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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/