"Stupid Goose"
Woody wrote the screenplay for the stage play "Stupid Goose" in 1968. He met actress Diane Keaton while performing on Broadway in the stage play "Goose." Diane Keaton later moved into director Woody Allen's room. But her relationship with Woody Allen was always on and off. Woody Allen himself recalled: "We sometimes reconciled, sometimes we broke up, no one could tell, and we didn't start a long-term relationship until we set off to shoot "Banana." Later Paramount Pictures wanted to put the "Stupid Goose" was made into a movie, so Herbert Ross was hired as the director. It took Woody Allen just 10 days to adapt the stage script into a movie script, resulting in the 1972 film version of Goose.
"Stupid Goose" tells the story of the hero film critic Ellen Felix who is relaxed, humorous and confident when he gets along with friends, but when he gets along with a strange girl, Ellen is nervous, dull and makes jokes frequently. In the end, Allen has an extramarital affair with Linda, the wife of Dick's best friend in the group of friends, on the road of constant blind dates, and the end of the film is as romantic and charming as "The Spy."
Unlike "Fool in Prison" and "Banana", which are just jokes, Woody Allen has added a lot of fantasy scenes and reflections on life in the script of "Stupid Goose". When Allen was in love, he imagined that Humphrey Bogart, the male protagonist in "North Africa Spy", had a conversation with him and taught him to chase girls. In his mind, his ex-wife would come to oppose Humphrey Bogart from time to time, battering Allen's courage. These fantasy characters appear directly in Allen's real life, a technique that has not been played in the two films directed by Allen before.
At the beginning of the movie, the movie fan Woody Allen was sitting in the cinema watching the last scene of "North Africa Spy". Humphrey Bogart did not choose to get together with her lover, but fulfilled her and her rival. It's a great realist ending. Just like Allen faced the choice of love in the movie: he fulfilled Linda like Humphrey Bogart fulfilled Ingrid Bergman. The hero and heroine did not obtain the beautiful love in the fantasy that broke the worldly vision, but calmly faced the reality and wisely chose to return everything to the original. Goose Goose exposes the perennial theme of all Woody Allen films: the gap between reality and fantasy. Woody Allen once said: "I once said that if there is any theme in my films, it must be the gap between reality and fantasy, which is very common in my films, and I think it can be attributed to one thing, that is I hate reality.", "My films are always filled with a kind of opposition between the perfection of fantasy and the frustration of reality." We know that Woody Allen sees the world from a pessimistic perspective, which leads to the generalization of his cinematic worldview. It is a vague pessimism.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that Woody Allen recreates the ending scene of "North Africa" at the end of the film, and he becomes the hero, but he is lonelier than Bogart. In "North Africa Spy", Bogart and the sheriff disappeared together in the fog of the airport, while in "The Goose", Alan and Bogart said goodbye and disappeared alone in the fog of the airport. Now we know that "Fool in Prison," "Banana," and "Stupid Goose" all pay homage to film history classics, and this is Allen's favorite film expression.
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