Woody Allen: A Retrospective by Tom Shone; Woody Allen Film By Film by Jason Solomons – review

Two studies of Woody Allen focus on the films, but diverge on the analysis

For an artist who professes never to read criticism, Woody Allen feeds the medium most generously. The sheer regularity of the 79-year-old film-maker’s output – averaging a film a year since 1969 – matched with its stimulating inconsistency of content and quality, makes for one of the most amply analysed oeuvres in modern American cinema. Each new study that comes along has mere months to thrive before it’s officially outdated.

One does not, then, tend to wait ages for a book on Woody Allen. Nevertheless, like the proverbial buses that no character in Allen’s bourgeois London fantasy Match Point would dream of using, along come two at once, markedly similar in form to boot. Both Tom Shone’s Woody Allen: A Retrospective and Jason Solomons’s Woody Allen: Film By Film are luxuriously illustrated career overviews, each one methodically examining his 45 features (including 1972’s Herbert Ross-directed anomaly, Play It Again, Sam) in chronological order, inadvertently sharing much anecdotal and archival material between them. (Solomons’s book is even more exhaustive, including TV curios and Allen-focused documentaries in its timeline.)

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