Free The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen by Peter J. Bailey

or Diane Keaton.
    18. James, p. 49; Stanley Kauffman similarly found the gag getting “heavier and heavier” until culminating in the chorus’s singing and dancing, which he characterized as “borscht belt shriek in excelsis.” “Return of a Trouble” (review Mighty Aphrodite), New Republic, November 27,1995, p. 29.
    19. Quoted in Fox, Woody: Movies from Manhattan, p. 254.
    20. Julian Fox’s description, p. 254.
    21. Anthony Lane expressed similar admiration for Sorvino’s overpowering of the scene: “As you would expect, Allen crams the scene with aghast twitches and breathy comeback, but for once we don’t even look at his side of the frame; Sorvino is too much fun to miss…. Sorvino’s control of the movie is almost embarrassing; she makes everyone else look lisdess and indifferent to life.” “Scarlet Women” (review of Mighty Aphrodite), The New Yorker, p. 113.
    17. And What a Perfect Plot: Everyone Says I Love You and Zelig
    1. Gado, The Passion of Ingmar Bergman, p. 183.
    2. John Baxter suggests two sources for the egalitarian musicale that is Everyone Says I Love You are Jacques Demy’s La Parapluies de Cherbourg and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort. Woody Allen: A Biography p. 427.
    3. David Denby, “Amateur Hour” (review of Everyone Says I Love You), New York, December 9, 1996, p. 72.
    4. Quoted in Sarah Blacher Cohen, “Jewish Literary Comediennes,” in Comic Relief Humor in Contemporary American Literature, ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), p. 185.
    5. Woody Allen, Everyone Says I Love You (Miramax Films, 1996).
    6. In her memoir, Mia Farrow suggests that her meditations on the strangeness of living on top of other people in apartments and the presence of a therapist in the apartment next door to hers inspired Allen to evolve the eavesdropping plot used in Another Woman. What Falls Away p. 245.
    7. It’s possible that, were Von a more substantial character, viewers might have objected more to the film’s endorsement of the invasion of her privacy which facilitates these comic moments; as they stand, these scenes constitute Allen’s mapping of the difference between soulmates constructed in comedy as opposed to the darker convergences of doppelgangers in the dramatic narrative of Another Woman .
    8. Von’s rejection of Joe repeats a pattern in Allen’s films which Richard Freadman noted in Play It Again, Sam: Allan Felix has “helped Linda to achieve a stage of maturation that signals his own emotional dispensability … symbolically and sadly, the volatile Jew has enriched the Gentile world to a point where it no longer needs him. Linda leaves and returns to Dick.” “Love Among the Stereotypes, or Why Woody’s Women Leave,” p. 114.
    9. Woody Allen, Play It Again, Sam (Paramount Pictures, 1972).
    10. Richard Schickel, “They Sorta Got Rhythm” (review of Everyone Says I Love You), Time, December 9, 1996, p. 82.
    11. Pauline Kael, “Charmer” (review of The Purple Rose of Cairo) in State ofthe Art (New York, E.P. Dutton, 1985), p. 337.
    12. Perhaps it is the equivocal mood of the dance scene that accounts for reviewers’ remarkably polarized responses to this moment and to the film’s success at romantically transporting the viewer. For Denby, the actors’ want of musical comedy skills means that “there’s no exhilaration, no release” for the audience; Lisa Schwarzbaum perceived the film as “melancholia disguised as a romantic fantasia” such that “this celebration of love and good fortune doesn’t seem very festive at all” (“Woody Sings!” Entertainment Weekly, December 20, 1996, p. 70). Stanley Kauffmann, perhaps the world’s least enthusiastic Woody Allen moviegoer since John Simon retired, found the song and dance of the film “sometimes frenetic, sometimes poignant, always enjoyable” ( The New Republic, November 11,1996, p. 40); David Ansen suggested that “Hawn’s flying through the air feels more theoretical than