I disagree with your characterization of Crimes and Misdemeanors as =

>pretty superficial.  Indeed, I think it is one of the best of Woody's =
>"serious" films, surpassed only by Another Woman, starring Gena =
>Rowlands.
>Perhaps it is a trifle didactic, but the choices are clear, and the =
>irony of having the life-affirming philosopher Woody is making the =
>documentary about commit suicide was delicious.  As the special edition =
>of Film and Philosophy on the films of Woody Allen highlighted, there is =
>still a good deal of controversy generated by the film (most especially =
>over the question of whether Judah really overcomes his guilt over =
>arranging the murder of his lover).  And how many Hollywood films do you =
>see where the evil prosper and the good suffer?
>
>     Could you expand on what you mean about Scorsese's films being =
>"denser", perhaps with an example (how about "Gangs of New York")?=20
>
>   =20
>all the best
>
>Dan
>
Oops. Have to admit to being an ex-(some would say still) hack writer 
used to getting paid by the word:

Have to admit that I'm not that big a fan of non-early Woody Allen in 
general, though I like Broadway Danny Rose and Manhattan and really want 
to catch up with the Django Reinhardt film. I resaw Crimes and 
Misdemeanors after assigning a Scorsese course a P. Adams Sitney essay 
about Last Temptation and C&M. In that context I was struck by how 
programmatic C&M seemed to be for me: interesting but without the 
ethical messiness of the Scorsese movies I was teaching. (One thing I 
like about the latter films is that the choices _aren't_ very clear.) 
Something more like a conte philosphique rather than a full-blooded 
novel. In talking about the two in class I think what I suggested is 
that Allen was using film to convey philosophical ideas whereas Scorsese 
was more directly thinking in film. I tend I guess to take Judah at the 
end at face value, not really seeing any of the characters as having all 
that much depth; I have nothing against cartoon-like characters in 
general, but I think for this movie something else is needed and Allen's 
project of combining broad comedy with certain types of considerations 
of the moral dilemmas of characters ends up cutting against itself. For 
example, I think the movie might have been stronger if the Alan Alda 
character wasn't so unredeemedly repellent (a lost opportunity there, I 
think, given the audience's predisposition to see Alda as likeable).

Was disappointed with Gangs of New York aside from the spectacle, 
feeling that it got away from Scorsese, though I have a sense it might 
grow on me, probably more as a film more than as a philosophical film. 
The best basis of comparison might be Goodfellas, which I think raises 
the question of "why be good?" in a particularly strong way. (I've taken 
to starting off non-film ethics courses by showing the beginning, the 
scenes around the Copa entrance, and the end of this film and find 
myself using it as a touchstone throughout the semester.) One way it 
differs from C&M is that it is made from the perspective of a bad guy 
(though one who is carefully constructed to be seen as a bit less 
violent and ruthless than the other mobsters). The film is built -- the 
fluid tracking shots and the cutting to the beat of the music do a lot 
of work here -- in a way that sucks its viewers into Henry's world and 
gives them a good sense of its attractions, while also showing the 
brutality of that world (and at the same time even making even the 
especially brutal Joe Pesci character sympathetic enough so that we feel 
bad when he gets killed; the film also halts our easy trajectiory 
through the world by cutting us back into reflectiveness through a 
Brechtian-like use of freeze frames). In C&M, we know where we morally 
stand in relation to most of the characters; in Goodfellas our ethical 
predispositions sympathies are called more into question.

This isn't to say that the movie doesn’t itself have an ethical point of 
view. You catch Scorsese’s moralism in the Copa scene where the 
steadicam shot and the burst into the light of the club gives a hint of 
the possibility of transcendence which is then deflated by a Henny 
Youngman joke; this is especially interesting given that the analogous 
steadicam shot through a tunnel is used to convey real triumph in Raging 
Bull: the palm sunday shot I came to call it after a similarly 
structured scene in Last Temptation. The point seems to be, in the vocab 
of Harry Frankfurt, that the character cares about things not worth 
caring about. This comes to a head after the unrepentant Henry enters 
into the witness protection program and is shown in a bland suburban 
tract complaining about getting ketchup for marinara sauce (wonderful 
line!) and about being a nobody who get to live the rest of his life as 
a schnook. Scorsese editorializes about this by playing this against an 
edited version of the amazing Sid Vicious version of My Way (have also 
used this independent of the movie in ethics classes), again suggesting 
that Henry is leading a morally distorted life. But this isn’t entirely 
convincing. What if Henry had been less greedy and avoided dealing in 
and using drugs? He might not have been caught. We’ve been caught up in 
the attractions of his gangster life so how can we disagree with his 
claim that that life is better than living as a schnook? (Are Ari’s and 
Plato’s responses to this type of problem adequate? becomes the initial 
issue for the ethics classes.) There is a real moral tension here that 
just doesn’t seem to exist in the Woody Allen movie which seems too 
easily confident in its sympathy for the schnook.

One relevant point may be that the MS is something of a pure filmmaker - 
the thinking guy’s Sam Fuller maybe - whereas WA is a tad literary for 
my taste. A last example: the end of Raging Bull was written to suggest 
a reconciliation between the brothers but in the shooting the scene 
refused to clearly play out like that, making the movie very ambiguous. 
Scorsese himself claims that Jake achieves a kind of redemption but the 
movie itself is much more ambiguous and powerful because this isn’t 
clear. Hard to imagine Woody Allen’s more illustrative movies fighting 
against their maker’s intentions like this.

John M.

-- 
words and images: http://home.earthlink.net/~jmatturr/