal to be funny.

 

The film was a bench-mark for Allen, but then, perhaps almost all his early films were. Each one was about a much different subject, showed greater stylistic nuances, and usually were progressively better than the one before. True, Allen’s early films early often stumbled; discussing his first feature, “Take the Money and Run” (1969, and maybe it’s actually his second feature, I’m not sure what to call, “What’s Up Tiger Lilly” (1966)) he talked about recognizing that the film had “dead spots” wherein in the humor was too strained and he was losing his command of the audience. His struggle for the next decade was to take control over the medium and make the dead spots disappear.

 

“Sleeper” still suffers from dead spots, but had greater narrative momentum than any of his previous films. Moreover, even back with “Take the Money …” he showed the rare gift of recapturing the audience after a misstep or two, which pretty much no one else could pull off. Howard Hawks once defined a good film as having “three great scenes and no bad ones,” but somehow Allen made really good films with bad scenes, because the great scenes were fall-off-your-chair hilarious. Allen’s professional career began in 1955, writing for an impressive string of TV Sketch-Comedy and Variety shows, and perhaps there he learned the desperate survival skill of recovering from a bad skit by immediately backing-it-up with a better one. Also, perhaps, he fell into the habit of thinking only in terms of what Stand-Up Comics call a “tight 10,” which created an inhibition in thinking in terms of sustaining a narrative for 85 minutes. Critic Pauline Kael gave this film a lukewarm review saying, “The humor here doesn’t tap the mother lode; it’s strip-mining.”

 

Before this film, in interviews, Allen often spoke about wanting to “stay rough” with his film technique. That would radically change only two films later with “Annie Hall” (1977). As Allen became more skillful, and the films got better by any objective measure (assuming there are any objective measures in Art), but something got lost, so for all of its flaws, the shambolisitic “Sleeper” still towers over most of his more mature cinema to come.

 

Examples of the films uneven-ness include the fact that Miles is Brain-Washed twice: the first, by the Tyranny, is groan-inducing, but the second, by the Resistance, is a hoot. Allen relies on physical comedy here more than any of his other films, and its hit-and-miss, but the hits, like an automatic kitchen rebelling against him, are classic.

There’s also the fact that Allen is really not that good an Actor. In film after film, he only plays one character and does so only on the surface. Allen’s constant casting of himself might reflect his egotism, but many other Directors also cast him because his narrow shtick was potent (Allen and Keaton’s first film collaboration was “Play it Again Sam” (1972), Directed by Herbert Ross and Written by Allen adapting Ross’ play if the same name). Critic Kael may not have loved the film, but she nailed Allen’s appeal, “The tension between his insecurity and his wit makes us empathize with him; we, too, are scared to show how smart we feel.”

 

Though as an Actor, Allen was a mediocrity, he was blessed by the fact that those who tried to imitate him were generally worse. David Bowie once said his first ambition was to be a Songwriter, not a Singer, but he couldn’t find anyone else to sing his songs the way he wanted them heard; perhaps Allen realized how hard it was to play Allen -- looking at his films, it appears that it took decades for Allen to discover in John Cusack, that rare Actor that could be better at being Allen than Allen himself in “Bullets Over Broadway” (1994).

When I first watched this, I was already familiar with Allen’s work, and liked his lines better than how he spoke them. His performance here was really only alive during his scenes with Keaton, they had great chemistry, and they became the only bright spots in an otherwise bland Cast (note: that blandness was likely in deliberate service of the film’s themes).

 

Of for those marvelous lines, Vince Canby wrote, “Language is immensely important in Allen's films, if not always as a means of communication. His characters don't talk as often as they trade clichés and the wispy ends of muddled ideas. When the character is Allen himself, he deals in free associations so sweeping that they would add 10 years to the treatment of any ordinarily neurotic analysand.”

 

One of the best things in the movie is how it cheerfully mixed imagined Pasts and Futures (one of the film’s tag-lines was “WOODY ALLEN TAKES A NOSTALGIC LOOK AT THE FUTURE”). I’ve already mentioned his reliance on the stylings of Silent Comedy; his uses music is similarly. The score, in part performed by Allen himself with his band The New Orleans Funeral and Ragtime Or­chestra and some sections performed by The Preservation Hall Jazz Band, is generations-old music. This is contrasted with the visual look is all smoot lines and clean white interiors and lovely and fecund park-like exteriors. Modestly budgeted at $2 million, the future was mostly evoked through real locations in Colorado, and it’s striking how buildings from that era (before many of you reading this were born) remain so forward-looking now. “Sleeper’s” Modernist architecture is much warmer and friendlier than that in Jean-Luc Godard’s film “Alphaville” (1965) as demonstrated when Miles visits a 22nd-century McDonalds (with a sign reading 795 trillions of hamburgers sold) that was filmed at the Mile High Church of Religious Science in Lakewood. Other notable locations included the Sculptured House on Genesee Mountain (a famous building that was never finished and abandoned for years before the filmmakers arrived) and the Mesa Laboratory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. The interiors were meant to evoke Stanley Kubrick’s film “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) and this is underlined by one of the Computer’s being voiced by Douglas Rain who also voiced the Computer HAL in “2001…”

 

This film marked signaled several visual transitions for Allen. It was his second collaboration with Cinematographer David M. Walsh, a major Hollywood talent who remained much in demand for years to come; but probably because of his TV background, Allen's films then relied on rigorously conventional lighting. Two films later, with “Annie Hall,” Allen began a much longer association with Cinematographer Gordon Willis, and Allen’s films took on a far more romantic look.

 

Both before, and after, this film, part of Allen’s posturing was that he was the ultimate NYer, but here he not only left the city, but the state, and showed not one image of any urban landscape. Eventually Allen would embrace period settings and more far-flung locals more regularly, this became especially pronounced after the Pedo scandal (though NYC remained his most common setting).

 

As stated above, “Annie Hall” was Allen’s next film. Two more after that came “Manhattan” (1979), which is considered one of his Masterpieces. It is also the first of several of his films that concern an older man who gets involved with an embarrassing relationship with a much younger girl. It was allegedly based on Allen, then-42-years-old, having an affair with then-17-year-old Stacey Nelkin (whom he met on the set of “Annie Hall") and/or then-16-year-old Actress Babi Christina Engelhardt. Allen denies that either relationship ever happened, but the lead Actress in “Manhattan,” then 17-year-old Mariel Hemingway, has also stated that Allen romantically pursued her.

 

Allen’s career was remarkable when “Sleeper” came out, and then remarkably survived the scandalous 1990s when he was 59-years-old and was near-simultaneously accused of sexually abusing his under-aged daughter and publicly hooked-up with his 19-year-old quasi-step-daughter. Things got a little more difficult for him when the MeToo movement gained momentum with the 2017 fall of Producer/Distributor Harvey Weinstein (that was two years after the first serious allegations against Weinstein went public, and resulted in serious blowback against Law Enforcement and Journalism for ignoring and/or attacking Weinstein's first public Accuser). Allen and Weinstein started getting frequently linked in media reports, though the story of how close their association actually was is full of contradictory claims.

 

Between 1992 and 2017 Allen made dozens of films and was nominated and/or won Oscars and received a Golden Globe Lifetime Achievement Award, but finally, after 2017, prominent Actresses who worked with him post-1992 started expressing public regret for those decisions. Still, Allen gets his films funded, attracts top talent, and are distributed as prestige events. Though his popularity in the USA is waning, he keeps a large and devoted fan-base in Europe, especially France, a country that has harbored Pedo Director Roman Polanski for decades.  

 

Now in his late 80s, Allen must be nearing retirement, and death can’t be too many years off either. After he’s gone, the scandals will be reduced to footnotes and only his work will remain. We now overlook that Painter Caravaggio was a murderer and Composer Richard Wagner was a proto-Nazi. Most likely, substantive censor will never come to Allen.

 

Trailer:

Sleeper (1973) - Trailer - Woody Allen - YouTube