STARDUST MEMORIES
MGM HD, 10:00 p.m. ET
This 1980 film is a very underrated Woody Allen movie. Largely, its cool reception may have been a matter of timing. Allen, after a strong of brilliantly breezy early comedies, had begun to deepen both his focus and his tone, and write and direct one ambitiously different movie after another, on a literally annual basis. Annie Hall, his masterpiece, came in 1977. Interiors, his Bergmanesque drama, followed in 1978. Manhattan, his black-and-white salute to New York, arrived in 1979. And then came 1980’s Stardust Memories, another black-and-white film, an introspective comedy so dark, and so introspectively honest, it made audiences at the time largely uncomfortable. It was a movie in which Allen played a popular director of movie comedies who didn’t want to make funny movies anymore, and wondered about life’s meaning – a cinematic subject building upon both Sullivan’s Travels and 8½. And parts of Stardust Memories, seen in that context, are dryly hilarious, as when Allen’s character, on a train filled with misfits and losers, looks through his window at a train on the opposite track, where all the passengers are glamorous and seem to be having such glorious fun. One of them (pictured) is Sharon Stone, making her very brief movie debut.