Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story (1971, Woody Allen) AFOFF Day #4

By Robert Hornak

A slight detour into nonsense.

I gather that Allan, if not a Woody Allen fan, per se, at least respected his work since I see he put a dozen of the prolific filmmaker’s movies on his list of “5,000 best screen works” on this very site. This may be thin justification for my entry in this year’s AFOFF, but there’s also some justification in light of my pick’s ubiquitous omission from nearly every corner of Allenalia, a rare political jab from “not essentially a political comedian” directly to Dick Nixon’s flummoxed jowls.

Despite his sometimes claim to political agnosticism, certain moments of commentary survive in Woody lore, namely his Woody Allen Looks at 1967 television special, from that year, wherein he spars with a particularly game William F. Buckley, Jr., or any number of his standup sideswipes: “I took some time off to write. I was working on a non-fiction version of the Warren Report.”), to the stammering quip he gives rally-speaker Alvy in Annie Hall: “I dated a woman working in the Eisenhower administration and I thought it was ironic, cause…I was trying to do to her what he’s been doing to the country for eight years.” Most of Allen’s politics is scattered over just a handful of examples, while Harvey Wallinger remains his most potent concentration of full-frontal political satire.

The film fits snugly amongst Allen’s “early funny ones”, in the era of Bananas and Sleeper, both of which also feature political satire but of the more general kind, as each is situated in fictional landscapes. It’s more akin to his first feature, Take the Money and Run (1969), since it’s presented as a factual documentary about a fictional man, in this case Dr. Harvey Wallinger, top political advisor to Nixon, but one-upping that film by placing Wallinger’s clips alongside actual footage of Nixon and other White House figures, often in moments of awkward pause or flamboyant ineptitude. Sometimes Allen employs professional Nixon lookalike Richard M. Dixon for shots that the director needed to appear in, a kind of dry run for Zelig (1983), which remarkably insinuates Allen’s “human chameleon” into actual footage of Capone, Babe Ruth, Hitler, etc.

The 25-minute short was intended to air on New York’s PBS station, WNET, in February of 1972 – until the director of programming got cold feet, perhaps reeling from pressures coming down from an antagonistic administration whose godhead was a morally crippled paranoid with an abject fear of criticism and the mere threat of appearing weak. When WNET eventually turned away Allen’s freely offered piece, PBS HQ offered it to other member stations with the dread warning that they’d then be at their own risk of Nixon shredding their licenses. So, of course, the special never aired and was summarily scuttled into the dust heap of the lesser Allen television ventures.

It’s clear Allen is having fun skewering the then-one-term president on the eve of his re-election campaign. Much of the humor derives from simple mocking of the president, his vice president, and his cabinet with on-the-nose word play (the whole “win the peace” bit) while other times Allen revels in his more typical absurdist non-sequiturs, the kind of jokes that fans of his standup and New Yorker essays would recognize as quintessential Woody Allen. Still other jokes cut with more specificity (pleading ineffectually with a makeup man to give Nixon more warmth and character). Allen often plays Wallinger with more dead-eyed flatness than his usual nebishy incarnations, yet coming off less like the living Henry Kissinger effigy he intends and arguably more like current White House advisor Stephen Miller (a man whose own attempts at humorous swipes come across like a failed Montgomery Burns open mic). Allen’s affect, which is a shade of his usual effervescent neurotic, introduces instead a kind of earnest restraint that, married to his sometimes trenchant quips, flips them further up into angry sarcasm.

Allen made the movie with no expectation of a payday from WNET or PBS, but essentially as a knock-off distraction during his down time between Bananas and Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex. Once the thing went belly-up, there was no complaint from Allen, who thought it slight and not well made – though that’s his self-evaluation for most of what he creates. In any case, it was never allowed to air anywhere and fell into the forgotten cracks of the pre-Internet world. Now, it seems to only exist as an every-now-and-then Youtube clip of dubious visual quality that eventually gets taken down – but for reasons much more banal than threats from a bully president. I’m not certain the link I provide below will always lead to extant footage – and even here it’s marred by Italian subtitles provided by the person who uploaded it.

I have to assume many who consume this site have seen the short at one point or another, or have at least heard of it. Those who’ve seen it may have found reason enough for it to be altogether forgotten. Fair enough – it’s certainly not among Allen’s greatest series of jokes or observations. I offer it here not as a breathless discovery, but more as a tribute to the small revolts that mount up into a wave of protest that can challenge and dismantle corrupted power. Aimed at a contemporary monster, it’s a document that seems to play the prescient harbinger for satirical arrows desperately needed for the monsters in our own midst.