Woody Allen’s Sleeper was next on our list of post-American tour films this evening. Why Sleeper? Because it was filmed in and around Denver, the city’s architecture (particularly Charles Deaton’s house) being considered futuristic at the time. (We visited Denver and saw the house, up on Genesee Mountain, on our way back from the Rockies.) The New York Jewish one-liners mostly still work and the visual gags (the orgasmatron and the orgasmic orb among them) still work uproariously. The film’s basic conceit is to examine how the world might look different if somebody were cryogenically frozen and then reawoken some 200 years later. Here, leaving aside the Woody Allen-ness of Woody (who basically always plays himself), the film, made in 1973 is perceptive, particularly on the trend in Western societies’ towards removing the private and the intimate from human relations. In Woody’s dystopia, as in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, relations become drug-enhanced and mechanistic. The jokes wear thin in the last third of the film, where an authoritarian society seeks to clone its assassinated leader from the only surviving part of his body – his nose. But we enjoyed watching this again. And Deaton’s house still looks as modernistic today as it did when it was built, incredibly, in 1963.