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

exhilarating” (Newsweek, December 9, 1996, p. 58); Peter Travers described that scene as “a trick done with wires, but Allen’s warm touch transforms it into romantic sorcery. At captivating moments like this, Everyone Says I Love You proves the musical can still cut it as sublime entertainment” (Rolling Stone, February 20, 1997, p. 74).
    13. Michael Hirschorn, “Woody Sings!” New York, September 9, 1996, p. 53.
    14. Todd McCarthy, “Tin Pan Allen” (review of Everyone Says I Love You), Premiere, January, 1997, p. 46.
    15. Hirschorn, p. 50.
    16. John Lahr, “The Imperfectionist,” p. 70.
    17. Janet Maslin, “When Everyone Sings, Just for the Joy of It,” The New York Times, Friday, December 6, 1996, III, p. 1.
    18. Woody Allen, “Zelig,” in Three Films of Woody Allen (New York: Vintage Books, 1987), p. 76.
    19. Irwin Yalom’s novel, When Nietszche Wept (New York: Basic Books, 1992), uses the same dynamic: in order to coerce Friedrich Nietzsche into confronting his despair, Joseph Breuer convinces him that it is the psychologist’s own despair that their sessions are seeking to remedy.
    20. Jay Martins Who Am I This Time?: Uncovering the Fictive Personality (New York:WW. Norton, 1988) addresses at length the contemporary psychological phenomenon of fab-ricated selves as they have been manifested in literature, film and American culture; the work briefly discusses Allen’s Zelig (pp. 88–90).
    21. Daniel Green, “The Comedian’s Dilemma,” Literature/Film Quarterly Fall, 1991, p. 74.
    22. Bellow has Arthur Sammler provide a rationale for Zelig-like behavior, one accompanied by a moralism incompatible with Allen’s depiction of the human chameleon, who imitates in order to be liked and to gain acceptance by others. “Better, thought Sammler, to accept the inevitability of imitation and then imitate good things. The ancients had this right. Greatness without models? Inconceivable. One could not be the thing itself—Reality. One must be satisfied with the symbols. Make it the object of imitation to seek and release the high qualities. Make peace, therefore, with intermediacy and representation. Otherwise, the individual must be the failure he now sees and knows himself to be.” Mr. Sammler’s Planet (New York: Viking Press, 1970), p. 149.
    23. Lahr, p, 82.
    24. Jacobs, p. 146.
    25. John Updike, “More Love in the Western World” (review of Love Declaredly Denis de Rougemont), in Assorted Prose (New York: Knopf, 1965), p. 299.
    18. How We Choose to Distort It: Deconstructing Harry
    Epigraph quoted in McCann, Woody Allen: New Yorker, p. 209.
    1. William E. Geist, “The Rolling Stone Interview: Woody Allen,” p. 211.
    2. Bjorkman, p. 103.
    3. Even in this one-liner of a short story plot Allen reasserts the Zelig moral: Harvey’s transformation of himself into Mandel Birnbaum results in self-erasure.
    4. Harrys characters, although more broadly comic, anticipate the loathsome cultural caricatures of Allen’s 1999 film, Celebrity, a movie whose unrelenting bitterness might be interpreted as the necessary culmination of Allen’s having written his protagonist out of the romantic closure of Everyone Says I Love You and his satire of art-as-redemption in Deconstructing Harry .
    5. Lest Allen be taken as exaggerating the magnitude of public condemnations of artists like Harry in the movie, consider Samuel H. Dresners description of Allen and the Jewish viewers who have admired his films: “Allen has contributed mightily to the whole perverse pursuit to the depths of human infamy…. The silence of Jews to Allen’s attack on their most prized possession, family morality, his celebration of their death through intermarriage, and his demeaning of those with religious commitment is a betrayal both of the Jewish faith and of the Jewish people. In failing to repudiate the perverse behavior advocated by Allen in his writings and his films, his Jewish audience has forsaken fundamental Jewish values: the