Sleeper: Movie & DVD Review by Christopher Smith

The sleeper in Woody Allen's 1973 screwball farce "Sleeper" is Allen himself.

Here, as Miles Monroe, Allen plays a former health food store owner who was accidentally cryogenically frozen in 1973 after an operation to remove an ulcer went awry. Now, 200 years later, he is awakened in 2173 to find a brave new world filled with robots, riots, idiots and corruption.

Considering that Miles left this world during the declining years of the Nixon administration, one would think that he would feel right at home in 2173. But no. Unfortunately, not even living through that era could prepare him for this era.

Somehow, the world has gotten worse. The restraints on our freedom have tightened. Nobody seems particularly happy. We live in a dystopian police state led by an unseen totalitarian ruler.

And sex, among the most basic of human needs and pleasures, has become the responsibility of a machine called the orgasmatron, in which you lock yourself inside a metal cylinder for a few rocking minutes while God-knows-what happens inside.

Slapstick and anarchy fuel the film's laughs.

As written by Allen and Marshall Brickman, the film is a funny sci-fi send-up that lampoons a number of films - "2001: A Space Odyssey," "1984," "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "A Clockwork Orange" chief among them - while also echoing the physical comedy of the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, and Chaplin, without embracing the latter performer's cuteness.

The film is early Allen, which is to say that the director is in a far more loose and playful mood than the movies that would come after his Academy Award-winning "Annie Hall." He's in his right mind here - working out the one-liners, allowing his wit free rein - but he's also way out of his mind, just as he should be.

When we first see Miles, he is covered in tinfoil, still loopy from his long slumber, with two desperate doctors-cum-revolutionists trying to wake him before armed men take them away. The gist of it is this: These revolutionaries and others like them want to overthrow the government. Since Miles is unknown in this world, he allegedly has the ability to infiltrate it and give the revolutionaries the information they seek - whatever that may be.

Chaos is a bullet that rips through "Sleeper," with Miles eventually finding himself in the company of Diane Keaton's Luna Schlosser, a greeting card poet and enthusiastic supporter of the orgasmatron who is rather happy with this world and can't understand why anyone would want to do away with it. It's their romantic bombast - and the bizarre situations that uncurl around them - that make "Sleeper" the silly, freakish hit that it is.

Grade: A-