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The Guardian
06-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
From Alice to Zelig via Rosemary's Baby: Mia Farrow's 20 best films – ranked!
Like many a Hollywood star, Farrow took part in a 1970s disaster movie. In this Roger Corman production she's in a love triangle with Rock Hudson, whose ski resort lies under an avalanche-prone mountain, and environmentalist Robert Forster, whose warnings are ignored. What happens next won't surprise you. Hot off Rosemary's Baby and Midnight Cowboy, respectively, Farrow and Dustin Hoffman team up for a one-night stand, with the getting-to-know-you part coming after the sex. John Mortimer's screenplay tries to channel the permissiveness of late-1960s Hollywood, but fails miserably, not helped by zero chemistry between the two leads. Billie Whitelaw in the 1976 original is a hard act to follow, but Farrow turns her scary dial all the way up to 11 as Mrs Baylock, the nanny from hell. She's part of a classy cast that makes this needless remake more than just tolerable. From Interiors onwards, Woody Allen expunged all comedy from his 'serious' oatmeal-hued homages to his heroes, Ingmar Bergman and (as here) Anton Chekhov. Farrow plays a suicidal woman whose plans to sell her holiday home in Vermont are scuppered by her mother, a former actor with a dark secret. Uncle Vanya is a lot funnier. In 1906, half a dozen rich folk gather in upstate New York for amorous shenanigans. The first of Farrow's 13 films with Woody Allen is a pastiche of Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night. It's sophisticated fluff, but as Ariel, free-spirited fiancee of a much older geezer, Mia has rarely looked lovelier. After her supporting role in Crimes and Misdemeanors, Allen bumped Farrow up to leading lady again in a whimsical chamber piece about a spoilt socialite for whom a Chinese herbal remedy has drastic side effects. Minor Woody, but a reminder that most of his career was spent writing nuanced female characters, as opposed to the dimwitted bimbos of his later oeuvre. Forget the 2022 remake, which never comes close to reproducing the high-camp larks of this ace Agatha Christie mystery. Peter Ustinov does Poirot duties when an heiress is murdered on a paddle steamer. Farrow is part of an all-star cast of suspects that also includes Bette Davis and Angela Lansbury. Allen plays a documentary-maker with a crush on a TV producer, played by Farrow, but their story feels like a featherweight afterthought next to the other half of his darkest film, in which an opthalmologist takes out a hit on an inconvenient lover. This adaptation of an early Peter Straub novel begins with Farrow giving an acting masterclass in panic as she botches a breakfast-table tracheotomy on her daughter. Afterwards, the traumatised mother starts thinking her London house is haunted by the child's ghost. But no, it's worse, and characters start dropping dead as a malevolent force kicks in. Farrow received third billing, after Laurence Harvey and Tom Courtenay, for her role as a perky, Pierre Cardin-clad photographer in Anthony Mann's film of Derek Marlowe's existential spy thriller. (Harvey took over as director after Mann died of a heart attack before the end of filming.) Her relentless ingenuousness only adds to the antihero's paranoia. Allen's film about middle-aged female regret is very much the Gena Rowlands show, photographed by Sven Nykvist in shades of beige. She is sensational as a 50-ish philosophy professor, but the tremulous vulnerability of Farrow's voice plays a pivotal role since it's the prof's eavesdropping on her therapy sessions that makes her re-evaluate her own life. In 1970, Farrow married conductor André Previn, gave birth to twins and acted on the London stage. Somehow she also found time to play a blind woman who gropes her way around her uncle's house, only to find everyone dead. There's a killer on the loose! A straightforward thriller that delivers the goods, with Mia the epitome of a woman in peril. This portrait of a disintegrating marriage marks the end of a golden run of collaborations between Farrow and Allen, but has acquired extra piquancy since their bust-up. In their earlier films, she was winsome; here, she is a passive-aggressive manipulator. One thing is clear: since 1992, neither has come anywhere near to recapturing the magic of their work together. Jack Clayton's film of F Scott Fitzgerald's novel gets drunk on its own 1920s period detail, and Robert Redford is more like a film star on sabbatical than a man with a shady past. But Farrow is perfect as shallow Daisy, looking so adorable in beaded headgear and flapper frocks (loose-fitting enough to hide her pregnancy during filming) that you can understand his fixation on her. A chameleonic mystery man crops up in old newsreel footage from the Jazz Age to Yankee Stadium in Allen's pioneering found-footage mockumentary. Farrow co-stars as his psychiatrist, Dr Eudora Fletcher, who uses hypnosis to explore his condition, falls in love with her patient, and rescues him from Nazi Germany. Her marriage to Frank Sinatra was on the rocks when Farrow put on a long dark wig to play the unstable Cenci in Joseph Losey's mad gothic arthouse melodrama filmed in a fabulous London location: Debenham House. Elizabeth Taylor plays a sex worker who becomes her surrogate mother, while Robert Mitchum is a sleazy uncle. It flopped, but has accrued a following over the years. One of Allen's most perfectly balanced films, this revolves around Farrow, at her most matriarchal as the den-mother bossing her family around at Thanksgiving, but unaware her own husband (Michael Caine) is lusting after her sister. Offscreen, meanwhile, Mia was busy giving birth to or adopting children, some with Woody's help, and would end up with 14 of them. Farrow comes out blasting as a brassy gum-chewing mob widow involved with a has-been lounge singer in Allen's poignant comedy about a two-bit talent agent who cares, almost too deeply, for his oddball acts. This was the film that showed definitively there was more to Mia than the waiflike characters she had been playing, on and off, since 1964's Peyton Place. Allen gave Farrow her most heartbreaking role in this bittersweet romantic fantasy set during the Great Depression. A mousy waitress seeks escape from her abusive marriage by going to the movies, until one day the leading man steps out of the screen and woos her in the real world. It's impossible not to start blubbing during Mia's exquisite final closeup. When she was cast as the lead in Roman Polanski's adaptation of Ira Levin's novel, Farrow was already Hollywood royalty (her parents were Maureen O'Sullivan and John Farrow), for her role in TV's Peyton Place, and for her marriage to Sinatra, who served her with divorce papers on set. As the nice Catholic wife forced to bear the devil's baby, she draws us into every aspect of her psychological and physical ordeal, pausing only to get one of the most famous pixie crops in cinema history. One of the all-time great horror film performances.
Los Angeles Times
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Not for his haters or his superfans, this Woody Allen biography is for the rest of us
It's certainly possible to not have an opinion about Woody Allen at this point, but it would take some work. Did he molest his adopted daughter, Dylan (as she claims), or did his former partner, Mia Farrow, coach Dylan into smearing Allen? Is it really OK to woo (and eventually wed) the teenage girl whom your partner (Farrow again) adopted and whose Sweet 16 party you attended? Or is that just textbook grooming? Patrick McGilligan's exhaustive biography 'Woody Allen: A Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham' addresses such questions, though it would be a stretch to say it weighs in on them. To the extent that it does, it places a thumb on the scale in favor of the subject to which it devotes some 848 pages. McGilligan writes that Allen's affair with Soon-Yi Previn 'raised puritanical eyebrows,' as if anyone who objected to such behavior was stuck in some outdated bourgeois rut. He treats Allen's '70s trysts with teenage girls as a sign of the times. (The author also trots out queasy phrases like 'the Woke Generation' in a way that suggests he'd like you to get off his lawn.) He spends a lot of time writing about how long Farrow breastfed the son she had with Allen, Satchel Ronan O'Sullivan Farrow (who would grow up to be a spokesman for Dylan and Farrow and a leading journalist of the #MeToo movement). At such moments the book grows rather strange, though its overall dissection of the immensely dysfunctional Allen/Farrow family is both finely detailed and deeply sad. Once you get past the sordid stuff — if you can get past it enough to pick up the book in the first place — you'll find an engaged, engaging and tirelessly insightful account of Allen's life and career, from a writer who has few peers in the film biography business. McGilligan, whose previous subjects include Alfred Hitchcock and Nicholas Ray, is a professional biographer, a document digger who knows how to use an artist's life to reflect on his or her body of work, and vice versa. He writes with authority and wit on the highlights of Allen's career ('Annie Hall,' 'Hannah and Her Sisters,' 'Crimes and Misdemeanors'), and he's blessedly brief on later trifles like 'Small Time Crooks,' 'Hollywood Ending' and 'The Curse of the Jade Scorpion,' which, among others, made it clear that a new Woody Allen movie could be cause for as much disappointment as excitement. McGilligan is particularly strong on Allen's showbiz beginnings, or, as he writes, his 'crucial development from a neophyte TV writer to a knock-kneed stand-up comic with a zany, neurotic persona.' His ascent was indeed remarkable. Allen began submitting gags to newspaper columnists as a high school student, used that work to break into the television writing business, picked up mentors including Neil Simon's older brother, Danny, and eventually met the two men who would, slowly, launch him into stardom. Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe saw a stand-up comedian in Allen well before Allen himself did; as his personal managers they pushed him into duty in New York comedy clubs. He initially floundered, clueless in matters of connecting with audiences and sustaining a performance, but found his footing as a digressive, less-topical, self-deprecating Mort Sahl type. Though even Allen admits his brand of intellectualism is pretty superficial — he never had much use for or interest in college — he crafted the Allen persona we would come to know, a stammering, angsty nebbish, terrified by the inevitability of death, quick to drop a reference to Sartre or Joyce into a comedic context. Not surprisingly, given his cinema bona fides, McGilligan handles Allen's development as a filmmaker with keen insight. He digs deep into Allen's collaboration with cinematographer Gordon Willis, dubbed 'The Prince of Darkness' due to his fondness for deep pools of shadow. Like Allen, Willis was a New York outsider. McGilligan writes: 'Both boasted tireless work ethics and stubbornly avoided any 'fooling around' during filming. Both despised cinematic cliches.' Their first collaboration, on Allen's masterpiece 'Annie Hall,' was particularly fruitful. In the words of the movie's star Diane Keaton, who won an Oscar (and started a casual fashion craze) for playing the free-spirited title character, Willis showed Allen how a master shot 'could be used to deliver the variety and impact an audience needed without cutting to close-ups.' Willis worked on seven more Allen movies, but 'Annie Hall' remains the director's most visually alive and imaginative creation. When both director and movie won Oscars, Allen famously stayed in New York, playing clarinet at Michael's Pub, instead of attending the ceremony. Unlike Eric Lax's 1991 'Woody Allen: A Biography,' which was celebratory if not terribly inquisitive, McGilligan's book is unauthorized. This means McGilligan had nobody and nothing to answer to but himself and the truth. As we have learned, however, the truth about Woody Allen can be elusive, which was the case even before the fog that surrounds his various scandals descended. Not for nothing did Variety dub him 'Mr. Secretive.' All the more impressive, then, that McGilligan was able to piece together what he has here. This isn't the takedown that Allen foes might have wanted, but nor is it hagiography. It is, for the time being, the definitive study of a man and an artist about whom it remains hard to be neutral. Chris Vognar is a freelance culture writer.
