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coherent, thematically consistent plots requiring no revision.
    3. Although in both name and biographical details Louis Levy resembles Primo Levi, author of Survival at Auschwitz, The Drowned and the Saved, and other works describing his experience in the Nazi Holocaust, Allen insists that his Crimes and Misdemeanors philosopher wasn’t modeled on Levi but derives from the murdered professor plot originally included in the Annie Hall script. Fox, pp. 204–5.
    4. The two plots of Crimes and Misdemeanors remain separate until the meeting of Judah and Cliff in the film’s concluding scene, but Allen’s screenplay carefully establishes links between the Cliff and Judah plots: one of the threats Dolores makes to Judah in hopes of forcing him to leave Miriam for her is that if they’re not together, “I don’t know what I’ll do, Judah—I’ll jump out the window, I swear.”
    5. There is significant evidence in the film that Halley is another character deluded by love, that she too is choosing “the wrong person” in her engagement to Lester. She loved her first husband “at first sight,” but, by her own admission, she “should have looked again,” her comment suggesting that she’s prone to error in love relations. The film’s characterization of Lester never fully contradicts Cliff’s negative perception of him as an egotist who exploits others by appealing to their fascination with his wealth and success, which is Cliff s explanation for Halley’s agreeing to marry him. Although she tells Cliff that she’s “professionally ambitious,” in both love relationships Halley has allowed romance to take precedence over her professional aspirations, abandoning her legal career following her first marriage, going to London to produce films and apparently spending much of her time there securing a fiancé instead.
    6. Using Allen’s review of Ingmar Bergman’s autobiography, The Magic Lantern, for context, Sam B. Girgus persuasively argues that the vision/blindness motifs of the film find subtextual reinforcement in the film’s Bergmanesque attempt to make visible “the soul’s landscape.” “‘The eyes of God,’ a phrase from Crimes and Misdemeanors, ” Girgus explains, “describes precisely how [Allen] wants the camera and his filmmaking to look within and bring out that world for art.” The Films of Woody Allen, p. 116.
    7. One of the moral issues glossed over by this film so focused upon ethics, Pauline Kael argued, is the consequence of Judah’s decision for its victim. “We aren’t asked to have any feeling for [Dolores],” Kael asserted; “We see the situation strictly in terms of her threats to break up [Judah’s] marriage and expose his financial manipulations…. The film’s emphasis is confusing: the spectator has more anxiety about the doctor’s possibly revealing his crime to the authorities than about what he does to her.” Movie Love, pp. 199, 203.
    8. Ironically, Allen considered ending Crimes and Misdemeanors with a scene from a Hollywood movie—an Esther Williams film, or Yankee Doodle Dandy, or It’s a Wonderful Life— as a way of dramatizing that, despite his rejection by Halley, Cliff is getting on with his life. Lax, p. 362.
    9. David Denby judged Crimes and Misdemeanors as “Allen’s most ambitious and completely organized film yet” (New York, October 29,1983, p. 124); Mike McGrady said,“Woody is Woody, and he has done it once again—provoked, excited, amused, entertained, and made one of the years best movies” (Newsday, October 13, 1989, Part III, p. 3); Jack Kroll described the film as “one of his most affecting movies and perhaps his most disquieting portrait of the urban psyche-scape” (Newsweek, October 16, 1989, p. 67); for Richard Schickel, the film’s mood swings “stir us from our comfortable stupor and vivify a true, moral, always acute and often hilarious meditation on the psychological economy of the Reagan years” ( Time, October 16, 1989, p.