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and out of all those feelings throughout the picture.” Sam Rubin and Richard Taylor, Mia: Flowerchild, Madonna, Muse (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), p. 118.
    31. Farrow suggested that the inspiration for the three sisters element of the film was her family, and her mother, Maureen O’Sullivan, concurred. Fox, p. 164.
    32. Quoted in Carroll, Woody and His Women, p. 237.
    33. Farrow’s description of a Las Vegas morning with Frank Sinatra exemplifies her tendency to depict her life as being determined by the decisions of others or of forces beyond her control: “By what series of decisions, I wondered, was I here, now, in Las Vegas, in this golf can, at five in the morning, with a man wearing a shoe box driving full speed toward death by plate glass? Should I have done something differently? No, I decided as we raced toward the window; there was nothing to be done differently, not then or now. All the occurrences of our common time, tender or troubled, were linked as surely as the beads on a rosary” (p. 110).
    34. What Falls Away, p. 226.
    35. Mia and Woody, p. 186.
    36.Groteke and Rosen, p. 68.
    37. Mickey’s suicide attempt and his subsequent affirmation of “being part of the experience” of living may owe something to Henrik’s comic attempt at self-destruction in Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night . Henrik tries to hang himself, but the rope slips off its tether, the action tripping a bed to appear from the wall. Henrik decides that if the world is sinful, he wants to sin, too, and there in the bed is the perfect occasion for sin—his father’s kept woman, Anne.
    38. Allen’s odd association of the Konigsberg family with the Marx Brothers seems to give even his Duck Soup epiphany an eccentric element of familial affirmation.
    39. Brode, p. 246.
    40. Allison and Curry interpret Lee’s complaint that the quarrel between Hannah and Holly is making her dizzy as halting the self-consciously intrusive, circling camera’s movements. “Allen thus allows his women characters to demonstrate seeming insight into and power over the ways in which perception by external mechanisms—such as cameras or patriarchal manipulations—distorts women’s relationships with each other” (p. 131). Their argument that the title characters of the film are consistently framed by male perceptions seems to me completely persuasive.
    10. If You Want a Hollywood Ending: Crimes and Misdemeanors
    1. In recognition of the film’s moral seriousness, the New York Times invited three theologically inclined professors to respond to the ethical issues raised by Crimes and Misdemeanors: James Nuecterlein saw it as epitomizing the fate of contemporary intellectuals who seek to believe but fail to achieve belief; Rabbi Eugene Borowitz argued that the film’s depiction of Rabbi Ben “uniquely displays the truth of faith, at least my Jewish faith”; while Mary Erler read the ending as demonstrating that “not only do moral questions not have answers, even asking them is pointless.” “Woody Allen Counts the Wages of Sin,” October 15, 1979, Section III, pp. 15, 20, 22.
    2. After seeing the first rough cut of the movie, Allen saw the disparity between the two plots—Judah’s crime and Cliff’s misdemeanor—as a failure of balance. “In comparison to Judah’s story,” he told Sandy Morse in a conference recorded by Eric Lax, “I’m not getting big enough things happening [with Cliff and Halley].” My critical contention is that, in the final version, that disparity becomes very much what Crimes and Misdemeanors is about. My pretensions to penetrating Allen’s ultimate intentions in the film notwithstanding, Lax’s extended recording of Allen’s debate with Sandy Morse over the narrative of Crimes and Misdemeanors (pp. 362–66) provides an excellent corrective, supplementing Ralph Rosenblum’s essay and Navacelle’s Woody on Location, to any notion that Woody Allen’s scripts arrive in the form of full-bodied,